Keywords based domains redirecting to a site.. is it SPAM?
-
Keywords based domains redirecting to a site is considered spam isn't it ?
And if yes, then is it considered spam in all cases whether those domain based sites are related or non related to main site?
-
Hi Moosa,
The answer will vary based on the specific situation.
If you buy domains which have backlinks then redirect them to your site in an attempt to pass PR to your site, you are attempting to manipulative search rankings. That is clearly a problem.
If you buy keyword domains and put up 1 page sites with the goal of ranking for those terms, then forwarding them to your site, that is also clearly a problem.
If your site is SacramentoVacuums.com and you purchase all the local area site names (RanchoCordovaVacuums.com, FairOaksVacuums.com, etc) and redirect them to your site for the possibility of type in traffic, that is not a problem. Even if you purchased 100 such domains...these domains do not have backlinks, they don't have a site, you are not attempting to rank any of them, you are simply trying to gain a bit of extra traffic.
If you are concerned, you could always 302 redirect the sites. That would be an unusual implementation, but I do not see any problem with it.
-
Based on what you shared, absolutely.
My question is...why redirect the domains? If there is no backlinks to the site and there is no page on the site, the sole reason is for type-in traffic. If you have an established website with a long name, you could later acquire a short name and 301 redirect it for either marketing or type in traffic. For example, bankofthewest.com owns botw.com and it used to redirect to the main site. Now they use it for their mobile site.
-
I understand your point, Ryan. I also understand that Google itself recommend 301 redirect from one domain to another in genuine cases. so yeah you made a valid point (just that your answer was bit aggressive but I still appreciate your help. thanks!).
Ok To be specific in my case- its in house, we already have two existing EMDs (not developed as sites) and we are planning to permanently redirect them to another EMD (even though it is EMD but still it will be developed as a proper brand site.).
So i guess you reckon its ok to do so?
-
Agree with you Moosa! Google has clearly mentioned that - "Google frowns on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the one they selected" - Google
So ofcourse redirecting 100s of them is definitely not a good idea!
-
Vikas, I am very familiar with the page you shared. I still stand by my response as correct. I believe you are either misinterpreting the guideline, or you have not fully explained the situation which is why I had requested an example.
Using the example I previously shared, if I purchased "SEOtips.net", "SEOtricks.net" and 100 other domains then 301 redirected all of them to my site, that would not violate Google's Guidelines. There is no attempt to manipulate search rankings. My site will not rank any higher because I redirected these domains to my site, assuming these are new domains which have never been used.
You quoted the policy on Doorway pages. Please read Google's definition of a Doorway page. It is a single web page designed to rank in search engines, pull traffic for the terms related to the page, then redirect the traffic to the target site. That is not what is happening here.
I am perfectly comfortable with your selection of Tyler's response as the correct answer. Tyler's response gets a thumbs up from me. Nevertheless, the response I shared is accurate.
-
"Google frowns on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the one they selected" - Google
"Having multiple domain names targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page" - Google
link - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2721311
-
Thanks Tyler!
-
My two cents: Like most things SEO the answer is to stop and think; collect all the statements/opinions that you can and then apply what you have learned to your current situation. In this case you are going to be taking both the EMD devaluation and the intent of the Panda (thin content)/Penguin (spammy links) updates and apply them to your situation. Without knowing your site or the other sites being linked from. I will be responding in broad hypotheticals and hopefully, if I understood your question correctly, it will provide you with something to consider.
First things first: Ryan is basically dead-on with his assessment of the 'I heard...' issue. So, for the sake of clarity, I will once more state that what follows is my opinion on the vague question presented.
Your question is a good example for the 'use your head' school of thought. The question appears to be about the spammy-ness of buying and redirecting EMD sites to a main website in an attempt to benefit from their existing site traffic/linking metrics. The confusion seems to be a common one: "Does changing X on site Y accomplish/trigger Z? If yes, then does this apply to everything?" Coupling individual situations and fixes to something as scattershot as 'in all cases' is writing yourself a check for future struggle.
I think that your main source of confusion is all the misconceptions that float around about the EMD update, so for the sake of clarity:
If you own an EMD site that sells baby clothes (ex: babyclothes.com) then the EMD update didn't penalize your site, it simply took away the algo advantage that having an EMD used to grant. Think of that EMD advantage/'penalty' as a short person standing in a crowd and on a stool; the short person appears taller than they actually are and the stool may be large enough to help that person stand out from the crowd more easily than they otherwise would. If the stool were to be removed then that short person would lose the boost in visibility the stool provided. This wouldn't be making the person shorter, but simply removing the vertical boost the stool provided.
With this understanding of the EMD devaluation in mind, your situation/question clears up and becomes less muddy than it may have initially seemed:
If you own a site that sells baby clothes (branded, EMD, etc...) and you acquire related EMDs (babyclothes.com; babyclothes.net; infantclothes.com; etc...) so they can be redirected then you should be just fine. The key word in that last sentence was 'related' and it applies to any type of domain, not just EMDs (they have lost their boosted value so should be treated like any other site). This is all assuming you are buying established/existing sites that have content because link schemes (like Ryan correctly pointed out) are penalized regardless of the site being an EMD or not. A doorway is a doorway regardless of its domain name.
Oh, and one final thing: Make sure that if you buy an existing site you give the user base of that site a few days or weeks notice of the coming change. Users are the most important part of any decision made and nothing will earn you the ire of your users more than sudden changes with no warnings (once again, I am assuming you are buying existing sites and not just setting up a bunch of doorways pointing to your site).
In short:
The EMD update has made the benefit of having such a domain moot, however, existing EMDs can still ride the wave of link and user base metrics that having an EMD used to be helpful in acquiring.
Redirecting any existing sites (EMD is an irrelevant variable for this case in my opinion) which you have purchased into your primary domain is not a problem assuming you aren't simply setting up a bunch of doorways and that the purchased/redirected sites are relevant.
I would love to hear some of the other opinions on this.
Vikas_Rana, did this help at all? I hope so.
-
**I heard a while back that some people spam by buying EMDs and then use their natural traffic by redirecting it to their main site. **
Where exactly did you hear this? Can you share a link?
People often say "I heard...." There is really nothing anyone can do to respond to such statements. SEO information is spammed on tens of thousands of sites. Every site owner has an opinion. We need to understand who said it? Did Matt Cutts say it? Or was it a random webmaster?
I heard it is important to optimize the meta keywords tag. Last week I had a client share two different monthly reports from two SEO companies where their meta keywords tags were being optimized each month. Does that mean I should run out and optimize all my meta keywords tags? No. The two companies were from India and their SEO knowledge is quite flawed.
**So Google started seeing it as spam technique. **
Google's Guidelines are published. They have been revised to offer additional clarity. Furthermore, Google has a public webmaster forums and publishes many articles and videos offering further clarification.
I work with Google penalties every week. I have never seen nor heard of a site penalized for having EMDs pointing to their main site just because they were EMDs. You discounted the prior example because SEOmoz is a large domain. OK. Let's use another example. If I were to go out and buy 100 domains such as "SEOtips.net", "SEOtricks.net" and 98 other similar domains and redirect them all to my company site, Vitopian.com I would not expect a penalty.
Now, if you were to alter your question in such a way as each of these domains had one page websites on them, then they become doorway pages which is a violation of Google's Guidelines.
-
The answer is No. All keyword based domains are not spammy. it depends upon the domain authority of the domain. Google stated that having keywords in your domain names will not give you a boost which was the case earlier.
However redirecting keyword based domain to your main site will not be spam if your keyword based domain is not blacklisted by Google.
It all depends upon what is the status of your keyword based domain. Is it black listed by Google or does it have a good domain authority.
-
Ryan, correct me if I am wrong but having one or few keyword based domains pointing out to main domain is fine but too many will a suspicious signal to Google... also the authority of main domain should also be put in consideration... no?
-
for seomoz it wont anyway because its very high authority domain too high to be effected by these small things!
-
Are you sure? I heard a while back that some people spam by buying EMDs and then use their natural traffic by redirecting it to their main site. So Google started seeing it as spam technique.
how about - ex: sportsshoes.com, shoes.com, leahershoes.com all redirecting to a site (which is also EMD!) ?
-
Can you share a specific example of the situation?
If SEOmoz.org owns bestseotools.com and chooses to 301 redirect the domain to the SEOmoz.org site, there is nothing spammy about it at all. In that sense, the answer to your question is no.
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
-
Purchased domain with links - redirect page by page or entire domain?
Hi, I purchased an old domain with a lot of links that I'm redirecting to my site. I want all of their links to redirect to the same page on my site so I can approach this two different ways: Entire site
Technical SEO | | ninel_P
1.) RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com or Page by page
2). Redirect 301 /retiredpage.html http://www.xyz.com/newpage.html Is there a better option I should go with in regards to SEO effectiveness? Thanks in advance!0 -
Old Redirected Domain is replacing my current domain on SERPs
Hello everyone, All of a sudden a 2 year old redirected domain is replacing my current domain for 2 weeks now, my site is apitus.com and my old domain is aptitus.pe (the redirect is still working), however this only happens on my country google results (google.com.pe), if you check my site on google.com, everything looks ok even with a sitelink, which I no longer have on my country search results. Back to the issue, the first thing I thought was go to Search Console and take it out from the index, so I asked for access by uploading a file but since everything on that old site redirects to my current site I can't make such action. While still waiting for such access, is there anything else I could do?. Thanks in advance. PD: I'm adding the images of my SERPs CmzN8kY G3zZwwj
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ0 -
Strange URL redirecting to my new site
Hi all, I recently relaunched a site on a brand new URL - www.boardwarehouse.co.uk. I've spent the last couple of weeks building some backlinks as well as developing a basic content strategy. We've started ranking for a few of our less competitive keywords which is great, however there's a strange site which either redirects or is mirroring our content. I'm at a complete loss as to what's causing this to happen and what i can do to stop it. On the attachment - my content is top and second. The fourth result is the offending site. Any help/ advice would be most helpful! Thanks in advance, Alick 0BSyNn6
Technical SEO | | Alick3000 -
Google indexing staging / development site that is redirected...
Hi Moz Fans! - Please help. We had a acme.stagingdomain.com while a site was in development, when it went live it redirected (302) to acmeprofessionalservices.com (real names redacted!!) no known external links to staging site although staging site url has been emailed from Google Apps(!!!) now found that staging site is in the index even though it redirects to the proper public site. and some (but not all) of the pages are in the index too. They all redirect to the proper public site when visited. It is convenient to have a redirect from the staging site to the new one for the team, Chrome etc. remember frequently visited sites. Be a shame to lose that. Yes, these pages can be removed using webmaster tools.
Technical SEO | | mozroadjan
But how did they get in the index to start with? And if we're building a new site, and a customer has an existing site is there a danger of duplicate content etc. penalties caused by the staging site? We had a similar incident recently when a PDF that was not linked anywhere on the site appeared in the index. The link had been emailed through Google Apps, and visited in Chrome, but that was it. So 3 questions. Why is the staging site still in the index despite the redirects? How did they get in the index in the first place? Will the new staging site affect the rank of the existing site, eg. duplicate content penalties?0 -
We just recently moved site domains, and I tried to set up a new campaign for the new root domain, but it threw an error?
It threw an error saying we cannot access the SERPs of this site? Any reason why? It is an https:// site instead of the http://, but even our older domain had an https://
Technical SEO | | josh1230 -
Trying to get google to know my site is a magazine site is this wrong
Hi, i have put a line to describe what my site is at the top of my site and i want to know if this is wrong or not. We have dropped frok being number one in google for lifestyle magazine to now number seven. Before we had to redo our site we were number one and then we dropepd to around number four when we finished the site and now we are number seven and i need to try and get back up there. To help google know we are a lifestyle magazine i have put a line at the top of the site and i want to know if this looks out of place and if i should take it down. i need advice on how to get google to know we are a lifestyle magazine and get back in the top five of google my site is www.in2town.co.uk any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Redirecting an Old Domain
One of my clients has a newish e-commerce website that was just redesigned. Part of this new marketing push is shutting down an old yahoo store. The problem is that this old store's domain has a 10 year old link in DMoz and is there fore in about 200 other directories. Is pointing that old domain at the new website going to be enough to keep all of that link juice flowing?
Technical SEO | | Simple_Machines0 -
Considering redirecting my site from .com/us to just .com. What could the possible SERP consequences?
Today we use country-specific .tlds but have the US site on .com/us; .com is now a 'flag-site.' Ikea uses that structure too (.com/.com/us). Looking potential risk to redirecting current US site to .com.
Technical SEO | | KnutDSvendsen0