Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Multiple Domain names pointing at one website

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Multiple Domain names pointing at one website

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    7
    11
    7652
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • markc-197183
      markc-197183 last edited by

      Hello,

      A collegue has asked if we can buy multiple domain names which contain keywords and point them at our website.

      Is this good practise or will it be seen as spam? Will these domains actually get ranked?

      I'm sure I'm not the first person to raise this but can't seem to find any questions and answers about this.

      Thanks

      Mark

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Everett
        Everett last edited by

        I would not advise buying EMDs for the purpose of linking into your main site, or for redirecting to your site after those EMDs get exact-match external links. Theoretically, if you had good content on the EMDs that you wouldn't mind putting on your main site some day (because catch-all redirects, like an entire site redirecting to the home page, are treated as 404s, according to John Muller of Google) you could gain something by redirecting the EMDs to that content on your main site once the EMDs had some decent links. However, the amount of effort it would take to do this would be significantly more than what it would take to put good content on your main site to begin with.

        Google has been lowering the importance of exact-match domains and exact-match anchor text for some time now. Shortcuts don't work forever. I don't mean to sound like some preachy white-hat guy, but even if you could get it to work for awhile you would be risking the reputation of your primary domain. When a site gets banned people often lose their jobs. They go on unemployment. They can't pay their mortgages. They can't afford health insurance. So yea, maybe a little bit preachy. Don't do it. Just my two cents.

        PS: I did try this a few times about five years ago on a few of my own personal sites. It didn't take long for Google to figure out how people were manipulating the algorithm by purchasing EMDs and redirecting them for this purpose.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • sd11sine
          sd11sine last edited by

          Does this technique still have any value ... or did the google updates catch this

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • markc-197183
            markc-197183 @irvingw last edited by

            Great, thank you all very much.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • StefanJDorresteijn
              StefanJDorresteijn @seoug_2005 last edited by

              Nothing is linked until I 301

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • irvingw
                irvingw last edited by

                Google's take is you're not supposed to do it.Also,

                a) make sure the domains are private registration so no one knows who owns the sites

                b) put about 2000 words per page on the site, you can get away with a two page site just make sure both pages have tons of unique content

                c) link to your site from the web and let Google find the site on it's own, don't submit it to Google's ADD URL tool - some claim that doing so tells Google that this is a new site, if Google finds it on it's own it doesn't make that determination (again can't be proven 100%)

                d) this strategy only sometimes works for some reason, don't count on them all ranking.

                markc-197183 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • markc-197183
                  markc-197183 @StefanJDorresteijn last edited by

                  Very Interesting - thank you Stefan. Does anyone know what googles take is on this?

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • martyc
                    martyc @seoug_2005 last edited by

                    Interesting strategy Stefan.  Did you link between your 7 exact match domains in any way or just to your main site?  Thanks.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • StefanJDorresteijn
                      StefanJDorresteijn @seoug_2005 last edited by

                      I mean that your main site and the seperate sites you're creating for link juice should not be on the same host. I've seen people link to themselves like that way too much and in my experience it doesn't work out well.

                      Quick example of how I did the hosting:

                      1. Main site is hosted somewhere in the middle-east
                      2. The 7 other sites are hosted with Arvixe, in the US

                      This way they're not connected in any way and they look like completely different sites that don't share anything.

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • seoug_2005
                        seoug_2005 @StefanJDorresteijn last edited by

                        Hello Stefan,

                        I read with interest your post and would like you to please clarify -

                        "Get completely different hosts for the other domains"

                        Do you mean completely different domains for your 7 websites. If yes, why so ?

                        StefanJDorresteijn martyc 3 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • StefanJDorresteijn
                          StefanJDorresteijn last edited by

                          I've done something sort of like this before so I'm sure my story gives you some insight.

                          I have a big forum that I do SEO for a lot and we were looking to rank our new sections for their respected keywords. Now, instead of fighting the big competitors we have by just building links, we decided to make multiple websites with the exactly keywords in the domain names. This way we ended up with 7 .com, exact match domain names. We filled these up with content and did some small SEO on them. After about two weeks they were all ranking in the top 3 for their keywords where my main site was nowhere to be found. We kept the sites there for about a month, and then 301'd them to our main site which led to our main site being in the top 5 after a week, and on rank 1 after three weeks and some extra linking.

                          When it comes to just having the domain names I wouldn't do it like that, I'd fill them up with content, do some quick link building for them, and then 301 them. This way you'll get their link juice and you don't have to do too much SEO for it.

                          Notes:

                          1. Get completely different hosts for the other domains
                          2. Make sure they're exact match, or at least close to it, otherwise it's not all that useful, they need to give you an advantage
                          3. Make sure the content you post on the sites is of high quality so you don't look spammy.

                          I'm not 100% if this is the best way to do it, but this is the way I did it and I had great success with it so I hope it helps!

                          seoug_2005 markc-197183 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          Got a burning SEO question?

                          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                          Start my free trial


                          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.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • TinoSharp

                            Hreflang and canonical tag for new country specific website - different base domain

                            I have a little different situation compared to most other questions which asks for hreflang and canonical tags for country specific version of websites. This is an SEO related question and I was hoping to get some insight on your recommendations. We have an existing Australian website - say - ausnight.com.au now we want to launch a UK version of this website - the domain is - uknight.co.uk please note, we are not only changing from .com.au to .co.uk.... but the base domain name as well changed - from ausnight to uknight as you can understand, the audience for both websites is different. Both websites has most pages same with same contents.... the questions I have is - Should we put canonical tag on the new website pages? If we don't put canon tag on new website pages, what is the impact on the SEO ranking of current website? I believe we need to put hreflang tag on both websites to tell google that we have another language version (en-au vs en-gb) of the same page. Is this correct?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinoSharp
                            0
                          • kadut

                            If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance?

                            Hi, If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance? Thanks Roy

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut
                            1
                          • piazza

                            Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts

                            Hi everyone I'm hoping a few of you can help me out... We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
                            This is for commercial reasons: Our current name is difficult for customers to spell It's not wholly representative of what we now offer We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
                            Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
                            A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places. In terms of current traffic: 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases) 70% is via adwords We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well. 
                            The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
                            We will keep all our existing products and content. Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
                            What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
                            I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required? As always, any help is very much appreciated. Many thanks Abs

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | piazza
                            0
                          • Macrofireball

                            Reverting back to old domain name.

                            I've recently been asked by a client if I can foresee any issues with reverting back to their original domain name. With the original domain name they had a pretty decent DA for their sector which they have now lost. Although I do appreciate that over time this might come back, the CEO is very keen to switch back to the old domain. They do currently have 301 redirects from the old domain to the new and have implemented rel canonical. As yet they have not notified Google of the change of address using Webmaster Tools. Can anyone forsee any issues with returning back to the old domain name? They have only been using the new domain name for a couple of months which currently has a DA for 1.

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Macrofireball
                            0
                          • infotrust2

                            My Domain authority dropped 9 points... Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this significant drop.

                            My domain authority dropped by 9 points and I haven't done anything differently since the last scan. What is going on?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | infotrust2
                            0
                          • Mark_Ch

                            Link Juice + multiple links pointing to the same page

                            Scenario
                            The website has a menu consisting of 4 links Home | Shoes | About Us | Contact Us Additionally within the body content we write about various shoe types. We create a link with the anchor text "Shoes" pointing to www.mydomain.co.uk/shoes In this simple example, we have 2 instances of the same link pointing to the same url location.
                            We have 4 unique links.
                            In total we have 5 on page links. Question
                            How many links would Google count as part of the link juice model?
                            How would the link juice be weighted in terms of percentages?
                            If changing the anchor text in the body content to say "fashion shoes" have a different impact? Any other advise or best practice would be appreciated. Thanks Mark

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
                            0
                          • knielsen

                            SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.

                            A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen
                            1
                          • djingel1

                            Any way to find which domains are 301 redirected to competitors' websites?

                            By looking at the work from an SEO collegue it became clear that his weak linkbuilding graph probably is not the cause for his good rankings for a pretty competitive keyword. (also no social mentions where found) I was wondering what it could be, site structure and other on page optimization factors seems to be ok and I don't think there will be exceptionally good or bad user behavior... Finally I looked at the competitors and found that they have more links, better content en better design, so I got a little stuck. The only reason I can think of is that he is doing 301 redirects (or is rel=canonical tags). Is there a way to trace these redirects back to the source in order to include this important variable in your competitor research? thnx

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djingel1
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          • Digital Marketers
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter
                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.