Gateway Pages

[Road]

I have read that gateway pages are frowned upon by the search engines?

If you have multiple domain names that are related to your main website what is the best way to get the greatest use from those related domain names?

Thank-you.

[MarieHaynes]

Hi John,

You can certainly redirect these to the main site, but they're not likely to add value beyond capturing type in traffic unless the domains have links pointing to them. I think it's a good idea to buy these for competitive reasons. If I were you, I'd likely 301 redirect them to the main site and then ignore them.

[Road]

Hi Marie,

Thanks very much for your response.  The main reason why I purchased domain names that are similar is to protect my brand and prevent others from copying my business at least using the same name.

I understand that creating microsites is misleading to the search engines and they don't like that so I don't want to do that.  But do I want to do a redirect of some kind?

Or just park them and forget about them? And as you say focus on developing my main sight.

Thanks

[MarieHaynes]

It's pretty common for a business to want to buy up all sorts of keyword rich domain names when starting out. I remember when my husband first started his business we got duped by a GoDaddy salesman who told us we should buy a whack of domain names that combined keywords and our city. And you know what we did with them? Nothing.

These domains might be useful for type in traffic. For example, if you are a plumber, people in your city might type "CityPlumber.com" into the url bar and you can have that redirect to your main site.

The obvious thing that people want to do when they have these domains is build microsites on them and then link to the main site. I have seen this work well for SEO. And then I have seen sites get disastrous manual penalties when this is overdone. In theory, if you had a keyword rich domain that you could truly build up and create a fantastic site on this domain, it might be helpful. But, I'd prefer to put that fantastic content on your main site.