Keyword-loaded domains...again

What is a good topology?

[aleksl]

I am sure this came up a number of times in this forum, but from reading and searching I really came up with nothing exact for my situation...

Let's say I have an informatinoal site about penguins in Sahara Desert. Site is called "mysite.com".

Over the last 2 years I've purchased about 10 domains that relate to the site, for instance "sahara-penguins.com". These domains were purchased mostly for keywords. Right now they point to mysite.com (i.e. if someone types in "sahara-penguins.com" they will see it in the browser url, but mysite.com will be displayed). I've read on this forum that Google may penalize for duplicate content, but I also have mysite.net and mysite.us set up like that...

I have content directly related to the keyword on my site. I have very little traffic for keyword domains from SEs right now, because of the set-up. I would like to be able to benefit from SEs. What will be the best set up to achieve that?

(A) just keep it as it is (low SE traffic)
(B) do a 301 redirect (not sure how this will increase SE traffic)
(C) point keyword-loaded domains to separate subfolders of the site (i.e. "sahara-penguins.com" -> mysite.com/sahara-penguins/)
(D) create a separate small sites for each keyword-loaded domain, and link from it back to mysite.com

What also complicates the issue, is that some users I am sure already bookmarked pages on keyword-loaded domains.

It is also a shared hosting, so any complicated set-ups need to be paid for, unfortunately, and my site is a non-commercial site, so I am trying to minimize $ impact also...

Thanks a bunch, please sticky or PM me if this goes beyond the topic of this forum.

[macavity]

Just thought I'd mention that I've recently posted a very similar query to this forum too. If you want to keep an eye on any responses to that thread the title is "Keyword rich domain names going to waste?"

Cheers,

Mac

[aleksl]

Hi Mac. It seems to me that this is a "grey" area that lots of people here make money on, so it is not very likely that they are going to tell exactly how. Well, it is worth a shot to ask anyway :)

[xbase234]

Type-in traffic is your best bet when promoting a single site.

The other alternative is to create a totally separate site with unique content, and focus the "call-to-action" or desired user activity to your main site.

Overall, your purpose may be best served by locating more type-in domains, rather than creating new websites.

[aleksl]

Ok, what do you mean by type-in traffic? People who type domain names? What are the ways to find that out in a fairly narrow industry?

[xbase234]

Yes - names that are catchy enough that a visitor would type them in to a browser.

You can view logs of a domain you are interested in buying (if the seller can provide, and if they are also trustworthy), or you can buy a number of names to monitor and discard the bad ones.

I've done the latter and had some nice surprises.