I’ve just bought up some alternative domain names for my business. My main website domain is my company name. The site is ticking along nicely and the keywords rank pretty high in Google.
The alternative names do not reflect my company name like my main domain.
The new domains contain keywords which the search engines could pick up.
What is the best practice SEO wise to benefit the most from these new domains? Obviously setting up forwarding to my main address is the easiest method but will the names ever be listed by the search engines as its an acting forwarding address? Would I be better to create optimised content for each domain and include a hyperlink to my business domain?
Any advice would be greatly received, sorry if I haven’t explained this thoroughly. Thanks!
You’re correct in that simply forwarding your domain names with a 301 will cause them to not be indexed and hence have no useful value to you if content has never been developed.
You could develop content for these extra sites and point them to your main site but I caution you against this as the effects will certainly be limited. Here’s why:
Your other sites have no reputation as they’re new (and presumably weren’t previously developed)
You’re going to be generating lots of links from a few sites which tends to look spammy
You’re going to develop unique content that’s useful and relevant to your keywords and place it on essentially useless websites
My suggestion is to take that same useful content that you’d be developing for the satellite websites and place it on your main website. Drive the visitors directly in there. Increasing your footprint by expanding domains sounds like an easy way to maximize exposure but it’s really an empty effort. For the same amount of work you’ll see better results by adding the useful features and content to your own main website.
Jeff thank you for those priceless words of wisdom.
Your explanation is very clear.
Would it still be a pointless effort to duplicate my main website layout onto these “satellite” sites. So they are still branded by my company but the home page articles being optimised for the appropriate keywords? When a user clicks the menu items they are actually transferred across to my main website which looks identical?
So in other words creating optimized referrring sites. I assume I would then need to do all the back links to even get the sites ranking at an acceptable level. Perhaps my only option is to forward them.
Could really do with getting these new domains indexed, if you have any alternative suggestions I would love to hear them. Thanks again!
Duplicating your design is not going to hurt you at all in terms of SEO. Think about all the blogs out there which use the same templates. Search engines understand this and aren’t going to knock you down for that.
If you could create unique and relevant satellite sites, yes the links may be useful. However, you hit the nail on the head in that you’d still have to get links to those sites to maximize the effects which is not reducing your overall effort in the least.
Assuming that you have content on 3 different but related topics, ask yourself this question: what’s the benefit of splitting that content into 3 different websites and linking them together rather than placing it in three different categories on your main website? The answer: none. The downside is that your maintenance effort increases, your hosting cost increases, your domain costs increase and you spend all kinds of time reading the ramblings of someone like me on the topic. (:
It’s always going to be about the content. If you have great content then it doesn’t really matter where you put it. My point is that if you have a choice, just put it under one website (assuming the content is related) and make your life easier.
I wouldn’t duplicate your content or your site at all. Maybe deploy a blog on one domain and a forum on another, or just redirect them in the meantime until you figure out what you’re going to do with them. Last resort is parking your domain to google to try and make some ad money.
There’s lots of reasons that somebody would duplicate their own content such as localization. The search engines (namely Google) understand this and have given us rel=canonical to deal with it.
Thanks guys for your inputs and advice. Very much appreciated.
If I understand you correctly about the rel=canonical link.
If I were to set up a blog, I would insert the rel=canonical blog link in my main site to ensure Google picks up both sets of content.
I think perhaps a blog may help me out if I set it up under one of the alternative domain names and I’ll forward the rest to my existing site.
I realize I have another load of back links to do thereafter but it may work out if I can get the content to a high level.
Perhaps my only option is to forward them.
