Multiple Domain Name Purchases For SEO?

[roothewhirl]

I have a client that thinks that purchasing a bunch of related domain names in his industry, then forwarding them to a single website, will increase his search engine presence. Is this is a form of black hatting, or is there any validity to what he is saying?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

-Ryan

[tedster]

This is an old-time, and now pretty useless, search marketing strategy. Even buying related domain names for their type-in value is showing limited returns as a promotional effort. And if each of the domains actually duplicates the content of the core domain (rather than redirecting) they will just be filtered out of the main search results.

So if these secondary domains are not developed on their own, they cannot show up in search results. About the only reason I can see for owning alternate domain names today is for trademark and brand name protection, including common typos.

If these alternate domains do more than redirect - if they serve some dedicated content of their own - then it better be very well done, quite thorough and strongly backlinked. The Mayday update to the Google algorithm took square aim at these secondary or "halo" sites. Google does not want them to rank - they only want to drive traffic to a principal domain.

[HuskyPup]

I agree with Tedster and we actually stopped doing this quite some time ago since it simply was not worth the effort and extra domain name costs and this year so far we have released getting on towards 100 names it was so ineffective.

If you are prepared to create a relevant keyword splash page for those keyword domain names you may get some value from them however don't bet your house on it!

If they're good names you'd probably make more from selling them but whatever you do don't pay more than the regular price for them with the hope you'll make even biger money, those days a long gone except for the real specialists.

[internetheaven]

I have a client that thinks that purchasing a bunch of related domain names in his industry, then forwarding them to a single website, will increase his search engine presence.

If it's the tactic I'm thinking of then it does work to boost rankings. And I'd say it's more of a grey area than black i.e. even if a manual reviewer spotted it, it wouldn't look like something dodgy ... ;)

[HuskyPup]

If he's thinking of doing what I have seen today it obviously works with keyword domains with outrageous keyword stuffing of a magnitude I have never seen before.

An entire network of sites incorporporating AdSense, and very difficult to tell it's AdSense it's been done so well, that has appeared on the first page of the SERPs very recently and they're not that old.

Something's gone badly wrong at G...and yes, I have reported the entire network and will do so every week until Google takes them down.

They're totally useless to anyone but the AdSense account holder.

[roothewhirl]

Everyone has given great advice! Thank you so much!

Hopefully you don't mind if I get a bit deeper on this subject.

So...my client has a fairly desirable search engine ranking (he had a previous SEO whiz who was too flaky - hence me being on the job now.)

The question in the first post of this thread was sparked by him getting a quote of $15,000 from some other SEO company to buy a bunch of locally geo-targeted domains, and send them to his current home page (smelled very fishy to me, thanks for the confirmation guys/girls!)

So here is where I am now:

(Please note: all names/places/businesses have been changed to protect the innocent.)

Currently he is ranked number 2 on google organic results for Tallahassee Pools. He wants to spread his market to neighboring places organically (being at the top of google for Settler's Creek Pools, Buckwood Pools, etc etc.)

My thinking was this; rather than buy a bunch of domain names (settlers-creek-pools.com, stuff like that...), why not create some landing pages with information about jobs he has done already in those towns with relevant titles, content and images.

As an example, say he's done a job in Settler's Creek - have the title be something like Settler's Creek Pool Job By Joe Smith's Pools (rough example), with some nice keyword dense (but readable) paragraphs, maybe a list of services provided, and some nicely alt tagged images.

Do you think this would be enough to organically rank him on the first page (maybe even top 3) of such a niche market? (keep in mind, the service he offers is evan a bit niche-ier than pools).

Once again, the help given already is immensely appreciated, and even more would be amazing!

-Ryan

[rjwmotor]

What you suggested above is working well for one of the sites I manage. As it sounds like the site is already currently ranking well, I would do exactly like you said: Create pages with the area of town and some examples of work that was done using the name sporadically and in the title/url.

Like I said, it has worked for me in a pretty niche industry.

[Duvash]

Yup, I'd go with the pages strategy as well.
It works great, and much less dodgy than those spiderweb networks.
If you have a well ranked website, theres no reason to even go there.

[samyb]

What you are good. Article submission and content writing based on targeted keywords is a good way to pull traffic. Good content also shows that you are an industry expert and visitors to your site would trust you more.

I have been doing this for my clients and it works.

I have a client that thinks that purchasing a bunch of related domain names in his industry, then forwarding them to a single website, will increase his search engine presence. Is this is a form of black hatting, or is there any validity to what he is saying?

This is grey zone and it might be better to keep out of it.

[Hissingsid]

I'm seeing signs with this new algorithm that a site that ranks well can pass on that ranking to other internal pages that have very few backlinks to them. For example site with 300 pages with every page linking to a page and only 6 external links to that page out ranks a page on a site where that page has around 100 external links direct to the page in question.

Get the site structure, anchor text and semantics right and a new page can get an instant boost just from internal linking.

Cheers

Sid

[deepakg]

If that strategic gives you benefit so what the problem to implement it.