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
-
Will adding /blog/ to my urls affect SEO rankings?
Following advice from an external SEO agency I removed /blog/ from our permalinks late last year. The logic was that it a) doesn't help SEO and b) reduces the character count for the slug. Both points make sense. However, it makes segmenting blog posts from other content in Google Analytics impossible. If I were to add /blog/ back into my URLs, and redirected the permalinks, would it harm my rankings? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GerardAdlum0 -
Google selecting incorrect URL as canonical: 'Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical'
Hi there, A number of our URLs are being de-indexed by Google. When looking into this using Google Search Console the same message is appearing on multiple pages across our sites: 'Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical' 'IndexingIndexing allowed? YesUser-declared canonical - https://www.mrisoftware.com/ie/products/real-estate-financial-software/Google-selected canonical - https://www.mrisoftware.com/uk/products/real-estate-financial-software/'Has anyone else experienced this problem?How can I get Google to select the correct, user-declared canoncial? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nfrank0 -
A new client has image urls showing above their page rankings for the same key phrase.
New client website https://yorkshirefoodguide.co.uk/ has for some key phrase searches the URL for an image showing above or as well as the url for the landing page. I'd be happy for it to show in the image pack but I want to url to rank in the main serp. The site is in WordPress and I'm sure this is just a setting I need to manage. Can you help please?
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Optimist0 -
This my site i want rank in doubi any advice for me
this my site i want rank in doubi any advice for me http://alsuntranslation.com/
Technical SEO | | ATS_SEO0 -
Is it bad to update product titles and URLs if they are only slightly modified
I am doing some house cleaning on the site and made some minor updates to product titles and a rule was written in and it auto updated the URL to what the product title was with a redirect put in place from the old URL. If this a bad thing and should i leave the URL alone and just update the product title? Then for the ones i did change the Product title and the URL was updated is this a bad thing and should i have just left the URL alone? These are all high ranking popular products so dont want to mess with any rankings going into busy season?
Technical SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Help! added WWW to wordpress site and now lost SEO ranking
Hi there Everyone! I have recently added a www to my wordpress website by going to settings>general and adding "www" to the wordpress address and the site address. After i did that i lost my SEO ranking, and also that MOZ is detecting that im getting site crawl issues stating that i have duplicate pages. an example is below: http://www.mefco.co.nz/news http://mefco.co.nz/news any ideas on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | jfactor0 -
Marketing URL
Hi, I need a bit of advice on marketing URL's. The destinations URL is http://www.website.com/by-development.php?area=Isle Of Wight&development=developmentname. If we wanted to use www.website.com/developmentname on literature to send people to the ugly URL above, what would we do? Would we need to rewrite the ugly URL to the neat and then 301 the ugly to the neat? Currently, the team are using a new domain of neatandrelevant.info and 301 redirecting it to ugly URL but there are lots of different developments they want to send people to so a new domain is bought for each development which seems a bit unnecessary. They point to different pages on the ugly URL website. Assuming canonical tag would not be needed then because the ugly URL page would be redirected. Also, as the website has ugly URL's anyway, would it not be best practice to use rewrites anyway so that the URL's read www.mywebsite.com/region/development? Would it confuse things to then have extra short marketing URL's missing out /region? Hope that makes sense....
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
During a site platform transition, should we 301 redirect all URLs or only those with inbound links?
We have an ecommerce client transitioning to a new platform. Due to the nature of the platform, all the pages will have different URLs. There are between 7000-8000 total pages on the website. We wrote 301 redirects for all URLs which are showing inbound links. Unfortunately, automating this process is pretty difficult and hand writing URLs for 8000 links is unfeasible. Is it worth investing the time to 301 redirect all 8000 URLs, or are we safe with only doing those with inbound links? One other option would be to implement a generic redirect for all the rest of the old URLs that sends them to the homepage. Would this be a good compromise?
Technical SEO | | outofboundsdigital0