Multiple Domain names pointing at one website
-
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
-
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.
-
Does this technique still have any value ... or did the google updates catch this
-
Great, thank you all very much.
-
Nothing is linked until I 301
-
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.
-
Very Interesting - thank you Stefan. Does anyone know what googles take is on this?
-
Interesting strategy Stefan. Did you link between your 7 exact match domains in any way or just to your main site? Thanks.
-
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 USThis way they're not connected in any way and they look like completely different sites that don't share anything.
-
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 ?
-
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!
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
-
Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | murraycustomhomescom0 -
Content From One Domain Mysteriously Indexing Under a Different Domain's URL
I've pulled out all the stops and so far this seems like a very technical issue with either Googlebot or our servers. I highly encourage and appreciate responses from those with knowledge of technical SEO/website problems. First some background info: Three websites, http://www.americanmuscle.com, m.americanmuscle.com and http://www.extremeterrain.com as well as all of their sub-domains could potentially be involved. AmericanMuscle sells Mustang parts, Extremeterrain is Jeep-only. Sometime recently, Google has been crawling our americanmuscle.com pages and serving them in the SERPs under an extremeterrain sub-domain, services.extremeterrain.com. You can see for yourself below. Total # of services.extremeterrain.com pages in Google's index: http://screencast.com/t/Dvqhk1TqBtoK When you click the cached version of there supposed pages, you see an americanmuscle page (some desktop, some mobile, none of which exist on extremeterrain.com😞 http://screencast.com/t/FkUgz8NGfFe All of these links give you a 404 when clicked... Many of these pages I've checked have cached multiple times while still being a 404 link--googlebot apparently has re-crawled many times so this is not a one-time fluke. The services. sub-domain serves both AM and XT and lives on the same server as our m.americanmuscle website, but answer to different ports. services.extremeterrain is never used to feed AM data, so why Google is associating the two is a mystery to me. the mobile americanmuscle website is set to only respond on a different port than services. and only responds to AM mobile sub-domains, not googlebot or any other user-agent. Any ideas? As one could imagine this is not an ideal scenario for either website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
Multiple Sitemaps Vs One Sitemap and Why 500 URLs?
I have a large website with rental listings in 14 markets, listings are added and taken off weekly if not daily. There are hundreds of listings in each market and all have their own landing page with a few pages associated. What is the best process here? I could run one sitemap and make each market's landing page .8 priority in the sitemap or make 14 sitemaps for each market and then have one sitemap for the general and static pages. From there, what would be the better way to structure? Should I keep all the big main landing pages in the general static sitemap or have them be at the top of the market segmented sitemaps? Also, I have over 5,000 urls, what is the best way to generate a sitemap over 500 urls? Is it necessary?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dom4410 -
One Website, Multiple Locations, One Blog?
There's definitely not going to be a "right" answer to this question, but I think it can lead to a great discussion. We are building a website for a client who has two locations, we are going to use a URL structure similar to this: www.Brand.com (this would be a landing page where users would select a location) www.Brand.com/Atlanta www.Brand.com/Boston However, we still want to focus on local SEO - so our deeper URL structure will be: www.Brand.com/Atlanta/Auto-Accident-Lawyer www.Brand.com/Atlanta/Motorcycle-Accident-Lawyer www.Brand.com/Boston/Auto-Accident-Lawyer www.Brand.com/Boston/Motorcycle-Accident-Lawyer The content on those pages will be unique and target local keywords. Each "version" of the website will have a navigation specific to that location. For example, once a user clicks into the Boston website, all of the navigation items will pertain to Boston. However, we run into an issue with the blog. Both locations will be using the same blog content, which ends up looking something like this: www.Brand.com/Atlanta/Blog/Blog-Article www.Brand.com/Boston/Blog/Blog-Article This obviously creates duplicate content. We could do something such as this: www.Brand.com/Blog/Blog-Article However, as noted above, each local version of the website has a separate navigation (this keeps a user in Boston on the Boston version of the website). So have a centralized blog is far from ideal unless navigations for both locations are included - which would allow users to return back to their local website. From my understanding, duplicate content doesn't necessarily "hurt" your SERPs, it simply keeps one of the duplicated pages from ranking. So the question comes down to this, is duplicate content a big enough issue to restructure a website to use a centralized blog?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McFaddenGavender0 -
Brand Name in Domain name
I am thinking to make a site for amazon affiliate ,but hesitate to get a domain name related to brand name like samsungxxxxxxxxx.com .getting such domain name is good or bad ? advice me to proceed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
301 Redirecting multiple domains to brand new domain
Hi guys, I have read quite a bit of stuff on 301 redirects after Penguin. Hoping someone could help me out. im looking at a way to do a legit 301 redirect without passing the penalty. I have acquired two businesses, business1 and business2, that both had websites that were hit by penguin. Ive anaylsed there backlinks and theres a lot of spammy forum links and comments and I was also informed they were both using buildmyrank. A side note, buiness2 only started using BMR after it noticed business1 have large amounts of high PR links. business1.com was ranking at position 1 till the penguin hit. Business2.com was ranking around page 2 I work in the same arena as these two businesses and didnt generate any business via the internet. When these 2 businesses failed (due to loss of rankings and traffic) i decided to take them over. What I am thinking of doing is 301'ing both business domains to my brand new, zero links, domain which will be the name of my new company. I will combine the content from both sites, around 1000 pages, in to the new one. So my question is, does 301'ing multiple domains, that target the same keywords, and operate in the same niche, look less "spammy" then 301'ing 1 domain? I'm trying to look at it in the eyes of google. It is a legit merging of businesses. Thanks for your help, really appreciate your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
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 -
Content on New Domain or Sub Directory of Existing Domain?
I have a client with a well aged, high DA site. They rank well for their wedding photography business in several cities. They are launching a new service which is related to photography (photobooths and flipbooks) which they built and developed content on a new domain. The existing domain has 0 links with a DA of 1. The site is brand new.. Is there any drawback to moving the existing content on the new domain to a sub directory of the high authority domain? EX: http://domain.com/newcompany The look, feel, and design of the new site / service is much different than the high DA site. My thoughts are that this will give them an automatic step up, especially since they will be marketing this in several major cities. Also, since the design will be different, if it is good to move to the subdir, should we put the new company name in the subdir folder or something keyword friendly like domain.com/photobooth as opposed to domain.com/newcompanyname. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | itrogers0