Does Adding Extra Domains Help SEO?

We’ve noticed an increase in emails from our website owners, asking the question whether they should purchase additional website addresses that contain a good search phrase eg selfcateringrentaltorbay.co.uk

The simple answer is “No”, not if they plan to simply point this domain at their existing site. Google counts unique web addresses (including domains) as being a web page. So www.company.com/page1 is one page of content. Similarly, www.company.com/page2 is another page of content.

However, if www.companyname.com/page1 has some content, and www.companyname.com/page2 has exactly the same content (because you copied it for some reason), then Google gets a little suspicious that something fishy is going on, because the content is identical. This is called duplicate content, and Google will discount the second address, and it won’t rank well, if at all.

Now if you compound this and point www.keyword1.com to www.company.com, you’re going to further duplicate the content on every page. www.keyword1.com/page will be identical to www.company.com/page1, but in a different domain. Now things are smelling really fishy to Google, because you’ve duplicated ALL pages into another domain.

If you purchased five keyword domains, this has just been compounded to be a bigger duplicate content issue, and you’ve completely shot yourself in the foot. Google will devalue all the duplicate pages, and they won’t perform at all in the search engines.

When It’s Useful to Have Multiple Domain Names

Yes, you absolutely can have multiple domain names, but you don’t want them to resolve or be indexed by Google. To prevent that you set up a 301-redirect or “forward” the domain to the “real” domain. If you 301-redirect a domain, it will never be indexed, because the “301 error” is a message to Google that “sorry, this URL doesn’t exist, here’s the ‘real’ one you should pay attention to.” This would be useful if you have a complicated or hard to spell domain name and you want to have a simpler one (handy when you need to spell it out over the ‘phone!)

How to make Multiple Domain Names ACTUALLY WORK for you

There is a lot to be said for having micro or satellite sites that work in conjunction with your main site, that have been set up to be optimised specifically for a low competitive long tail search phrase. This micro site will use new text (i.e. not an exact copy of the text on the main master website), and as mentioned, will be optimised to get found for just one search phrase that has a decent number of monthly searches but has low competition i.e. not many other websites competing for this phrase. This would allow the new micro site to efficiently get found by search engines, and this website would then pass it’s traffic on (by way of links) to the master website.

These micro sites are designed to bring in a valuable source of Organic Search Visitors.

Should you wish to have your own micro website(s) we can provide a micro satellite site for a small set up fee, plus our monthly hosting fee thereafter.  Please note – as with all of our websites, our hosting is required for this service.

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