Master of Your Domain

Domain Field (2003) by Antony Gormley - fr: puffin11uk [flickr.com]

Full-On Retard with Domains
by Peter Boyd
03/09/09

100+ Domains for a web site? Are you serious?

"Yes, I am serious."

Sorry, this does not help and just drives your web designer crazy.

“But why can’t I use 5, 10 or even 100 domains for my web site?”

Simple. Google (and the other search engines) only wants to index your site once. It does not care if you have 100 domains pointing into your site for optimization reasons.

Our advice: pick one, perhaps two at the most. Use one for your main site that Google will index. Use another domain if it has sexy marketing appeal that your main domain does not have. For instance, the second domain could be shorter, or appeal to a certain demographic. If you want to purchase multiple to prevent other firms from encroaching, then go ahead and purchase multiple domains, but do not expect it to help your web site or optimization efforts. However, you want to always have only one domain for SEO reasons.

Our advice on domains remains the same as it did in 2008:

• Oldest Domain
• Shortest Domain
• Domains without hyphens or odd spelling
• Domain that is a .COM (sorry .ORG and others)
• Domain with keyword phrases
• Domain with the best and most inbound links (usually this is your oldest site)
• Domain that is easy to spell via the phone
• Domain that does not have any bad connotation

As stated by our previous article, you will want to do a 301 redirect for all previous domains to the primary domain. You definitely want to 301 redirect any secondary domain that you use for marketing purposes into the primary domain. If you do not, you could end up with Google indexing multiple web sites and that would lead to duplicate content penalties.

As stated in that previous article, if you want to use multiple domains, then create multiple UNIQUE web sites. Otherwise, choose your best domain and move forward with your marketing.

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