Forum Moderators: open
I'd be grateful for any thought and comments on the following situation:
A few years ago I started a site which is now moderately successful but at the time I chose a domain name for the site which didn't contain keywords relevant to the site's purpose (The name has connotations which are fairly obvious to a human reading it but not something a search engine would pick up on). That's not a problem, I'm happy with the name, it's becoming fairly well known and there weren't any "keyword rich" domain names available at the time anyway.
However, some time afterwards a number of (very) relevant domain names did become available and I snapped them up but since that time I've done nothing with them other than set up a redirect at the registrar's site to my domain (typing in one of these domain names transfers you to my original site with an ad from the registrar displayed at the bottom of the browser). I've often wondered if this is all I can do with them (they're catching a bit of type in traffic) or are there other steps I should take to "exploit" them? My thinking is that paying (e.g. PPC) for exposure would simply be money better spent marketing the original domain name but should I be submitting these names to search engines to be indexed? Would that work, would it be ethical?
Just to clarify all the above, if I was selling widgets the domain name I'm using would be the equivalent of something like "widgy.com". The other names I picked up at a later date would be along the lines of "industrialwidgets.com", "householdwidgets.com", etc.
Many thanks in advance for any guidance!
Kind regards,
Mac
I know that we have some members with experiences of a situation like yours. Hopefully they will chime in. For me it looks like you're doing the right thing.
> should I be submitting these names to search engines to be indexed?
How fast are those redirects? If they work immediately I doubt that any search engine would index them.
Cheers,
Mac
Now I generally use a 301 in an .htaccess file, but I still sometimes use something like
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="20;URL=http://www.my-domain.dk/new-file/">
And I once was warned that search engines do not like such redirects to be too fast. AFAIK the problem arises if you put real content on such a page to attract spiders and then use a fast redirect to send human visitors to the other page.
