Referrals from widget domains
-
Let's say you are doing seo for a company that sells 5000 widgets.
Let's call their site www.mainsite.com ...
They have already set up ( purchased ) many domains such as www.widget1.com which is one of the widgets they have on their main site. so they might have several hundred of these domains. What is the best use of these domains?
Would it be :
- Have those pages be landing pages with content and pictures and optimized with a link to their main site widget page?
- Or have that domain have a 301 redirect to go their main site, to the particular page showing that widget for sale off their main site?
Miscellaneous sidebar question -
Since both the main site widget page and the widget domain might be in competition and might have duplicate content, what are the ramifications of not using the canonical tag, and what other considerations might there be? How much must be duplicate content before considering using the canonical tag?
-
they might have several hundred of these domains. What is the best use of these domains?
I would let them expire and buy beer with the savings...
Then focus all of my energy on a single domain.
-
let me try to paraphrase so i can understand your answer better, ok?
the satellite site is the perfect match widget domain page, and it is branded to look uniform to the main site for user experience visual uniformity. It has unique content, and some how has many links pointing to it ( how did you perform that feat i wonder?) - with directories or blog articles pointing to those perfect match domains?
so its right now, in the short term, a click from the perfect match domain to the main site, with anchor text coming from that, as well as the prior link going to it, but later, you will change that and just do a 301 redirect to the main site, so user experience will be only the main site, yes?
Using the 301 redirect you may lose about or around 10% as i understand it, link juice.
And important follow up question, when you mentioned building trust, how exactly is that accomplished? By having good content on the main page certainly, and perhaps all the sorts of pages that build trust - company profile, terms of service , faq pages?
Add finally, when you do the 301 redirect ultimately, you will move the content over to the landing pages you are sending them to?
thanks!
-
Hi Ed,
Great question.
I had the same dilemma when I was working with a client in the promotional merchandise industry. What I ended up doing was create a landing page on each of the satelite sites with unique content on it. The landing page was branded in exactly the same way as the main ecommerce site was branded so if the user clicked on any links it would give the appearance that they were on the same website.
As the domains on the satellite site were exact match we could happily blast a couple hundred low quality links with exact anchor text to it to get it to rank on the first page short term. As the landing page linked to the main website it actually helped the main eCommerce site rank for the same keyword.
We stopped any aggressive link building on the satellite and then concentrated on building higher quality and a little bit more trust. As this was going on we were building big trust signals back to the main website and really concentrating heavily on social and super high quality links.
It now has the main site and the satellite sites ranking on the 1st page together, with the landing page ranked above the main site.
However, I think this will be short lived. I am more a fan of building brand and domain authority, so when the time is right I will be redirecting the satellites into the main site category pages. But I want to give the domains plenty of time to age on the own before doing so.
So in summary, put original content on your exact match domain landing pages and brand it the same as the main site. Concentrate on building authority and trust to the main site and treat the landing pages as a short term strategy.
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
-
Subdirectories and Domain Authority
Hello, A subdirectory consolidates domain authority vs a ccTLD approach. However, for example, if a domain has been well established in the UK i.e example.com, is that domains authority diluted if a subdirectory is created i.e example.com/es Will some of the link juice attained on www.example.com be shared throughout www.example.com/es and therefore initially impact search visibility for www.example.com? I understand it works both ways as well, as any links attained on www.example.com/es will benefit the example.com domain. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SEONOW1230 -
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
Technical SEO | | LeszekNowakowski0 -
How About Moving My Site to Another Domain?
My website has been hit by a Google Penguin penalty. At this point, it seems very few websites have recovered from this penalty even after it was lifted. That said, I'm still wondering if I should start a new website or my current one to another domain. When I started my website, I registered the domain name http://www.thewebhostinghero.com A few years later, I bought webhostinghero.com as it became available. Actually, webhostinghero.com redirects traffic to thewebhostinghero.com at the registrar level. There are barely any links pointing to webhostinghero.com. TheWebHostingHero.com is quite a big website with over 1400 pages and some very useful tools (http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/free-tools) that took me so long to develop, I just can't believe I'd have to throw it all out the window. So that said, do you think it would be possible to move all or some of the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com? Would that make sense? Would webhostinghero.com come out as a copy of thewebhostinghero.com since the domain is similar, etc.? Of course, moving the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com would have to be done without any 301/302 redirects to avoid passing bad link juice. At the same time, I don't want to end up with duplicate content on both domains.
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Conserving Link Equity When Purchasing a Domain
Suppose you were interested in buying a successful blog with lots of powerful links and they offered to sell you the domain but none of the content. Do you have any tips for conserving the link equity when buying the domain? (Note: about half of the inbound links are to the homepage and the plan is to relaunch the site with new content.)
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs0 -
Domains and subdomains
When I started a campaign for my message, I got the message: "We have detected that the domain www.vamospaella.com and the domain vamospaella.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here." I wasn't sure whether I had said it was a subdomain when in fact it was a domain (or the other way round), so I started another campaign for the same website using the other option and the message didn't come up. However, I still don't understand what you meant by this and whether it's an issue. When I search for my website in Google, it shows as vamospaella.com when other websites come up as www. and then their domain name. If it is a problem, is it to do with my hosting package and how it's set up or is it to do with my local site on my computer? I did ring my web host, 1&1, but they said they couldn't see a problem. Please can you let me know how I can resolve this as my ranking is still quite low in Google and I'm not sure why. If it is because of "twin domains", then will Google see my content as duplicated and keep me low in their rankings? I'm new to SEO and not a website novice, so please answer in lay terms! Thanks Melissa
Technical SEO | | melissa10 -
Is Buying Domains Good For SEO? Can I 301 redirect domains to an Original website?
I have a friend that purchased multiple domains related to their website. Each of these domains have the back ground of the original website and irrelevant content on them. Is is possible to redirect the various domains to certain pages on the original website. For example if the website is www.shoes.com and they purchased domains such as www.leathermensshoes.com and a few others related to the website. Is it SEO friendly to link the domains purchased to the original website?
Technical SEO | | TSpike10 -
Moving Blog to Custom Domain
Hi All - I am currently attempting to move a blog (companyname.blogspot.com) that has a 2/10 GPR to a custom domain name so that I can get my targeted keywords in the domain name. The new domain will just be www.targetedkeyword.com. There are easy instructions for doing this with the A record and CNAME changes in the Blogger help, but I am worried about losing rank and links if I do this. Can you guys help me understand what the ramifications would be, and how I can accomplish this without losing the 2/10 mojo? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Bandicoot0 -
Seomoz api for domains working, for domains+directory not?
We're working on a tool using the seomoz api ... for domains we're always getting the right values, but for longer URLs we're having troubles ... Example: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-reasons-why-qa-sites-can-boost-your-seo-in-2011-despite-googles-farmer-update-12160 won't work http://www.seomoz.org/blog works Any idea what we might be doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | gmellak0