My boss wants to start buying around 30 domain names for everyone client site we set up. The 30 additional domains would consist of the company's name and a certain keyword.
These 30 site will contain a four page site and a link to the clients main site, all 30 sites will share the same info, just optimized for their unique keyword.
He believes that keywords in domain names is key to getting higher in the search results.
I think this a crap way to conduct business, but I don't know enough about SEO and how search engines work to offer him good reasons for not pursuing this course of action. I was just always told don't try anything sneaky and stick to developing meaningful content for users.
Is he right about this being a good strategy?
Thanks in advance
M.Cold
[edited by: Webwork at 7:01 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2007]
[edit reason] We avoid even "fake" domains, per Charter. [/edit]
I'm not looking for various solutions here, thank you though!
I'm just trying to find out if what my boss wants to do is beneficial in any way or just a waste of our time.
Thanks again and sorry about using the "fake" domain names! I should have known that! ;)
M.Cold
But if he really wants to do it (e.g. doesn't care about Google traffic), subdomains are the cheaper way to generate this type of spam. But he sounds like the type of boss who may not understand what a subdomain is.
For most search engines, domain names are a tiny part of their algorithm for ranking so he's probably wasting his time at best - and risking the main sites being banned.
M. Cold
These extra sites didn't seem spammy to me but I wonder how the SEs feel about them.
I have about 50-60 of these at the moment, probably more I don't count them, I do this for any new domain I buy within my industry rather than parking them so that they're already aged in the SERPs for when I actually get round to developing them.
Incidentally they all have AdSense on them too and are very well targetted.
Before you register domain names with your client's name or IP in the actual domain, you may want to confirm with your client, and detirmine who will be allocated as the license holder (this should be your client, unless they nominate you to look after it for them).
This is a very common thing in the domain name world, web developers will register a domain, sometimes unwittingly in their own name, employees leave companies, companies go bust and registrants lose access to their domain.
In terms of the idea, there are a lot of people pursuing the 'register another domain, add content, feed the traffic back to the intended site' trick, but remember a few things:
1) New domains take a while to get page rank
2) you should try to distribute inbound links from sites with unique content and preferably distribute the inbound links over multiple host/ip addresses.
Sub-domains off your own site, or directories off your main site (perhaps if you have a category section) may prove more beneficial, especially if your site has a good page rank.
Anyhow, I'm sure there's handy pointers in the link development thread that will be beneficial to you.
HTH
