Question about SEO and domains
-
Hello,
Over time we have purchased many domain names that relate to our business.
Let us say we sell chairs of type A, chairs of type B, Tables of Type C etc. We also have a main web site (main domain) which has been functioning for many years and is ranked well but not great.
Since we have domain chairtypeA.com and chairtypeB.com I was thinking of putting them to good use as follows.
STRATEGY A
a) Create the domain as a parallel domain but is mainly informational - it talks about chair type A, its history, what to look for etc. It has the same IP address as main domain
b) Have all the links on the page be directly linked to the MAIN site- so if you are on page for ChairtypeA and want to see it in a set you just click a link and it takes you to the main site.
c) The look and feel of the ChairtypeA site is exactly the same as the main site - in fact except for the Heading, title and content the whole framework is from the main site.
My hope is that if people are looking for chairtypeA, we would rank and attract customers. Plus it would use up some of the domain names we have purchased.
THE OTHER ALTERNATIVE (Strategy B) is
a) Create a domain for chairtypeA parallel to main domain (same IP address)
b) redirect it to subfolder in main domain
c) refer to the pages also as maindomain/chairtypeA (here is where it is no longer purely parallel)
I have 3 objectives
a) Use my purchased domain names
b) Focus on certain products (liek ChairtypeA)
c) Overall increase visibility and ranking
Please give me any feedback which indicates whether Strategy A or Strategy B is more effective, or if any has negative consequences. Or you could suggest Strategy C - a completely new approach.
Thanks
Sam
-
Personally, I wouldn't try get 'serious value' out of them. If there are just a couple of these domain names, redirect them to your main site. But focus on getting serious value out of your main site instead. If you have great content for ChairtypeA it should be on your ChairtypeA page, not on a micorsite.
If you gain inbound links, best they point to your main site pages. Not to microsites. You're diluting the potential of ChairtypeA by spreading its content over 2 sites.
-
So If I have two domains
MAINSITE and SPECIALIZED-SITE
And MAINSITE has a page that goes MAINSITE/SPECIALIZED-PRODUCT
How do I redirect SPECIALIZED-SITE to a particular page on MAINSITE?
Do I just point to a special page for the subdomain (like MAINSITE/SPECIALIZED-PRODUCT/index.html) in cpanel? We use cpanel
Thanks very much
Sam
-
I allowed some of mine to expire and used the savings to buy beer. Got immediate value from the beer and some of my competitors are now spending their time building hotdog stands on them - none of which have challenged me anywhere yet.
I am still sitting on a few of those domains. They will probably be allowed to expire after my funeral.
-
What we recommend is that you concentrate on one domain name to build up that site's domain authority. The other domain names should be 301 redirected to that main site. If you have domain names that are related to certain products or categories, you may want to redirect those to an internal page on your site.
What we have seen in the past is that if you have too many domain names pointing and redirecting to your main site you can run into ranking problems, even incur penalties from Google. So, I would limit the number of domains that you redirect to your main site.
If you decide to set up "micro sites" on those domains, keep in mind that they are going to need a lot of attention such as link building and social media marketing--it may end up hurting your main site if you were to have low quality or "think" content sites pointing to your main site.
-
You could use the specific domain names as redirects to the relevant pages if you really want to use them in some way.
The thing is Apple wouldn't use a new domain for one product. Ranking for search term Chair type A isn't going to be any easier at domain chairtypeA.com than it would be at chairtypes.com/chairtypeA
In fact, as EGOL said, having all your links going to the main domain is going to create a nice high authoritative page that tells Google you sell all types of chairs. Let's say your main domain authority has a domain authority of 30 because it has 20 links or something. Those 20 links are related to both chair type A and chair type B. If you split those into two domains, you are then left with two domains with half the authority. You would then have two less authoritative sites with 10 links each (It's not that literal) thus ranking lower on both sites than you would have originally using the higher authoritative page.
This is the better idea as the chair types combined create a stronger campaign where you can develop more links, more traffic and more trust.
Danny
-
Further comment - I am not trying to fool google. But trying to make the case that if you are looking for ChairtypeA - you would probably look for a website by that name. In a sense it would be like creating a website for iphone5s and another one for iphone6 but both in some way relate to apple.
Sam
-
Thank you for your answer.
In your opinion - how would I get serious value out of the very specific domain names we have that are related to sub categories or specific products (that are all available on the main site)?
Thanks
-
I would make one big furniture site. By doing that, all of the content and links and mentions and shares, etc. will contribute to the authority of a single domain.
In all types of battle "divide and conquer" is a primary way to victory. Making a lot of hot dog stands does this for your competitors.
People have been trying to fool Google by making hot dog stands and linking them to their main domain for nearly 20 years. Google has recognized them as "manufactured links" for much of that time.
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
-
Solved How to reduce the spam score for my domain?
My domain longfeifei.com is for a regular company website and someone sent a lot of external links on different low-quality websites on the internet. Now the score is very high about 75%. If I disavow the unusual links from google search console. Is it possible to reduce the spam score? Is MOZ associated with GOOGLE Data? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | niaokun6838072 -
Redirects, SEO and More
Website errors remittent of Chernobyl. First of all, I ask a lot of questions of the community and I don't do a lot of answering. For that, I am sorry! I own a small SEO company and the majority of my clients are upstarts just like myself. We try to do the best we can on a very limited budget.
Moz Pro | | underdogmike
With that said, the client website in question, http://bestdefensega.com has been a struggle to rank in the metro atlanta lawyer market.
Here's the story. My client is a new solo attorney that practices criminal law and personal injury law. We launched bestdensega.com to focus on criminal defense and my client has also paid AVVO for a website as well. We recently decided to make a monster website that would have 50+ pages and be representative of all that he practices.
I recently put a temporary redirect on bestdefensega.com and pointed it to the avvo website while I was rebuilding the website. I did this using a plugin.
This morning I decided that I wanted to remove the redirect, so I deactivated and deleted the plugin. The redirect is still in effect. I suspect that this may be a cacheing scenario.
How do I undo a redirect?
Also, I noticed that the AVVO site has all of a sudden shot up to the top of the search results and bestdefnesega.com has dropped past the 3rd page for our keywords. Have I lost all of bestdefensega.com's link juice? Also, bestdefensega.com has a spam score of 7. Why? There are no shady links and everything I do is on the up and up. Also Open Site Explorer says that bestdefensega.com doesn't have any inbound links.
Google WebMaster Tools says that the site has of 500 inbound links.. Frustrated, Thanks0 -
Affordable SEO?
Hey,
Moz Pro | | ChrisHolgate
I love the resources available to me through Moz.com and although I've found it's possible to make a half decent attempt at improving our site using these tools. I have however got to the point where it would be nice to have a second opinion as my view on our site and what can be achieved is no doubt somewhat stale. Obviously asking the community through Q&A is a start and I have benefited greatly in the past from your advice but I wouldn't expect anybody to give our site more than a two minute glance for free. As such I'm hoping to locate someone that I can pay to talk things over with just to get some fresh ideas and perhaps a list of tasks that my staff and I can continue to undertake over the coming months. I appreciate that Moz has a list of recommended SEO companies however these all seem to be targeted towards larger brands and I can imagine a relationship with one of these companies being less personal than I would like. Asides from going through lists of users and checking out their profiles individually, is there a resource that lists the smaller independent on Moz.com and if so where can I find it? Alternatively are their any external resources that might help me to find someone that would be a good match?
Thanks for your help. Chris1 -
Web Site Migration Testing and SEO-QA Automation?
Hey Mozzers, Are there any good Migration-SEO-QA Tools out there? Given a prioritized list of URLs and prioritized list of Keywords, is there a tool that can compare basic SEO factors, old URL vs. new URL, and identify all the specific gaps that need to be fixed? Here is a basic SEO-QA acceptance checklist, for porting any website. . . . Until the porting work is completed we cannot accept the new website. Givens: 1. A list of the Top 100 URLs from the old site, prioritized by conversion rates, landing page traffic, and inbound links. 2. A list of the planned 404 - mapped URLs, old to new site, from the porting team. 3. A list of the current Top 200 Keywords, prioritized. 4. A good amount of SEO work has already been done, by several professionals, for the current (old) site. **How to evaluate if the new site will be acceptable to Google? Check ON-PAGE SEO Factors... ** **. . . that is, the NEW site must be AS GOOD AS (or better than) the current (old) site,
Moz Pro | | George.Fanucci
in the eyes of Google, to preserve the On-Page SEO work already done. ** Criteria: URLs ok? :: Is the URL mapping ok, old to new, best web page? LINKS ok :: Are all internal LINKS and keyword Anchor Text ported? TEXT ok :: On-page content, TEXT and keywords ok? TITLE ok :: HTML Title and title keywords ok? DESCRIPTION ok :: HTML Meta Description ok? H1, H2 ok :: HTML H1, H2 and keywords ok? IMG kwds :: HTML IMG and ALT keywords ok? URL kwds :: URL - keywords in new URLs ok? Potential porting defects: Keywords in URL missing: Keywords in HTML Title missing: Keywords in Meta Description missing: Any internal LINKS or Link anchor text missing: Keywords in Page TEXT missing: H1, H2 missing keywords: HTML IMG alt-text, IMG file URLs, any missing keywords: Notes: Until the porting work is completed we cannot accept the new site, or set a target date for potential cutover. There are eight (8) data items per URL, and about one hundred (100) URLs to be considered for SEO-QA before going live. We were expecting to cutover before the end of February, at the latest. There is no point in doing full QA acceptance-tests until the porting work is completed. QA spot-checks have found far too many defects. About 60% of the landing-page traffic comes via the top 40 URLs. With over 100 URLs to look at, it can take more than a week or two just to do SEO-QA in detail, manually, item-by-item, page-by-page, side-by-side, old vs. new. Spot-checks indicate a business disaster would occur unless the porting defects are fixed before going live. _Any Migration-QA Tools?_Given a prioritized list of URLs and prioritized list of Keywords, is there a tool that can compare basic On-Page SEO factors, old URL vs. new URL, and identify most of the specific gaps that need to be fixed before going live with the new site? _ *** Edit: Any comments on the SEO criteria, tools, or methods will be appreciated!_0 -
Site Explorer Results - Linking Domains Tab
I have a competitor who has the following Linking Root Domains numbers on the Linking Domains tab and was wondering if some one could explain what the numbers mean? opera.com - 205,515
Moz Pro | | bridgeway04-34677
dmoz.org - 97,752 prweb.com - 198,092 quantcast.com - 115,748 tinyurl.com - 443,540 jquery.com - 57,886 URL: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.verypdf.com%2F Thanks, Brad0 -
SEO process suggestions / keyword analysis
hi all, we've done a bit of SEO over the years for our site, and are looking to pick things up this year and spend more time on SEO. first off, we are working on revising our keyword list & would like to view what keywords specific competitors are ranking for and try to target those keywords as well. is this possible via SEOmoz (similar to spyfu)? please let me know if you feel this is a good first step in picking up our SEO efforts for the new year. i've been looking at the research tools & is seems the Keyword Difficulty Tool hasn't been fully functional for the past week or so ("Our Keyword Difficulty Tool is having issues displaying AdWords API data. We are working with the AdWords API folks to get a fix soon!"). also, i noticed i can enter competitor sites in open site explorer & compare link metrics, but i don't see anywhere to compare keyword metrics. is there something i'm missing? thanks again everyone!
Moz Pro | | lsat0 -
Impact of 301-redirected domains on OSE Metrics
When looking at the OSE metrics (DA, PA, Number Linking RDs etc.) is it purely based on OSEs evaluation of the specific domain or will it take into account links that have been 301-redirected to the domain?
Moz Pro | | bjalc20110 -
"Special pricing" on SEO DVDs?
The section for buying your dvd training lists the price for everyone at $119 and the special price for pro members at - $119. Then the text says that the special price will be shown when the item is added to the cart where the special price is - $119. Am I missing something here?
Moz Pro | | IanTheScot1