Should You Buy Numerous Keyword Rich Domains
We would not recommend purchasing numerous keyword rich domains solely to rank well for them. Although domain name does slightly influence rankings, it won’t be of much help if your competitors have better optimized websites.
Exact match domains no longer provide as large of an advantage over websites whose domains do not contain keywords as they once did. Matt Cutts stated that although keyword rich domains haven’t been completely devalued, Google has diminished the importance of them in search results—they’ve been reduced to a level that is more appropriate, similar to other branded domains.
If you do wish to purchase them, we would recommend keeping all sites in one domain and redirecting to your main website using a 301 redirect. Another option is to create totally different websites at other domains of your choosing, but creating and maintaining a single website is the most effective practice. The only other option for domains is to build a completely different website at each domain. There’s nothing wrong with having several websites, but each must provide different information and content in order to be effective. Obviously having many websites is a lot more work than just maintaining one website.
Good Reasons for Purchasing Multiple Domains
- Branding. This is a common concern for larger companies—Pepsi for example should own pepsi.com, pepsi.net, pepsi.org, pepsi.biz, etc…
- You have a domain that is easily misspellable and want to obtain domains containing the most frequent variations of this name. This won’t necessarily bring in many visitors but you should be able to catch a few. This is more of a priority if your website is large.
- You may wish to buy all the domain names that your audience might type in to find your company.
Once you have created all of your domains, 301-redirect them all to your main website. If you do decide to maintain multiple websites, make sure that all the content on these sites is completely unique—Google suppresses duplicated content and penalizes multiple websites they believe have been created for the sole purpose of achieving rankings.
Google will allow you to maintain multiple websites within your industry, but only if there is an actual reason to operate these multiple websites—each must contain unique content. Keep in mind that running multiple websites is more costly and time consuming.
Bad Reasons for Purchasing Multiple Domains
Google does take domain name into account when determining what your website is about, and some people choose to purchase keyword heavy domains such as www.cheap-web-hosting.com for example. Because Google only wants to list your site once, not multiple times under different domains, it may catch on and your website will be banned under all domains—Google has banned spammers from purchasing keyword-stuffed domains that attempt to rank under different keywords by using the same content.
Examples:
Cheap-web-hosting-new-jersey.com
Cheap-web-hosting-pennsylvania.com
All the domains are the same site but have nothing to do with the locations.
Google is attempting to weed out these domains and spamming techniques so results are more relevant to users. Never create multiple domains with duplicate content. If search engines find your duplicate domains, all of them will be penalized. If you do want to copy your website and have it as a mirror, make sure you set up a robots.txt file so search engine spiders cannot read it, otherwise it will be considered as spam.