High Quality Domains and what to do with them
-
Hi,
I rus a travel photography business. The primary function of the website is to sell prints, though I blog about my travels on the same domain name as well as a few pieces of content that are helpful to users interested in some of the places I travel to. I do okay with it, but obviously, I am always looking for a way to increase visibility and sales of prints. I own a couple of high quality keyword domain names, that I've been trying to figure out what to do with. One of which is for a city that my prints of my photography are probably best known for. The domains I'm really trying to decide what to do with are basically a www.citystatephotography.com and www.citystatephotos.com, where the city and state are the ones I'm targeting. The question is, what do I do with it? I've seen various ideas from other photographers that have various levels of success. Here are the options I'm considering:
-
Just redirect it to the photo gallery of photos that I'm trying to rank highly for. From what I read on various blogs, this doesn't really do much of anything, but maybe I've read wrong?
-
Create a website or microsite with some quality content related to the city that also links back to my photography website on various places and possibly once in the navigation. I do have quality content I could put up that would be helpful to people from the city besides just trying to get sales. But there's always a chance this will cannibalize my original domain without helping sales, I assume?
-
Spam my photo galleries across two domains. Most of my photography galleries would stay on my main domain that I already run, but the photo galleries that are key to that city would be hosted on that citystatephotography.com domain name. I've seen a photographer from Colorado do quite well with this method. (www.imagesofrmnp.com and www.morninglight.us) He's heavily known for his images of Rocky Mountain National Park and that seems to be his main brand, but all of his non-RMNP travel photography goes on the other site. The two sites look almost identical, though they link back and forth fairly extensively. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of duplicate content either. I've considered this method, but I'm nervous I'll kill what I've already built up if this were to fail.
-
Do nothing with the domains. Seems wasteful, as these domains, particularly the citystatephotography.com domain seems useful in some way.
Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!
-
-
The only other thing I would suggest is to hang onto the domain names. Don't let the registration lapse so they can be picked up by others.
-
Thanks for the reply! Gives me some things to think about. Maybe I could test just one of the domains to see what happens for now.
-
Saying that these domains are more or less useless will be wrong in my opinion. If I would be at your place I would have gone for the micro sites idea with creative content that can help the people of that particular city or the people who want to travel to that city.
If you are up for it, make sure that the content do not get duplicated. I agree that some of the gallery pictures might be the same but your creativity in text content should make it as unique and powerful for readers as possible.
What you should not do is a massive redirect as this will not help you in any way but too many redirections might cause a negative fluctuations in rankings.
Hope this helps!
-
Definitely don't go redirecting them to your money site Mickey. Any 301's pointing to your site are always risky. If you are trying to maintain some high-level branding recognition with the domains then that may justify redirecting them to your money site, but I know that's not the case.
The only other reason you would want to 301 a domain to your site is because it had powerful on-topic inbound links pointing to it. That kind of redirect could help your site in a big way, but it's also very risky too. In general, you want to have the least amount of 301's pointing to your domains as possible. And if possible you want to have absolutely no 301's pointing to your site, especially if there's no authority or inbound links juice attached to them.
-
I agree. Concentrate on it. Moving it up just a few positions will be a big improvement in traffic. Then after you are in great positions for your most important keywords, launch one of the new domains and put all of your work into it.
-
Thanks! I appreciate the reply! My current website is doing well, though it would use some tweaks so it sounds like it would be far more useful to just concentrate on it.
-
Thanks for the response. There's really only 5-6 domains, so it's not a huge deal. I just thought it was worth seeing if there was a way to put them to good use. And yes, they all costed around $10. I've just had most of them for quite a while and haven't done anything with them yet. This all makes a lot of sense, and between these responses and more reading, I won't bother with them. However, is it even worth re-directing the domains or will that actually penalize me?
-
Most people look at new domains as "opportunities". I look at them as "taking your eye off of the ball".
If your current websites are kicking everyone's butt everywhere that is the best time to start another domain. If your current website is not dominating everything everywhere then that is the worst time to start a new domain.
So, if you are not dominating your niche, you would be better off putting all of this work into your current main site and moving it from position #5 to position #3. That will do more to pull in traffic and show off your work than building a couple of outhouses.
-
As much as you probably don't want to hear this, I think those domains are pretty much useless. I'm also assuming (possibly incorrectly) that you have just bought these domains for around $10 because they were available.
If the domains don't have any on-topic inbound links or authority behind them, then you can't really do much with them except start from scratch. If they do have some established authority and topically relevant trust flow, then that's a completely different story.
Keyword rich domain names are more of a hindrance these days than a help. One of the main reasons is that every time you acquire a naked URL backlink to your site such as www.citystatephotos.com, it already has the main keyword in it. This makes it very difficult to control your link anchor text ratios in the long run.
Google is all about brands now and not keyword rich anchor text domain names. Yes, those domains are perfect candidates for a churn and burn spam campaign but they're not the type of domain names that you'd want to build a long-term stable Internet presence with.
They're also no good to build a PBN's on either because they have no juice going to them. The effort required to send them quality link juice would be far better off spent just improving the quality of your original site.
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
-
Merging domains into sudomains
I know that questions about this topic have been asked before, but I didn't really find an answer that I could apply to our situation. We have several websites that now exist on separate domains, even though their topics are closely related. We are moving each of these sites into a new CMS and are considering collapsing all of the domains into a sub-domain structure around the strongest domain. Important to note: All of the current domains have existed for many years and have strong site authority, and regardless of the domain decision, in this restructuring we will be bringing them all under a global header. I know that there are SEO risks to moving a site from an established domain to a new one, even with 301 redirects in place, but the team in charge of this move wants to know how much of a hit we would take and how quickly natural search traffic might recover. Maybe and mights aren't really satisfying their questions... Does anyone have experience with collapsing domains into a sub-domain structure and feel like sharing your results? Most importantly, was it worth it???? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JuliaG0 -
Cross domain canonical and hreflang
Hi Guys, So we are close to launching our new site and just need to be sure that our canonical, duplicate issues are sorted before launch. So here is our current situation. The current site is on trespass.co.uk. Then new site will be on trespass.com. The new launch is global and we will have the 3 stores within magento all in english. Trespass.com for the UK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trespass
Trespass.com/US for US
Trespass.com/ROW for all other countries On trespass.com we have the following: On trespass.com/US we have the following: On trespass.com/ROW we have the following: This is how the magento developers.design company have set it up but am I right in saying the canonical tag for each store (/ROW and /US) should point to Trespass.com as the only difference is in the pricing £ $ and euros? Thanks for your help0 -
Domain authority imrpovement
Hi all, I'm trying to increase the domain authority of the www.gpmsummit.com. Is there any advice to improve it efficiently? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WTGEvents0 -
Purchase of domain name from a different industry.
Hi I am thinking of acquiring a domain name, although it is currently being used in a completely different industry to the one I hoping to use it for. The site only has 46 links and was registered in 2009. It has a DA of 25, Home PA of 37 and PR of 2 I was just wondering how easy or hard it would be to optimise the website for a completely different industry, i.e. lets say it was initially bought to sell hair-care products and I want to use it to sell electronics. Would I leave the existing links in? Could I use that new disavow tool in webmaster tools to wipe the slate clean and start again? Really haven't come across this before, does anyone have any ideas? Thanks for your time, Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
.co.uk domain with romanian content
Hello, I want to build a blog on a .co.uk domain that targets Romanians from uk. The blog will be in Romanian. What recommendation do you have regarding Google, should I submit the website to google.co.uk or google.ro. Did you had any cases like this? Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0 -
Domain Issue
Starting a new local travel guide site. Would like to buy a domain and have found one with decent Domain Authority and Trust, but they want $2500 for the domain which I feel is a bit steep since I will be not using any of the content and it is generating hardly any revenue now. . I would rather not start from scratch with no links and no trust. I have a few questions.... -Any suggestions on sites to look for domains or strategy for finding and offering to buy? Any guidelines on how to value domains? If I but it and change registration do I risk losing all the value? Cold I just change technical contact info? Any other suggestions are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reportcard0 -
Help! My Domain Authority keeps dropping! What do I do?
Hey! I just noticed my Domain Authority keeps dropping? What's happening? What do I do to get it better. I'm scared and dont know the next move to make to get this site better. Help please! Thanks! http://www.moondoggieinc.com Kristy O
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristyO1 -
Virtual Domains and Duplicate Content
So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains. Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL. Example: sub.agencysite.com/store sub.brandsite.com/store Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content. Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask) I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site. They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers) Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up. So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology? I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new. My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup? I mean on one hand I am saying
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
"Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!" So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?0