I have a client that is an artist. They have a website to show off and sell their art, but it doesn’t go under their name, it goes under a company name. Let’s call it “abc-art.com” for example.
They want to use their actual name now, as well as have their company name. (example: artist-name.com AND abc-art.com). I could point both domains to their company website.
For SEO purposes, is it okay to do this? Or, would it be better for them to have a website for themselves as an artist, and then have their company name website as well?
They do want to promote the site as “abc-art.com”, but they also want to be found under their actual name “artist-name.com”.
While this would probably be ok, in my opinion, it creates a poor user experience. You would also run into an issue of having duplicate content on the domains. It would be better to create a sub-domain as the person’s name (i.e. theirname.abc-art.com) or optimize a page on the site that already exists for their name.
Having a separate site in order to rank for their name is not necessary. You just need to have another page. Google and other engines serve single pages in search results and not entire websites. If you optimize one page with their name (perhaps an about the artist section), that should suffice.
They could also create other profiles around the web under their name instead of the company name if they want more exposure as an artist.
[FONT=verdana]As far as the search engines are concerned, this will be seen as two separate sites, with duplicate content. This is not an ideal situation, as any incoming links will be diluted between the two sites.
If you do take this route, you should either use 301s to redirect from one of the sites to the other, or use the rel=“canonical” tag to tell which of the two you want the search engines to know about. In both cases, the link popularity will be correctly assigned to the “right” site.
I also agree with Shawn that it is a bad user experience. If I was in your client’s position, I would use the company website to promote the product and to actually sell it off the page (if that’s what their business involves), and use the personal website to create interest in the artist as a person. By all means, have the personal site linking to the business site, but recognise that they have different functions and will attract a different audience.
Thank you for your input, guys! I will have them stay with their main site (abc-art.com) and create an “Artist” page with their bio.
By doing this, would it be better to point their “artist-name.com” domain to the bio page? Or, would it still be okay to have both “abc-art.com” and “artist-name.com” point to the website?
You should not have any navigation pointing to another site. You could however have a few links pointing to the other site.
At first I was going to say no google wouldn’t like two domains pointing to the same place. Could be considered doorway pages. It’s bad practice regardless. But then I realized many people do this exact thing when they change domains. They redirect their old domain to their new. So no google would not penalize you.
If it were me, and I had to have two separate sites, then I would make two separate sites with different content. And I would then reference the other within the other. Not in the main nav though.
Search engines will hate this. Big Googz really might slap your site down. This happened to me a couple of years ago. stupid of me to do it before doing any research