redirect ideas

[brianweb]

I want one main site that is the destination of many different domains. For example if someone wants to see personal ads for a certain city (www.mycity.com) they can type in the advertised domain for that city and then be redirected to the main site (www.mainsite.com/mycity) that has all the cities categorized.

1st, is this frowned upon by search engines, redirect that is.

2nd if it is not frowned on what is the absolute correct way to do a redirect so that they will not consider it spammy.

Thank you

[jdMorgan]

If I were a search engine, I'd view more than one or two other domains pointed to a single domain as somewhat spammy, and I'd view more than two dozen as very spammy.

Not to mention that this could become expensive and a maintenance nightmare, and that anyone with a grudge who's in the know about your plans could pre-register domains they know you'd like to have --or really need to have-- before you do.

Have you considered simply using multiple subdomains of one domain, e.g. "city-name.personal_ad_site_brand.com"?
One domain registraton fee, one "brand," so no brand or identity confusion, and no duplicate-content or cross-linking issues.

Jim

[brianweb]

Thanks for the Ideas! I really appreciate it. So from a marketing standpoint is it as good to advertise a site like mycity.mystate.com as it is mycity.com and have it redirected? Thank you very much for your input. I love Webmaster World!

[jdMorgan]

My intent was to move your focus away from what I think would be a technical and practical nightmare (buying/managing one domain for every city) to subdomains and branding your site. In other words, big_city.catchy_name_for_your_service.com.

If you attain success, you're going to want "a brand name," not a bunch of unique and unrelated domain names for each of the cities you serve. I mean, Amazon does not use chicago_books.com and new_york_books.com, and houston_books.com and denver_books.com, they just use amazon.com. But if they were to open local bookstores in each of those cities, it wouldn't hurt them to use site names like houston.amazon.com for the stores themselves.

I'm not expressing this logic very well, but you're in the grey area between being "a nobody" and being an amazon.com, and the catchier your domain name, the better it will work. So somewhere between big_city.catchy_name_for_your_service.com and big_city_service.catchy_name.com would be good. Plan for big success at the beginning, and you won't have to go through the abject misery of re-branding in the future.

This planning might include not being too specific with the brand itself, because that can become a constraint if you expand and change your business model in the future; There's a good reason that google is google.com, and not Larry-n-Sergey-Search.com or something too specific. Now that their revenue is primarily on-line advertising instead of selling co-branded search services, that's a Very Good Thing. Same for Amazon -- they have expanded well beyond just being an on-line bookstore.

For a fairly lame example that nonetheless indicates that the subdomain.brand approach is "acceptable," how about search.msn.com.

I'm really more of a techie than a marketer, but as a techie, I see many people get into big trouble because the initial plan was lacking, and that applies to branding Web sites as well. Small Web-centric companies focus on SEO and generating traffic, and often ignore branding to their detriment, while big companies are all about brand-name recognition. Start now.

Jim

[brianweb]

Thanks Jim!

Your ideas are extremely helpful to me. I'll start my new branding adventure tonight. Thanks again.