Pointing Other URL to My Site? Good or bad for ranking.
-
A few years ago I purchased a few keyword rich domain names and set up some satellite sites. Spammy I now know.
What should I do now? I own the domain names for at least another 3 years. Should I point them to my main site or would that hurt my main site ranking?
-
I would not do too many of these, but I agree with Gary. As long as there are no penalties associated with the domains, owning them and 301-ing them to your website should be fine and may get some domain traffic when someone types theexactproductyousell.com
Having said that, I don't think this will do what you want. If these domains don't have links pointing to them or any authority, so It's not likely to do much for positive rankings.
-
I think that sounds absolutely fine on the basis the backlinks pointing to the URLs are ok and like Gary said, check you haven't received any penalties on the URLs. If you've done any blackhat link building on the URLs and you're planning on 301 redirecting them, you're potentially opening yourself up for trouble.
That being said, why do you want to 301 redirect them? Do the sites have regular traffic coming to them? Or have you done some particularly good form of link building on them?
If there's no real value in redirecting them, you may as well just leave them and cut your loses early...
-
That sounds good to me
-
I don't think the sites are associated with any bad mojo. I was thinking I would just change the DNS on the domains to send the traffic to my main site and then us redirect to resolve the URL into my main page URL. At lease until they expire. After that I'll let them go. In the mean time I've decided to invest all time & resources into creating value on my main site.
Anyone see any problem with that strategy?
-
the sites where originally meant for value and original content. However lack to time & resources made them just a waste of time.
-
If you 301 the domains to your current site, that is fine provided non of them have any nasty stuff like penalties associated with them.
It can actually boost business sometimes if they are good domains that people go to directly, does not happen often but it can do.
Many websites have multiple domains 301'd to their main site for brand name protection such as spelling mistakes. So its a very common practice.
If on the other hand you refer to linking I would definitely not do that!
Or you could build up the other domains with relevant content and save them for a rainy day if your main site ever got hit in the future by a penalty. Seems to be a backup plan many have right now as Google is in crazy mode right now.
-
Microsites can be done in a spammy way or a white hat way. If you have the time & resources, you could consider posting unique content on each of the mircosites and build them up as legitimate sites. They could even draw in search traffic. Then link them to your main site in a non-spammy way (i.e. no exact match anchor text).
-
What do you mean by pointing them to your main site (linking or redirecting)?
And if your concern is just because you have the inventory of domain names, shut 'em down if the sites are of no value.
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
-
Our site recently switched from http to https. Do I still need to setup a redirect for the incoming links pointing to http?
Our site recently switched from http to https. If you type in the http://www.websitename.com then it will automatically go to https://www.websitename.com ... my question is... do I still need to create a redirect in the htaccess file to ensure we don't lose all the links currently pointing to the http version of the website?
Technical SEO | | ninel_P0 -
Category URL Pagination where URLs don't change between pages
Hello, I am working on an e-commerce site where there are categories with multiple pages. In order to avoid pagination issues I was thinking of using rel=next and rel=prev and cannonical tags. I noticed a site where the URL doesn't change between pages, so whether you're on page 1,2, or 3 of the same category, the URL doesn't change. Would this be a cleaner way of dealing with pagination?
Technical SEO | | whiteonlySEO0 -
Then why my site is not ranking
My website's DA and PAs are good compare with my competitors. Then why my site is not ranking.
Technical SEO | | Somanathan0 -
Content Aggregator Services....good or bad for seo?
I've just had a demo from a content aggregator service called NewsCred. Essentially the service licenses the use of content from multiple sources on our own site. They claim that as the content is all properly referenced back to the original sites there are no SEO implication to the host site. Are they correct? Should we stay away?
Technical SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Value in Consolidating Similar Sites / Duplicate Content for Different URLs
We have 5 ecommerce sites: one company site with all products, and then four product-specific sites with relevant URL titles and products divided up between them (www.companysite.com, www.product1.com, www.product2.com, etc). We're thinking of consolidating the smaller sites into our most successful site (www.product1.com) in order to save management time and money, even though I hate to lose the product-specific URLs in search results. Is this a wise move? If we proceed, all of the products will be available on both our company site and our most successful site (www.company.com & www.product1.com). This would unfortunately give us two sites of duplicate content, since the products will have the same pictures, descriptions, etc. The only difference would be the URL. Would we face penalties from Google, even though it would make sense to continue to carry our products on our company site?
Technical SEO | | versare0 -
Drupal URL Aliases vs 301 Redirects + Do URL Aliases create duplicates?
Hi all! I have just begun work on a Drupal site which heavily uses the URL Aliases feature. I fear that it is creating duplicate links. For example:: we have http://www.URL.com/index.php and http://www.URL.com/ In addition we are about to switch a lot of links and want to keep the search engine benefit. Am I right in thinking URL aliases change the URL, while leaving the old URL live and without creating search engine friendly redirects such as 301s? Thanks for any help! Christian
Technical SEO | | ChristianMKTG0 -
How to visualize our entire site to discover the origin of URLs?
What is a tool to use so that I can visualize all links to all pages on the site so that I can discover how certain duplicate content URLs are being created?
Technical SEO | | poolguy0 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1