krx

I'd be interested to hear what some of the more knowledgeable seo folk think of this article (I've edited it down from the original, which you can find here). Mainly, I'm curious about his argument that multiple domains do not add much value to seo...
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/search-engines/744442-do-multiple-domains-help-search-engine.html

Why use multiple domain names?
By Richard Lowe

Why would someone want to have more than one unique domain name for a single site?

Search engines - First, let's take a brief look at search engines. In the past, it was a very common spamming technique to purchase dozens, hundreds or in some really gross cases, thousands of domain names, all referencing exactly the same site. These were all submitted to the search engines, and many of them were indexed and blindly added to the results. This is how many questionable sites used to get top search results very quickly and inexpensively.

The search engines have apparently caught onto this technique. At the very least, it has become common knowledge that this kind of spamming is not tolerated (sometimes common knowledge can be just as effective a deterrent as actual enforcement). I know that in the past it was normal to find many sites of different domain names but identical content in search engine results; today it's far more rare.

In fact, the top search engine, Google, bases it's ranking scheme on quality of links. What this translates to is you must get popular (higher ranking) sites to link to your site to raise your ranking. Thus, it's a better strategy to get as many links to a SINGLE domain name than to many different domain names.

With this in mind, it's now considered best by most search engine optimization specialists (at least those that know what they are doing) to only list a single domain with the search engines.

Multiple entry points - One technique that I use on my own site with great success is to have multiple entry points, each it's own domain name. Let's consider a mythical site in order to illustrate how this works.

The site is about homemaking, and thus the main domain is "homemaking.com". Underneath this are sections about sewing, housecleaning and cooking. You might use "homemaking.com" for link exchanges and search engine submissions, then create three additional domains: "sewing.com", "housecleaning.com" and "cooking.com" (although if you actually managed to purchase those domain names you could resell them for quite a chunk of change).

Each of these domains would use a 301 redirect (this informs any search engine that the page has permanently moved to a new location) to a specific page on the site.

Those three domains would then be used in different themed marketing campaigns. You might submit an article to a cooking site, for instance, which referencing cooking.com. For a newsletter about cleaning, you would use housecleaning.com. Each domain name is merely a shortcut to the master domain, but it is much more targeted than "homemaking.com".
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=744442

Subdomains - This is a great way to get much of the benefit of the above listed techniques without purchasing additional domain names. It does require a little more control of your DNS entries, however, as most ISPs and web hosts will not be willing to do these kinds of things for you.

In this case, you could define "housekeeping.com" as the primary domain, then "cleaning.housekeeping.com", "sewing.housekeeping.com" and "cooking.housekeeping.com" as the subdomains. You should continue to use 301 redirects to keep the search engines from indexing these pages.

Conclusions - The point is that owning more than one domain has many uses, although it is no longer of much value from a search engine optimization viewpoint. Instead, you can use the other domain names to fulfill other types of marketing and to attract people from specific markets to your site.

zidane

In my own opinion having multiple subdomains does not contribute to my site's SEO. I only made subdomains so I can use them for other things
I have in mind. I mainly blog so this is something I do every now and then, this also applies to affiliate product promoting websites.

Zidane

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enlytend

These are what are known as "doorway pages." Search engines take a very dim view of those, to the point of severely penalizing you.
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=744442

You're better off building a site with one domain and concentrating on that than trying to build "satellite" domains and link or redirect them to the main domain. Of course, if your domain is prone to typos, owning and redirecting typos is fine.

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waqarhassan41

If you have multiple domains with the same keywords and you 301 redirect to the main site then its be good for ranking.

krx

Does this contradict what enlytend said, above?

audreyabbey

Using too many domain will not help in SEO, It is what we called door pages which is one of the black hat technique, continuing doing that might penalize your website.

nkjskj

multiple domains will not help in SEO anyway. Its illegal to try such things. SE's may penalize site for using this.

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ElinaDoney

Personally i wont suggest you to use multiple domain and inter-link them. google knows it and they might deindex or might warn you before putting them into sandbox

seenathkumar

It does not make any sense to have multiple domains for your business, you can use that domains for some other purpose but using it for SEO will not help, SEO can be done on one site by promoting quality keywords which will help to improve the traffic of the website, promoting the other website with same keyword does not make sense and will not help your business their will be more confusion for visitors, so it's better to have one domain and do SEO for that website.

george88smith88

For me, domains are like dresses or swimsuits. Empty ones are not worth much. You have to 'fill it out' with good content, good inbound links, etc.

krx

Interesting. I wonder why most major corporations continue to use related domains as "doorway pages" if it is not good for seo. Also the purported advantages of using related domains as 301 redirects to your main site is a major selling point for domainers trying to sell those related domains. Other than defensive purposes (keeping the competition from getting it) what other reason is there for the common practice of business owners buying up similar/related domains?