High Quality Domains and what to do with them
-
Hi,
I rus a travel photography business. The primary function of the website is to sell prints, though I blog about my travels on the same domain name as well as a few pieces of content that are helpful to users interested in some of the places I travel to. I do okay with it, but obviously, I am always looking for a way to increase visibility and sales of prints. I own a couple of high quality keyword domain names, that I've been trying to figure out what to do with. One of which is for a city that my prints of my photography are probably best known for. The domains I'm really trying to decide what to do with are basically a www.citystatephotography.com and www.citystatephotos.com, where the city and state are the ones I'm targeting. The question is, what do I do with it? I've seen various ideas from other photographers that have various levels of success. Here are the options I'm considering:
-
Just redirect it to the photo gallery of photos that I'm trying to rank highly for. From what I read on various blogs, this doesn't really do much of anything, but maybe I've read wrong?
-
Create a website or microsite with some quality content related to the city that also links back to my photography website on various places and possibly once in the navigation. I do have quality content I could put up that would be helpful to people from the city besides just trying to get sales. But there's always a chance this will cannibalize my original domain without helping sales, I assume?
-
Spam my photo galleries across two domains. Most of my photography galleries would stay on my main domain that I already run, but the photo galleries that are key to that city would be hosted on that citystatephotography.com domain name. I've seen a photographer from Colorado do quite well with this method. (www.imagesofrmnp.com and www.morninglight.us) He's heavily known for his images of Rocky Mountain National Park and that seems to be his main brand, but all of his non-RMNP travel photography goes on the other site. The two sites look almost identical, though they link back and forth fairly extensively. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of duplicate content either. I've considered this method, but I'm nervous I'll kill what I've already built up if this were to fail.
-
Do nothing with the domains. Seems wasteful, as these domains, particularly the citystatephotography.com domain seems useful in some way.
Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!
-
-
The only other thing I would suggest is to hang onto the domain names. Don't let the registration lapse so they can be picked up by others.
-
Thanks for the reply! Gives me some things to think about. Maybe I could test just one of the domains to see what happens for now.
-
Saying that these domains are more or less useless will be wrong in my opinion. If I would be at your place I would have gone for the micro sites idea with creative content that can help the people of that particular city or the people who want to travel to that city.
If you are up for it, make sure that the content do not get duplicated. I agree that some of the gallery pictures might be the same but your creativity in text content should make it as unique and powerful for readers as possible.
What you should not do is a massive redirect as this will not help you in any way but too many redirections might cause a negative fluctuations in rankings.
Hope this helps!
-
Definitely don't go redirecting them to your money site Mickey. Any 301's pointing to your site are always risky. If you are trying to maintain some high-level branding recognition with the domains then that may justify redirecting them to your money site, but I know that's not the case.
The only other reason you would want to 301 a domain to your site is because it had powerful on-topic inbound links pointing to it. That kind of redirect could help your site in a big way, but it's also very risky too. In general, you want to have the least amount of 301's pointing to your domains as possible. And if possible you want to have absolutely no 301's pointing to your site, especially if there's no authority or inbound links juice attached to them.
-
I agree. Concentrate on it. Moving it up just a few positions will be a big improvement in traffic. Then after you are in great positions for your most important keywords, launch one of the new domains and put all of your work into it.
-
Thanks! I appreciate the reply! My current website is doing well, though it would use some tweaks so it sounds like it would be far more useful to just concentrate on it.
-
Thanks for the response. There's really only 5-6 domains, so it's not a huge deal. I just thought it was worth seeing if there was a way to put them to good use. And yes, they all costed around $10. I've just had most of them for quite a while and haven't done anything with them yet. This all makes a lot of sense, and between these responses and more reading, I won't bother with them. However, is it even worth re-directing the domains or will that actually penalize me?
-
Most people look at new domains as "opportunities". I look at them as "taking your eye off of the ball".
If your current websites are kicking everyone's butt everywhere that is the best time to start another domain. If your current website is not dominating everything everywhere then that is the worst time to start a new domain.
So, if you are not dominating your niche, you would be better off putting all of this work into your current main site and moving it from position #5 to position #3. That will do more to pull in traffic and show off your work than building a couple of outhouses.
-
As much as you probably don't want to hear this, I think those domains are pretty much useless. I'm also assuming (possibly incorrectly) that you have just bought these domains for around $10 because they were available.
If the domains don't have any on-topic inbound links or authority behind them, then you can't really do much with them except start from scratch. If they do have some established authority and topically relevant trust flow, then that's a completely different story.
Keyword rich domain names are more of a hindrance these days than a help. One of the main reasons is that every time you acquire a naked URL backlink to your site such as www.citystatephotos.com, it already has the main keyword in it. This makes it very difficult to control your link anchor text ratios in the long run.
Google is all about brands now and not keyword rich anchor text domain names. Yes, those domains are perfect candidates for a churn and burn spam campaign but they're not the type of domain names that you'd want to build a long-term stable Internet presence with.
They're also no good to build a PBN's on either because they have no juice going to them. The effort required to send them quality link juice would be far better off spent just improving the quality of your original site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Using a Sub Domain as a Main Domain?
Hi, I'm working on a site at the moment and the sub domain is acting as the main domain. This occurred when the site was redesigned and built on a sub domain for testing but it was never moved to the main domain when it went live (a couple of years ago). So little or no pages are live on domain.com but all on sub.domain.com. It's a large company but they have very poor rankings. Would you recommend that they move the sub domain back into the root folder? Does this involve renaming/re-pointing URLs? Thanks Louise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MVIreland1 -
Negative SEO penalty, new domain?
One of my clients has just been hit with a Penguin 3.0 penalty. They have been subject to a negative link building attack for the last 5 months and despite my best effort it appears I haven't disavowed enough, someone was building a lot of links to them and all really low quality spam and a lot of forum profiles. They still rank for their brand, the site is in the index but the only rankings I can see are in Google Local. My advice to them for the quickest way back into Google is to get a new domain and relaunch on this new domain. The challenge is, the domain they want to buy used to be used as a domain in the 'erotic video distrubution' industry. It currently has 17 backlinks from 9 domain and the anchor text is mostly brand related but I can see that 70 links have already been deleted. I would consider this to be too high risk but would be interested to see if everyone agrees with me, it would be an awesome domain name if the history wasn't there!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Merge content pages together to get one deep high quality content page - good or not !?
Hi, I manage the SEO of a brand poker website that provide ongoing very good content around specific poker tournaments, but all this content is split into dozens of pages in different sections of the website (blog section, news sections, tournament section, promotion section). It seems like today having one deep piece of content in one page has better chance to get mention / social signals / links and therefore get a higher authority / ranking / traffic than if this content was split into dozens of pages. But the poker website I work for and also many other website do generate naturally good content targeting long tail keywords around a specific topic into different section of the website on an ongoing basis. Do you we need once a while to merge those content pages into one page ? If yes, what technical implementation would you advice ? (copy and readjust/restructure all content into one page + 301 the URL into one). Thanks Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
Complementary Domain
Hi guys, I have the following situation I would like some help. Because my client is in Brazil, I will make up fictional names so it's easier to understand. My client is a shoe store whose domain is mangabeira.com. That is the brand name and will always be the main domain and reference of the website. We were offered the domain shoes.com. There is no intention of changing the brand name or anything, but there would be a redirect that would send the user who to mangabeira.com. My question is how much impact would that complementary domain do to my SEO performance and how that redirect must be handled. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LucasLopes0 -
Is having all your media hosted on a sub-domain bad?
I just realized yesterday while doing some audit work on our site (which is still relatively new) that all of our audio assets are stored on a separate sub-domain. We are an eCommerce site that sells audio books, and every product page has a sample audio file to listen to. But all those files are stored on a sub-domain of the main site. "cdn-media.oursite.com". First, I understand that media(our audio files) has some inherent SEO value if hosted correctly. Is that true? And if so, how important would you think it is? Secondly, assuming that it does have value, are we losing that value by having them hosted on a sub-domain? I have read things that say sub-domains are bad, and I have read things that say that Google at least has been treating sub-domains as sub-folders, but I can't find anything definitive one way or the other. On another note, another thing I saw is that people are linking to the sound files directly in various places, and those links are going to the sub-domain, not the main domain. There aren't even pages on the sub-domain, just the files, so those links deliver a "visitor" to a page that is completely blank except for a tiny little audio player. Not sure what to do about that, but that can't be good one way or the other right? How big of a problem is this really? Is it worth me going to our IT dept. and trying to change it? It sounds like it would be a pretty big deal to change, so I'll need a few voices to back me up if that's the case.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DownPour0 -
SEO friendlier domain name
Hi, I just have a doubt. I am building a site I want to optimize for the keyword "slot machine gratis". I have bought two domains: slot-machines-gratis.it and slotmachine-gratis.it. Which domain do you recommend that I use to target the keyword "slot machine gratis"? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
High PR backlinking blogs
I have a few high pr blogs all setup on different ip addresses. Should I optimize these blogs for my chosen keywords I want to use as backlinks to my "money site". In other words if my keyword is "ice cream" and im sending links back to my money site with the anchor text "ice cream" and ice cream type keywords...wouldnt it be logical to make that blog optimized for ice cream as well? My thought is that google will find these links even more powerful if they come from a website that already appears to be ice cream related. ...man i want some ice cream now
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dcstover10 -
Understanding Canocalization, domain structure, redirects
Hey guys, My background is more in marketing aspect of SEO and I'm afraid my technical knowledge is not where it should be. I'm confused about how to find out whether a site is splitting link juice by having to many domains(?) that are not redirected properly. Am I asking that right? How do you figure that out? And, once you know, do you just go to the ones that are not redirecting and add a 301? Where is the best place to add a 301? I know there's a difference in the eyes of the search engines between, say, example.com and www.example.com and probably other forms, correct? I'm not a programmer or IT specialist, I'm a marketing consultant, but I feel like I'm really missing it when it comes to understanding all this stuff (looking at HTTP headers, using GWT, reading source code, etc) and am not sure the best way to learn it effectively so I can be sure I'm not missing something when consulting with clients. Help? Please? Thanks, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidPPeters0