Exact match domain marketing?
-
Hi All,
I've managed to secure a couple of exact match domains that are closely related to my main site but I'm a bit unsure of how to make best use of them.
My plan is to generate revenue by ranking high for the exact match terms, moving the visitor onto the main site to take their details and payment.
Naturally I want this satelite site to be very similar so that I can keep the brand continuety going and maintain a smooth transition to the main site. My main concerns however are:
- Will I get punished for using the same Navigation menu, logo and code as my main site? The navigation menu will link to pages on the main site, and this satelite site will most likely only consist of an index page and about 5 - 10 individual content pages.
2)I want the branding on this satelite site to be the same as my main site. Will I be punished for the difference in branding vs domain name? I know the SE's are unlikely to pick it up because the logo is an image but is there a risk of human editing?
- I want to link from the main site to the satelite site to give it a bit of a boost and to get through a possible sandbox. If the satelite has numerous links to the main site and the main site is linking to the satelite site will there be any benefit?
Never tried to create a site like this so a bit nervous about impacting the main site.
Thank in advance.
-
Hi Mulith
Ya, from a little town called Gansbaai, an hour outside of Cape Town. Yourself? It depends, dont approach a website that offers to sell links, rather find a good website and do some form of value exchange (I recommend targeted recipricol linking). Anyway, though this might interest you. Have a look at all of these sites. All have exactly same webiste structure/brand, just different domians, and all the domians are strengthened through exact match anchor text (bought!!) (This is similar to the scenario),
and there are many more of these. This is no good and by all means! (I was shocked when I stumbled upon this on the web the other day, the unfortunate thing is they rank for very competitive terms and all their links are bought, or strategically exchanged (although Google picks this up, the anchor text still helps significantly), pity Google cant pick this kind of link buying up yet. Cheers
-
I suppose if you keep it away from the main site then you've got some form of insulation against a penalty. Buying links like that surely is quite expensive?
BTW noticed you're from SA too, small world!
-
Hey Man, you telling me you have to be desperate for buying links, it's pretty desperate buying exact match domains and then doing a whole campaign for those (that's just as spammy in googles eyes), what kind of links do you want to build to the new domain anyway?, or do you expect to rank by having a few links from your mother site, cause that won't happen? Do some research on-line and you will see that 90% of competitive SEO campaigns buy links (like yours :)). I don't want to get into a debate here, but if I look at the current results, there is absoloutley no way you going to take number 1 ranking for that besides with your existing website.....Even if you do a new website and match your competitors profile, he will win due to domain age and your exact match domain wont be sufficient....Or am I missing something here, also by the time your domain ranks number 1, exact match domain might be valued even less...Recipricols depend on the pages they coming from and the balance of the link juice between the two sites, they can be extremely effective in your situation...
-
Buying links - No Offence intented but I'd have to be pretty desperate for that to happen and reciprocal aren't likely to pass much juice despite the exact match anchor text.
The domain is: http://tinyurl.com/3wohp5p
Using google.co.uk amd serps "sell a business" "selling a business"
-
Hi Mulith, can you not give us the website and keywords to have a closer look. If you say you have tried to achieve number one ranking and cannot with your website, because of the other sites high DA, I seriously dought yoru exact match domain will do it (remember there are hundres of rankign factors and there is a correlation, not causation between exact match domains...).....To be honest, although this community might hate me for it, I think you are better of buying links with exact match anchor text, that should get you number 1 quickly. Or do some link exchange...seems like what you are missing is exact match anchor text for your targeted keyword?
-
Thanks Janml for the extended comment.
If I'm honest the strategy is short term and allows me to generate the income needed to get link building done for the main site. So although it may seem short term, there is a long term goal in all of this.
I'm already 3rd-4th for the keyword but the real conversions happen at the top because No1 is a very high DA site and if I'm completely honest with myself, despite all the best content in the world, it will take me months, if not years to get there. I'm banking on the 0.25 correlation between exact match and No1 rankings, combined with a quick link building push to get to the top.
Since employing link builders costs money this seems like the best way to get the dosh together.
Pitty link builders don't accept equity based on the traffic or market share they bring in. That would remove the need for doing this the long winded way.
-
Regarding the questions, the answers bellow suffice. However, I would seriously reconsider the tactic you are wanting to employ. You will not rank that easily just because of an exact match domain (Google has recently devalued this ranking factor, and will probably continue doing so considering all the spam it creates on the web). If these keywords are so easy to achieve a number one ranking for, then rather use your existing domain and create some quality content that will attract links and rank (If your existing website cant achieve this, then it will be extremely challenging with new websites, and with the time you will invest ranking the new sites, you would have probably achieved the ranking easier on your original domain). Google will certainly pick up the links between your website and the new ones (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-link-based-spam-analysis-techniques - is a good read regarding this), and the link juice flowing will be minimal, so you will need to design an entire link strategy for the new sites (which is not feasible....)). . Strengthening multiple domians to drive traffic to a single site is certainly not the most effective way of going about to earn higher rankings. Why do you belive you cannot achive these rankings with your exisitng domian, maybe you should rather start with seeking assitance in that regard?
I am just warning you as you might be investing time and money in a strategy that is not sustainable, always think long term when investing in SEO and make sure your work will bear the fruits of its labour for a long time, and not just achieve a short term solution.....
-
Hi Mate,
My advice:
-
Make all the domains similar layouts yet have different content on all.
-
Try and link up to the main website via all the websites
-
Try and split the hosting too is possible.
I don't think you will get punished if you use the right content
Just change the image sizes possible and use vaired alt tests.
I think it will help but be wary of too many sites on the same IP also same GA analytics
Play it smart and use design and content wise and it will work well.
Regards.
-
-
-
if the rest of the content is different and there is enough unique content) then no i shouldn't be a problem.
-
If above is ok then 2 won't be a problem
-
Yes just like any other link building will help you.
That said I would advice on making a few landing pages on the site and use it as a portal for the main site. Just keep the content unique and relevant and you won't have any problems. Plus you should get a proff. designer to make a nice user friendly landing page design that works.
-
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
-
Duplicate content across different domains
Hi Guys, Looking for some advice regarding duplicate content across different domains. I have reviewed some previous Q&A on this topic e.g. https://moz.com/community/q/two-different-domains-exact-same-content but just want to confirm if I'm missing anything. Basically, we have a client which has 1 site (call this site A) which has solids rankings. They have decided to build a new site (site B), which contains 50% duplicate pages and content from site A. Our recommendation to them was to make the content on site B as unique as possible but they want to launch asap, so not enough time. They will eventually transfer over to unique content on the website but in the short-term, it will be duplicate content. John Mueller from Google has said several times that there is no duplicate content penalty. So assuming this is correct site A should be fine, no ranking losses. Any disagree with this? Assuming we don't want to leave this to chance or assume John Mueller is correct would the next best thing to do is setup rel canonical tags between site A and site B on the pages with duplicate content? Then once we have unique content ready, execute that content on the site and remove the canonical tags. Any suggestions or advice would be very much appreciated! Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Linking from & to in domains and sub-domains
What's the best optimised linking between sub-domains and domains? And every time we'll give website link at top with logo...do we need to link sub-domain also with all it's pages? If example.com is domain and example.com/blog is sub-domain or sub-folder... Do we need to link to example.com from /blog? Do we need to give /blog link in all pages of /blog? Is there any difference in connecting domains with sub-domains and sub-folders?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Unnatural Links From My Site Penalty - Where, exactly?
So I was just surprised by officially being one of the very few to be hit with the manual penalty from Google "unnatural links from your site." We run a clean ship or try to. Of all the possible penalties, this is the one most unlikely by far to occur. Well, it explains some issues we've had that have been impossible to overcome. We don't have a link exchange. Our entire directory has been deindexed from Google for almost 2 years because of Panda/Penguin - just to be 100% sure this didn't happen. We removed even links that went even to my own personal websites - which were a literal handful. We have 3 partners - who have nofollow links and are listed on a single page. So I'm wondering... does anyone have any reason to understand why we'd have this penalty and it would linger for such a long period of time? If you want to see strange things, try to look up our page rank on virtually any page, especially in the /gui de/ directory. Now the bizarre results of many months make sense. Hopefully one of my fellow SEOs with a fresh pair of eyes can take a look at this one. http://legal.nu/kc68
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoagnostic0 -
Domain authority imrpovement
Hi all, I'm trying to increase the domain authority of the www.gpmsummit.com. Is there any advice to improve it efficiently? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WTGEvents0 -
Article Marketing / Article Posting
I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website. I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites. today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things: my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use) (The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.) I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag. I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc. There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences. If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too 🙂 Thanks SEOMoz!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOWizards0 -
Multiple domain level redirects to unique sub-folder on one domain...
Hi, I have a restaurant menu directory listing website (for example www.menus.com). Restaurant can have there menu listed on this site along with other details such as opening hours, photos ect. An example of a restaurant url might be www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza. A feature i would like to offer is the ability for Bob's pizza to use the menus.com website listing as his own website (let assume he has no website currently). I would like to purchase www.bobspizza.com and 301 redirect to www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza Why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrails
So bob can then list bobspizza.com on his advertising material (business cards etc, rather than www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza). I was considering using a 301 redirect for this though have been told that too many domain level redirects to one single domain can be flagged as spam by Google. Is there any other way to achieve this outcome without being penalised? Rel canonical url, url masking? Other things to note: It is fine if www.bobspizza.com is NOT listed in search results. I would ideally like any link juice pointing to www.bobspizza.com to pass onto www.menus.com though this is a nice to have. If it comes at the cost of being penalised i can live without the link juice from this. Thanks0 -
Website domain hosting and set-up for foreign domains?
Hi, I am just wondering what the best practice is for marketing a business in two separate countries? I have a new client that wants me to create their website targeted at the UK market which for me is normal but they also want to target Australia (Probably couldn't get any further away) My initial thoughts are that the business would need two separate websites. The first one in the uk and the second website hosted on servers in Australia with different content. Is this correct? or does anyone have any advice which may simplify getting this thing off the ground. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0