Should I redirect a direct keyword url?
-
We are a manufacture of a product and we own the url of our business/product name (samples) "www.thewafflemaker.com" and our company name is "The Waffle Maker". We do all of our business on "www.thewafflemaker.com" and rank #1 for about 16 of the top 20 keywords related to "Waffle Makers".
However, we also own "www.wafflemaker.com" without "The" in the URL. Right now we have it set up as a single page that contains information about the product and a link to our sales site. Should we build this site up or have it just redirect to "www.thewafflemaker.com"?
Any help is appreciated.
Thank you!
-
We really dont have the time or resources to keep up with both sites. We get about 150 organic hits to the "www.wafflemaker.com" site and only see about 20 of those come to our main site.
Maybe a redirect is best since our sales site is set up to reel the buyer in.
Thanks for the input Ryan
-
If you have enough content and time to manage the SEO on the 2nd domain, I'd say go for it. What you want to avoid is duplicating your content, or cannibalizing your own keywords on the main site.
If you don't have any new keywords you want to pursue, don't have the time to properly SEO the domain, or don't have enough content for a second site, I'd say go for the redirect.
EDIT: You should also know that exact match keywords in domains is one of the less important ranking factors, and most agree it will continue to become less important.
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
-
Negative Keywords for SEO
Hi Mozzers, I have a client that has a totally legit retail business and they are getting lots of traffic organically that is adult in nature and totally off subject. The reason for this is their domain name contains keywords which while work well for their brand, when reordered and couple with a another keyword (such as picture or image) they get traffic for searches that have nothing to do with them and are pretty awful in nature. If this was Adwords I'd add a negative in of course but how can I stop bad traffic coming to the site organically? Any ideas? Cheers B 🙂
Branding | | Bush_JSM0 -
How to handle knock-off product leveraging your brand keywords?
Hello all, I fear this may be a bit of newcomer question but maybe you can help me out. My business is in a highly competitive market, and when you search for our branded name many of our competitors show up in search results well before us (who don't contain, or even reference, our brand name on their site). We're trying to take a proactive approach to content development and site enhancement, but I am wondering if there's anything on the defense-front that we can do to better own our brand ranking in SERPs. Thoughts? Suggestions? Should I be reading SEO 101? Thanks
Branding | | J-Me0 -
Is it OK to choose a Domain Name with Brand-name followed by keyword? Part 2
Last month I have posted a question about choosing the right domain name for a website which is currently popular in india, which also needs to be popular in USA. Here's the link to that question (http://moz.com/community/q/is-it-ok-to-choose-a-domain-name-with-brand-name-followed-by-keyword) As you can see the question got 3 helpful responses from experts. But if you scroll down and see.. there is a 4th response which I myself posted throwing some extra doubts, (This was left unanswered.) Could someone please check that thread and clarify my doubt ( the 4 response)
Branding | | PaulineRose0 -
Marketing for a new alternative solution (general keywords) and for it to show up under specific keyword searches
Hi Moz Community! I've run into a marketing dilemma for one of our customers that we provide SEO and internet marketing services to. Therefore, I need the help of you clever people! The company is a high-tech innovative biotechnology company, so instead of using their product as an example which might be confusing, I will represent the problem with "DVDs" and a new technology similar to Netflix. Customer wants to buy 500 Days of Summer DVD online and isn't aware of the new technology called 'Netflix' where we can stream it online instead of ordering it online. Netflix marketing team wants their website to show up alongside search results so when people search for 'buy 500 Days of Summer DVD', you will see Amazon, blah blah and at some point also see 'Netflix: Stream Instantly Online!' What is the best way to approach this? Micro (macro) site? Can I target 'DVD' and make the microsite use a direct match? Do I have to create a page for every single popular DVD in order for it to effectively rank? Any other clever solutions to this problem? Thanks everyone! Sheldon
Branding | | swzhai0 -
Subject: Brand anchor text distribution. Does the HP url classify as brand anchor?
Hi guys, I just wanted to know what your take is on this and whether anyone knows if google has published any info on this. I am wanting to analyse a fairly large backlink profile. The idea is to discover how far it correlates alongside recent SERPS ranking data (based on anchor text distribution) information that has been published across the web. There is so much data to categorise and segment. This is due to overlaps in categorisation, (which is possibly a good thing as it appears more natural) though I often it difficult to decide which goes where. My question today relates to brand anchor text - in determining the % of overall brand distribution for a backlink profile - Which out of the below do you think rings true? 1.) Should I be considering the homepage url anchor text as a branded link anchor? 2.) Should the brand % just be 'pure brand' anchor text? 3.) Should it contain partial brand + KWD data? 4.) Should it comprise of all of the above elements? 5.) Should I divvy up / segment partial brand, pure brand, brand + kwd, citations etc into new sub categories and see how this individual data correlates to current ranking factors in the SERPS? (Not sure if there is any recent published data in this amount of detail) Anyway, I just wondered what you guys thought about this in the eyes of Google., and also to find out how you go about classifying and segmenting backlink profile data. Thanks for now
Branding | | Turkey0 -
Is it a bad idea to have a catchy brand name url redirect to an exact match domain
A friend wanted to setup a website where people would share and vote on "widget" ideas where the winning idea got build for free. They bought cute the domain name widg.et and branded their site as widg.et. However, for SEO, they are having widg.et forward to www.sharewidgets.com. Then, to complicate things further, they changed their business model to remove the voting feature and now the site is just set to show off the widgets they've made and let people order new custom widgets. They might add the voting feature back later. "Widget" and "widgets" in this case has an SEOmoz difficulty of 72% and 71%, so quite high and none of the two word or long tail phrases have much traffic. What do you think they should do: Remove all domain forwarding and use widg.et as their only domain as it's less confusing and better for branding Get another domain that includes their keyword widget for the SEO exact match benefit Keep it as is, even though "sharewidgets" is no longer quite as applicable Many Thanks!
Branding | | skincareseo0 -
301 Redirect Old Established Site to New Business Model Site?
I have a client who has a website which is getting fairly descent traffic in the current industry its in. He is launching a new business model, same industry. New domain, new brand etc. Is it better to keep both entities separate and try growing them both? Or would it be more effective in terms of acquiring ranks and traffic to 301 redirect the old established site to the new site? Transferring all the value from the old and instantly boosting the new model. Not sure if this ads anything to the topic, the new domain is also an exact domain keyword match for a highly searched term.
Branding | | sunbelt0