2 domains for one website
-
Hi,
I was wondering: i have 2 domains. One is the name of the company the other one is an exact match domain. There is only one website. If I use both domains for this website which one will rank? How google react to website configured like that?
Regards
-
Just seconding Chris. There's no reason to reproduce the site. You're question gets right into why, too—you wouldn't have a lot of control over which would rank. 301ing the exact match domain to the branded one is what I'd do.
-
Leszek,
This is a very common question that comes up with many clients. Realistically you only need one site, this site should be your main focus with optimization, linking, and content. I would suggest having your exact match domain redirecting to your branded website. This way the exact match domain is still in use, but your company's name is associated with the main site.
Many people think they need their exact keyword, or keywords, to be in their domain, which is not true. Many sites (Google and Moz for example) do not use keywords in their domains, yet rank very well in their industries. Now these are extreme examples, yet if you create a well thought out marketing campaign you can rank any domain for just about any keyword.
I hope this helps, if you have additional questions please let me know.
Regards,
Chris
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
-
Website of Products by a Brand on a Sub-Domain or a Sub-Directory?
Hi, We have a brand website under which we plan to develop various apps. We think that putting each website on its own sub-domain would be a good option. E.g. Main website – abc.com; app1 website – app1.abc.com; app2 website – app2.abc.com etc. Would it be the right way to do it or should we put the apps in a sub-directory. E.g. abc.com/app1; abc.com/app2 etc. These apps would either be totally unrelated or may be in future we may provide something so as to enable their integration. Thanks
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Non Moving #1 Website
Hi Guys, Bit of an odd one we have recently undertaken our SEO in house (6-7 Months) and since doing this have had some great results, we have identified our competitors utilising Ahrefs, Moz and other tools that we have selected. However we have come up against something that we really cannot work out. One of our competitors ranks for everything related to there term on their website and industry at position #1 They are not actively doing SEO, Poor backlink structure from the research that we have carried out No fresh content being generate I was wondering if someone would perhaps mind spending 5 mins having a quick look to see what you think as i can't think what we might have missed. Tim.
Technical SEO | | fordy0 -
Should we 301 redirect our old domain to the new domain
We have a product that when started was under the domain appnowgo.com. We've since changed the name and the domain is now knackhq.com. The latter domain doesn't rank nearly as well as the former for many of the keywords we are targeting. For example... "online database builder" and "web app builder" are two of those keywords. Obviously having app in the domain is not a bad thing but it is our old name. The question is, should we 301 the appnowgo.com domain to knackhq.com? Or should we use that better rank and just link users to knackhq.com from the appnowgo.com site until we can increase our ranking for knackhq.com? We don't plan to update the content on appnowgo.com anymore and we obviously don't want to drop off rank if at all possible. Thanks! Eric
Technical SEO | | sitestrux0 -
Links to Website Author
I'm a website developer, and in the past I have usually added a tiny backlink to the footer of my clients' websites like this: Website Design by MyCompanyName I understand that Google sees this as a low-quality backlink. However, I was wondering if such links can hurt my rankings. Does Penguin sees these links as spam? If so, should I add a rel="nofollow" to the links? Is there anything else I should change? I do not want to remove these links completely because they are good for marketing my business. I just want to minimize any negative SEO impact of the links. I appreciate your input. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SiteWizard_LLC0 -
302 multiple domains...
Hello, I have a few domain names with orthographic variations that I'd like to redirect to my main site. The problem is my registrar (OVH) does only 302 redirects, so what are my options ? Can I keep a dozen 302's ? Do I have to change all their DNS (it's a load on my server...) ? Thanks for any ideas Johann.
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Different domains
Firstly apologies for the very brief question as I am mainly looking for your thoughts as opposed to specific help about a specific problem. I am working on a site which has two sepreate domains and within one domain, two sub domains. The two different sites both havea high page rank, PR6 each, one is the corporate site and the other is the company blog. There are also two sub domains within the corporate site, again both domains have high pr and tons of content. My question is would it be better to consolidate all the assets under one domain or is it better to keep the sites sepreate, from an seo perspective that is.
Technical SEO | | LiquidTech0 -
301 Redirect Domain or 301 Redirect Domain + Interior Pages
Hello - My company acquired another company in our industry and our IT team immediately set up the acquired companies domain name as a an alias to our site. This created a duplicate version of our website under another domain name and Google started ranking interior pages from the aliased acquired site for several top keywords that were previously held by our real site. Should we 301 redirect just the top level domain name of the acquired site to the real site or 301 redirect the top level domain name and the interior pages on the acquired site to help ensure that our real domain will take back the rankings it once had? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Room2140 -
External Links from own domain
Hi all, I have a very weird question about external links to our site from our own domain. According to GWMT we have 603,404,378 links from our own domain to our domain (see screen 1) We noticed when we drilled down that this is from disabled sub-domains like m.jump.co.za. In the past we used to redirect all traffic from sub-domains to our primary www domain. But it seems that for some time in the past that google had access to crawl some of our sub-domains, but in december 2010 we fixed this so that all sub-domain traffic redirects (301) to our primary domain. Example http://m.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ redirected to http://www.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ The weird part is that the number of external links kept on growing and is now sitting on a massive number. On 8 April 2011 we took a different approach and we created a landing page for m.jump.co.za and all other requests generated 404 errors. We added all the directories to the robots.txt and we also manually removed all the directories from GWMT. Now 3 weeks later, and the number of external links just keeps on growing: Here is some stats: 11-Apr-11 - 543 747 534 12-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 13-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 14-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 15-Apr-11 - 521 528 014 16-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 17-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 18-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 19-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 20-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 21-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 26-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 27-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 28-Apr-11 - 603 404 378 I am now thinking of cleaning the robots.txt and re-including all the excluded directories from GWMT and to see if google will be able to get rid of all these links. What do you think is the best solution to get rid of all these invalid pages. moz1.PNG moz2.PNG moz3.PNG
Technical SEO | | JacoRoux0