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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...
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".
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.
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".
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.
