I’m wondering what the real value of buying keyword based domain names is.
Say i sell electric drills but my company name is power-tools4u.com and i want to get up in the listings for electric drills.
What is the value in buying electric-drills.com or buy-electric-drills.com and having a site on each domain with information on electric drills and then having backlinks to my main power-tools4u.com site?
I know that adding content and then promoting the content on those keyword sites means less time doing the same for my main site. But does anyone think it is still a worthwhile exercise?
Thanks!
How can anyone possibly answer that?
- Get the amount of profit you make if you spend all your time working on your main site
- Get the profit you make by dividing your time between your main site and the other sites.
If 2 > 1 then it was worth it.
Instead of asking these questions - the answers to which might hold true for someone else’s site but not yous - why don’t you try it for yourself and report back when you have the answer? 
Yeah that’s not a bad idea at all. I could just make them easy to remember urls for other purposes.
Cheers. This has all certainly been good food for thought.
The principal reason for setting up multiple domains pointing to the same website is for marketing, not for SEO. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but it does mean that you might be asking the wrong question to the wrong people 
If you have set up your redirects correctly then Google will take one look at electric-drills.com and see that it points to power-tools.com, and from then on will only consider it as power-tools.com. The fact that you have registered an alternative name won’t be a factor. (And if you don’t set up your redirects properly, you’ll lose out on an awful lot of googley goodness)
The real advantage of multiple domain names is that you can put out marketing and virals saying “Want electric drills? Go to electricdrills.com!”, “Want a chainsaw? Go to cheapchainsaws.com!” and so on - you’re making a more memorable domain name to drive direct traffic to your site. That might be a strategy that is well worth following … but it won’t affect how search engines see your site.
Hmm, i wonder if aside from the link value it would get to the top of searches for electric drills quicker than a non keyword based domain name.
This would be placed in the <head> of the document. As a habit I place it right below the <title> tag. This basically tells everyone (spiders mainly) that no matter which domain you are visiting this is the ‘real’ source of this content.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mymaindomain.com/somepage.php" />
By no means am I an expert on this, I would suggest checking out google webmaster blog post on it: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
Now, if you’re going with hoopermans approach this would not really apply. This only applies if you’re pointing two different domains at the same site.
Like google.com and gogle.com.
Hooperman: That is exactly what i was getting at! Thanks.
That is a good point about the ownership issue. I don’t really know is the honest answer. I would at least hope that you weren’t penalised!
Could you tell me more about how this canonical tag works in this scenario? That sounds very interesting!
Thank you!
Inbound links that are relevant to your pages are good, if that helps. Part of your plan would be to create content on those “helper” sites that is related to your main site, so in theory it should help.
If Google and The Others know that the owner of the main site is the same as the owner of the helper sites, I wonder whether they would give the links the same value, though.
jtotheb, I understood your original question but I can see how it was skewed. I don’t have an answer for you but am interested in what others have to say. I do think the use of a canonical tag would be necessary when using this practice. This way all the SEO ‘credit’ will be given to the ‘main’ domain name. I have several clients with multiple domain names and I used the canonical tag.
Hi, thanks very much for the terse yet still useful response.
I suppose there was a flaw in my question there, i think what i was mostly getting at was asking if keyword filled domain names pointing back to a company site was a good idea. I shouldn’t have added all that extra waffle.
How about that? Is that a better question?
I doubt that you would be penalised. My guess is that the value of the link would be diminished though.
Funny that this should come up today after I was just reading an email from Hobo SEO about micro sites which use exact keyword matches in the domain. However, the guy who writes the blog (Shaun Anderson) is at pains to point out that he’s not doing it to create backlinks to the main site, infact that would be a bad idea and is likely to result in a penalty. The point of using an exact match domain with the micro sites is to get the micro sites themselves ranking.
So, based on what he says, I’d say that the answer to your question "I suppose there was a flaw in my question there, i think what i was mostly getting at was asking if keyword filled domain names pointing back to a company site was a good idea" is probably no, it’s not a good idea.
Anyway, this guy knows his stuff, read the blog article is you want - Microsites – A Good Idea Most of the Time (For Me)