Will multiple domains for the same local business hurt its rankings?
-
If I have a mold removal client who has domain1.com, which is several years old, and he creates a new domain2.com with the same info (reworded), but changes over the citations to domain2 will it
1. lower domain1.com's rankings?
2. make ranking either site harder since there are now 2 sites for the same thing?
3. reduce the ability for either site to gain a higher domain authority since links can now go to either
-
What is the purpose of the 2nd site?
The age of the domain a ranking factor, but one of many.
If he wants to change the domain your client can tell Google about a change of address in GWT and do a 301 redirect from the old site to the new site.
If the purpose is to have two sites ranking on the first page, a quicker and easier tactic would be to do some barnacle SEO (see http://moz.com/blog/barnacle-seo-whiteboard-friday) and get some of their citation / profile pages ranking on the 1st page for their mold related keywords.
With the recent updates and focus on quality it has become more difficult to try and operate multiple sub-niche sites, and will be much better to focus attention on creating one quality site which is seen as an authority.
-
Domain 1 had domain age, and the authority of the citation sites linking to it. Most likely Google had already crawled them, knew they existed, and will now have to recrawl and assign a new ranking. Be ready to wait a while.
This was very common at an SEO firm I used to work at, where they would create location or keyword-based domains in addition to the main branded domain in an effort to gain additional rank. They were frequently pummeled by the larger branded sites in rankings. Google targets these types of sites which have thin content, short term domain registrations, lack of citations/backlinks, etc etc.
If the site is hosted on the same ip address, in the same webmaster/analytics account AND has similar wording, I'm willing to bet Google will see them as similar and smack them both, or index the newer domain due to being seen as "fresher" content. Unless the time has been spent in giving both domains some love regarding citations and content I do not see this doing well in the SERP.
-
Websites compete against each other one page in the SERPs vs one page in the SERPs.
Let's imagine that you expand this idea... if two websites are better then ten websites should be awesome.
So you build ten websites, each with ten pages and put them out in the SERPs to compete. But your competitor puts those one hundred pages all on the same website.
Every time someone lands on that 100 page site they say.. "WOW this site has everything" and they tweet about it share it and link to it. That big site is going to become really popular.
You have ten websites and when people land on them they say... "meh... this site is OK but a am not tweentin' about it because that big site is a lot better":.
So, you can attack with ten slingshots or attack with one battleship, which one is going to defeat the competitor when you are fightin' one page in the SERPs vs one page in the SERPs?
All of my money is on the single big site with all of that awesome content.
The only time that I would consider making site #2 is when you have site #1 beating everybody everywhere. Then what it is going to do is push your competitor down in the SERPs, but really instead of starting that second site you should just be expanding the big site into new keywords.
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
-
Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?
Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron0 -
What will happen if we 302 a page that is ranking #1 in google for a high traffic term?
We're planning to test something and we want to 302 a page to another page for a period of time. The question is, the original page is ranking #1 for a high traffic term. I want to know what will happen if we do this? Will we lose our rank? Will the traffic remain the same? Ultimately I do not want to lose traffic and I do not want to 301 until it has been properly tested.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maxcdn0 -
Community inside the domain or in a separate domain
Hi there, I work for an ecommerce company as an online marketing consultant. They make kitchenware, microware and so on. The are reviewing their overall strategy and as such they want to build up a community. Ideally, they would want to have the community in a separate domain. This domain wouldn't have the logo of the brand. This community wouldn't promote the brand itself. The brand would post content occassionally and link the store domain. The reasoning of this approach is to not interfere in the way of the community users and also the fact that the branded traffic acquired doesn't end up buying at the store I like this approach but I am concerned because the brand is not that big to have two domains separated and lose all the authority associated with one strong domain. I would definitely have everything under the same domain, store and community, otherwise we would have to acquire traffic for two domains. 1. What do you think of both scenarios, one domain versus two? Which one is better? 2. Do you know any examples of ecommerce companies with successful communities within the store domain? Thanks and regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footd0 -
Why do some domains out rank stronger authority domains
Hi, If we take the Moz stats into account here, how comes sometimes weak Moz stat domains out ranking strong Moz stat domains? For example: A inner page with DA56 / PA40 is outranking a Wikipedia inner page with DA100 / PA82. That's a massive difference basically twice as strong on the Wikipedia page but being out ranking. In this case I assume the onpage SEO is playing a big part, but can onpage optimisation be that powerful? And I see this all the time, what SEO factors cause this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bondara0 -
How can I rank a national site for local terms
Hi All I have a website that covers all parts of the UK and I wish to be found for terms such as "car for sale London" "car for sale Manchester" and so on. In the past I have created separate landing pages for each town and city but with the quality score of a page becoming more of a ranking factor it is hard to make 300 + town pages interesting and useful. Is it best practice to do what I am doing and improve the quality of each of the pages or would I be better off removing the old pages and using some other technique to rank for the local searches? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
Can changing dynamic url of over 2000 pages site after a year will change its ranking
Hi- Have built site in joomla The urls are dynamic in nature with over a year - all pages are well indexed and backlinks been built over with these dynamic urls Need to know if i hire an agency to change over dynamic url to static url of these 2000 pages - will it also change all Search engine ranking positions of existing urls Will all the seo effort and backlinks build over 15 months will still hold valid or this will just back to square one due to change of urls is it advisable to get the url changed from dynamic to static one - especially when site is receiving over 75,000 visitors every month Thanks in advance. Look for expert suggestions
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Transfer a page that is already ranked from a second to a third domain level
Hi everybody, i have a page well optimized for my keyword it is on a domain with 28 domain authority it is well linked but it isn't enough to rank first Do you think that buy a third level domain with the keyword inside, put the page on-it and re-index it is a good solution? ( by putting a 301 redirect on the previous page of course ) now i'm waiting to be indexed for the new page but nothing appear searching the keyword instead the previous ranked page... thanks Guido
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidoboem0 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markc-1971830