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SEO Myth #2 – Buying Multiple Domains Will Help My Rankings
It’s a common misconception that buying up additional domain names and pointing them to your main domain will help your site rank better. I only wish it were that easy. If it were, I’d be at GoDaddy buying up every combination of SEO-search-engine-optimization-cincinnati.com, .org, .biz, .info… you get the picture.
There are occasions when you might want to purchase multiple domains:
- To protect your brand name. Buy all the TLDs (top level domains) for your company name – .com, .biz, .info, etc. This just protects you from competition doing the same and posting something uncomplimentary about you or your company to that domain. Have you ever gone to a domain thinking it was something.com and it was really something.net… and the .com was nowhere near what you were looking for?
- Purchase common misspellings. If your domain name could be easily misspelled, buy the variations as well. If a user mistypes your domain name, they’ll still get to your site and won’t get frustrated when Google says “did you mean…” or when the browser says “page not found”.
- Purchase other domains that might be commonly typed in. You might have a specific product or service that is different from your company name. Users might type in the wrong domain when trying to find your site. Help them out by anticipating what they might type in and make sure you help them get to your site. Another example – maybe you have a domain that’s something like companynameco.com, but users might forget the co at the end and just type companyname.com to try and find your site. So, you got it, buy that domain too.
- Another site linked to the wrong domain, and they meant to link to you. You will lose all the intended traffic to your site if that other site made a typo. If you can’t get them to fix it, and you feel that it’s a useful enough link, buy that domain too!
Let’s get tech-y now. (This is my favorite part.) So you have a set of domains, for one or more of the reasons above. You don’t want to duplicate the content from your main site and put it on all of your domains because the search engines will penalize you for having the identical content on more than 1 site. So you want to redirect the domains to your main site. How do you set them up? Tell your hosting company or server admin to set up a 301 Permanent Redirect. The setup of this type of redirect is different depending on the type of server your domain is hosted on (Linux or Windows). Your hosting company should know how to set this up correctly, but make sure they know it has to be a 301. We can test it for you when it’s setup.
And you will find, when you talk to your hosting company, that there are costs involved in maintaining a domain with a redirect like this. This is when you have to revisit the list above and decide – is the cost of this setup worth the potential traffic I could get by setting this up? If not, don’t bother. It’s not worth spending money on something that might only bring you a couple visitors… unless of course those visitors are highly qualified and ready to make a purchase to offset the costs of your redirect. It’s all about ROI here.
Here’s a few tips on what NOT to do:
- Buy up tons of keyword rich domains with the intention of forwarding them to your main site to help rankings. They will not help your main site rank better.
- Use your registrar’s “free” forwarding service. It’s usually not the right type of forward, so it won’t help resolve the issues above.
- Post a one page site at a domain and link to your site. Trust us, the search engines are smart – they can figure this one out with one hand tied behind their back.
Multiple domains pointing to your main site will not help your rankings. They might help traffic if they’re being used, but don’t waste your money if the ROI isn’t there.