SEO Agency: Using multiple domains for SEO

Many businesses buy multiple domains. There are a couple of reasons for this one is to buy all the variations of your branded URL to prevent any competitors or affiliates stealing your site traffic. The other is buying keyword rich domains hoping to benefit from the type in traffic. Type in traffic is when someone goes directly to the address bar and types in for example seoagency.com.

If you use multiple domains for your business make sure you set them up correctly to prevent any duplicate content issues. If you don’t know how to do this you can always ask your SEO agency to do it for you. If you are going to redirect URLs to one main domain make sure you use a 301 redirect.

You should never host the same version of your site on all the domains you own. This will result in duplicate content issues. By housing the same website content across multiple domains you are using a spam technique which Google frowns upon and you can get sandboxed or worse banned for this behaviour. You can read Google’s guidelines on duplicate content here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359

Google tries to only show relevant unique content so it is important to ensure your SEO agency does everything within their power to prevent your site from being penalised by duplicate content. This can range from using technical recommendations to something simple such as creating relevant engaging and unique content for your site. Using a cheap copywriter to spin articles for SEO will harm your site.

Keywords in your domain for SEO

Using a domain with keywords in the URL will only work if the other sites you are competing against are un-optimised. Keywords in the URL have little weighting on your rankings and it is far more important to focus on the website content. If you do own multiple domains ensure each domain has unique content otherwise Google will only choose to index one of your sites.

It is true that it is easier to optimise a site with a keyword rich domain however this is not the only factor determining your search engine rankings. SEO is not about quick wins it is about creating a website that is relevant, unique and useful. If you don’t achieve these three things your search engine optimisation will not be as successful as it can be.