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Thank you for answering so quickly! I respect your opinion, and I know that keyword-rich domain names are controversial (always have been). For many years I've continually seen great results when people use them and market them the right way.  Even if all search engines stop including the keyword-richness of domain names in their algos, the bottom line is, when people link to websites, they will likely use the domain name. If it's keyword-rich, they're using keywords to link to the website.

I intend to correctly build links and the anchor text will often read www.keyword-domain.com and the user who clicks it will land on www.keyword-domain.com. So no confusion there, hopefully. I welcome further discussions.

Thank you for answering so quickly!

My agency just built a new website for a client who is a franchisee.  It's not launched yet - it's currently under an IP address.  I suggested to client that he buy a keyword-rich domain name for it, which he did. Then he found out that the franchisor will not allow it to be his main domain name. They want him to use a domain name with the franchisor name in it.  But they WILL allow him to put a 301 redirect on that franchisor-approved domain name, and redirect it to his keyword-rich domain name.

He is interested in having my agency perform an SEO Campaign for this new website. But would SEO and link marketing work for a website that has a new non-keyword domain name that 301 redirects to a new keyword-rich domain name?

I would do page-to-page 301 redirects to the webpages with topics that are most closely relevant to the old webpages' topics. Yes, you can do page-to-page redirects to webpages with different domain names.  It's going to take a lot of work if you have to do that with 50k URLs though!

I suggest that you consider this:  Keep hosting it and replace the main page's content with a paragraph explaining that the website is on pause. It can contain a link to some of your other websites.

Here's why I suggest that:  I have a client with a website with a Google PageRank of 3.  He closed the business and wanted to ditch the website since he was starting a new biz.  Instead, he let me put up a blank page with a paragraph stating that the business was closed. And I reduced my hosting fee for that website. There were no longer any internal links to the inner webpages, other than on the sitemap.xml.  Nearly six months later, the website still has maintained Google PR3 (and PR2 for inner pages), and someone has approached him wanting to buy the website!  Yay!

One last idea:  You could contact the websites that link to the soon-to-be-retired website and ask them to link instead to one of your other, relevant websites. Hope this helps!  Good luck!

I have a new SEO client; his website has never been optimized. There are 70 domain names involved with this one website. Each domain name points to an exact replica of the main page, other than the fact that a small content box has different info in it, and sometimes the header graphic is different. So, 70 webpages that are 5% different from each other and 5% different from the main page.

How badly is this issue affecting this website's ability to rank well, and what is the best way to solve this?