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
-
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 -
Will SEO Moz index our keywords if the site is ALL https?
We have a site coming into beta next week. Playing around with SEO Moz, I had trouble getting the keywords to rank at all. Was this because the site is entirely https? If yes, what else can SEO Moz NOT do if the site is all https? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
301 Redirect How Long until the juice passes through to new site
Hi Guys, Following on from a question i asked last week in regard to a 301 http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking I was thinking that i had some kind of issue on the site, although i have gone over it with a fine tooth comb i cannot find any issue's and from the amount of reads the thread has had im sure if there was something obvious it would have been pointed out. So i am quite confident the 301 from site A to site B is fine and working as intended, so my question is how long should it take until the juice is passed From site A to Site B as its 9 weeks now and still down 85% on traffic and even text for my home page if copied into the search bar don't bring up my site Bing is fine and did not see any real traffic drops but Google is not giving me back the rankings i had prior Whenever i have done a 301 before the rankings pretty steady and i see no real loss in rankings but this time ... painful all changes in WMT made
Technical SEO | | kellymandingo
Canonical tag implemented
all Pages 301 and correct 200 response from the targeted page
Sitemap Updated
Many Links Changed from Old site to new (including DMOZ)
no Robots text Blocking directory's
Google crawling freely and regularly The strange thing is New content is indexed immediately and ranks easily, I added a page for my service in my local area and went straight to position 5 in Google however old existing content wont move, I tracked 150 keywords only 4 are top 75 Don't know what else to do so any advice would be much appreciated PS site is around 17k pages Paul0 -
Domain name with separated/non-separated keywords
I start a new webshop within a month about spices and coffee. I'm thinking about the domain name to take. I would like to get visitors from coffee and spice keyword searches. How much does it matter (in terms of SEO) if I use spiceandcoffee instead of spice-and-coffee? (The site will be hungarian and it sounds easy to remember without the hypen: fuszer-es-kave or fuszereskave.) Does Google weighing more separated keywords in domain, instead of non-separated?
Technical SEO | | joo0 -
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 -
What to do with domain?
I bought a domain a couple months ago while having delusions of granger. The domain is PR2, has around 30 decent backlinks, and a small amount of traffic. It also has one of our keywords in the domain name. I'm thinking of 301 redirect to our homepage. Is there a downside to doing this? We really could use the additional traffic on our site.
Technical SEO | | dmac0 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0 -
Impact on domain when using a subdomain for majority opf site content
Hello, We're looking to use a subdomain for a bookings engine that will also host the majority of our site content as it wil house the details of the courses that we'll be selling online. All content is currently available on www.existingdomain.co.uk A few pages will remain here but the majority will ultimately be hosted on a different IP address under a subdomain: courses.existingdomain.co.uk I am a little concerened about search engine reaction to this content separation. Would this approach dilute the rankings of www.existingdomain.co.uk? Is there anything else we need to be mindful of? We have alternative options if this is a real SEO faux pas. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Urbanfox0