Domain dominance
-
I've just started to work for a company who've purchased masses of domains with every conceivable permutation based on all their products with every extension possible e.g .biz . eu. .net (including .co.uk and .com of course).
I have two questions:
1. Is it worth keeping all these (they want to add more) domains or let them expire?
2. All the purchased domains are online - is there any point (they redirect with a 301)?
-
Lisa
It is a personal decision. There is no right or wrong answer.
Big companies - sometimes buy them and do not use them in any shape nor form, but keep from competitors. Smaller companies usually don't as it is a costs issue.
My experience is most competitors do not understand their own digital channel let alone, snapping up similar names of competitors...
-
Is it worth keeping any domains that are similar to our brand/products? Why pass that opportunity to our competitors?
-
I would let them expire and buy beer with the savings.
Let the competitors spend their time and money on them.
-
I echo Andy above.
On the domains I would run them all through "open site explorer" &/or "majestic" to ensure you are not giving up anything of any value.
I would also be careful if they have no value, and are 301'ed to your main site, that could look spammy to google. So if you do choose to hold them, even though they have no value, so held for brand protection sake, do not 301 them unless it could be a traffic referral domain.
Hope that assists.
-
Hi Lisa,
1. Is it worth keeping all these (they want to add more) domains or let them expire?
If they are keeping them to help ensure brand security, then this is very popular and no harm in keeping them.
2. All the purchased domains are online - is there any point (they redirect with a 301)?
There is probably not a lot of point in all of them being live and pointing towards the main site as there will be no SEO benefit in doing this. If the sites were live and each had a site on there, it would be a different story and one that would end in a penalty.
If they are hoping to gain any SEO benefit from doing this, then they will be wasting their time. By all means they can buy them, but if what they have is delivering nothing beneficial (and I suspect they aren't), then I would just take them all down. It is more common to have a .co.uk and .com (and perhaps a few others) pointing to one key domain to capture traffic that types it wrong, but outside of this, it's a bit of a dead duck.
-Andy
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
-
Botched domain migration
tldr: we consolidated several of our domains from longdomain.com to domain.com over a year ago and lost our highest value keywords, roughly 70% of our traffic. All our links were natural google loved our site up until that point. Things started to go sideways then... Oct 2016: 301 redirect everything from http(s)://(www).longdomain.com/* to https://www.domain.com/*, traffic starts to slump Jan 2017: Traffic has slumped 30-40% from normal seasonal levels Apr 2017: We experiment with Rankscience, implementation is botched creating a robots.txt disallow: / which is corrected in a week. traffic slumps even more during this period, but this issue seems to recover over the next month or two (hard to tell since now we have multiple factors and seasonal traffic). Oct 2017: Start an engagement with a seo firm that has experience with migration issues. They find some pages which are not redirecting and claimed that google is confused by that and pages we were redirecting wouldnt pass all the pr value until every page on our old site (including non public ones that google seems to have scraped from emails) was redirected over. Interm: Site audits from the seo form, many minor onsite improvements, link disvow, etc etc, no impact really. Current day: Stumped, and the business is hurting from the lost rankings and cost of seo. Those high value rankings are just gone and I did everything by the book as best I know. Redirects, same content, just punished. Up until the interacting with Rankscience and the seo firm, I handled all the serp related concerns myself. This has left me pretty disillusioned and at my wits end on where to look next.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sonar0 -
How to handle multiple domains?
Hello, We are working on migrating a website to a new web server. In addition to the primary website domain, there are several other variations that are owned. Is okay if we point all of our domains to the same IP address as our primary domain, and then setup 301 redirects to the primary domain? Are there any risks in doing this? There may be about 100 domains. Many of them are different country TLD for same primary .com domain, others including misspellings of primary .com, and some that are not so related to primary domain. Thank you in advance for your response!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | srbello1 -
Move a blog from a domain to a new domain in the same hosting server
I have the need to find the best solution to move my viverezen.org blog on new domain naturazen.org because somebody stolen my brand. Now I registererd brand NaturaZen and I am going to use this website as main and have the old viverezen just to point in the new website I dont want lose autority and more important I dont want lose the 500 visits I have everyday. Both domain are under same hosting company What is best SEO solution you can give me to help? I thought to point the hosting on new domain naturazen and put all link with redirect 301 on viverezen but probably I am wrong stuck_out_tongue thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VivereZen0 -
Domain Forwarding for SEO
Hey guys, I recently created a new website for a client who was ranking #1 for the term "jupiter obgyn" but they have now dropped down to #4. This happened because their old home page was at www. instead of just jupiterobgyn.com. When you type in the www. version, it does take you to the root domain but it's not carrying the old PA! The www. version of the page had a 22 PA and the new root domain hosted page is a 1. How can I fix it so that "link juice" carries over? Is this something i need to do in 1and1 (their web host) or within Wordpress? Thanks!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Taking up an "abondoned" domain?
Hi, As far as SEO goes, are there any direct contradictions to picking up an approximately 1 year old domain, where the only thing that has ever been on is a static "Hello world" page from a wordpress install done when the domain was created? I'm thinking about picking it up again, as if it was a totally fresh domain, add content, and do SEO on it. What are your thoughts friends? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kaince0 -
Old links showing on new domain
Last year we incurred a Google penalty and after months of trying the clean up the link profile with no joy we relaunched the site with a .org rather than .co.uk Now the issue is that 2 weeks after the launch GWMT is showing all the old links pointing to the new url. We didn't do a redirect of any kind, just changed the url Why is this????
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Duplicate Content across 4 domains
I am working on a new project where the client has 5 domains each with identical website content. There is no rel=canonical. There is a great variation in the number of pages in the index for each of the domains (from 1 to 1250). OSE shows a range of linking domains from 1 to 120 for each domain. I will be strongly recommending to the client to focus on one website and 301 everything from the other domains. I would recommend focusing on the domain that has the most pages indexed and the most referring domains but I've noticed the client has started using one of the other domains in their offline promotional activity and it is now their preferred domain. What are your thoughts on this situation? Would it be better to 301 to the client's preferred domain (and lose a level of ranking power throught the 301 reduction factor + wait for other pages to get indexed) or stick with the highest ranking/most linked domain even though it doesn't match the client's preferred domain used for email addresses etc. Or would it better to use cross-domain canoncial tags? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Different Geographies - New Domain or Subdomain?
I have a site that is successful on the SERPs for a certain geography, let's call it City A (I'm sure you can't tell what it is from my username). I'm moving to a new city in another state so I will be building my business in this area (City B). Should I create a new domain for City B with CityBWebsiteDesign.com or should I create a sub-domain called CityB.BrandableCompanyName.com and just redirect CityBWebsiteDesign.com to the URL for offline marketing purposes only? My current website BrandableCompanyName.com has some authority with Google. Will it be better to building something on the sub-domain and get any sort of cross-benefits or are there really no benefits to be had between sub-domains? The benefit of going with CityBWebsiteDesign.com would be having a keyword rich URL but I would basically be starting from zero with building authority. Specific experience you've had with this or cited examples would be great for the discussion! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredDetroit
Jared0