Multiple domains - one site

more details about best practices for multiple domains point to one site

[snowybudgie]

Hi there

There was some discussion of this topic on a thread starting 18 July 03.

However, I would like to enquire a little further about the possible benefits and disadvantages of using multiple domains. We are a global non-profit organisation that has a core domain of ourservice.org, with PR3 on Google. We also have at least two other domains registered that are slightly different (keyword-related) descriptions of our service. We are contemplating pointing these other domains to our core site as well. My questions are:

1. Would the use of additional domains pointing to the same site cause any grief with SE such as Google? My understanding from previous posts is that it would not.

2. Should these additional ('secondary') domains be registered with SEs?

3. Is there much SEO benefit to be had from having these secondary domains point to our site?

4. If the answer to 3 is no, then the only other advantage I can see of using the secondary domains would be to 'catch' those users who might just type the secondary (keyword based) URL directly into their browsers, as a kind of 'guessing' as to what our URL is. Would others agree?

Many thanks

Snowybudgie
Australia

[dougmcc1]

If the secondary sites are very similar to the main site, then I would add those pages to the main site and then apply 301 redirects to the secondary sites.

[snowybudgie]

Thanks Doug. Just to clarify, there are no 'secondary sites' at all. There are simply alternative ('secondary') domains. The idea is to point these domains to our main site. At the moment they are not pointing to any site at all.

Regards

[dougmcc1]

Thanks for clarifying, now I see what you mean.

Don't register any domains with SE's unless they have good, unique content. So what I would do is park those secondary domains on the same DNS server as the main site and point them to the main site so that when visitors type in the URL of a secondary site, they get transferred to your main site. I've never done this so I hope someone else can chip in if you need assistance with this :)

[surfgatinho]

Hi
I have several domain names pointing with the same site content but different index pages eg one index page is web-hosting on another site it's web-design.
They do have keyword specific URLs.
What I found (to my suprise and pleasure) was they seemed to get ranked higher than me 1 year old main site within a month.
Maybe this is an exception or anomally but I'd reccommend a different index page/entry point on the various domains
Chris

[zachj]

I have been playing around on the web for four years. I am one of the coding brilliant, marketing bright, design ok, search engine dumb people.

I somehow ended up with 300 domain names or so that I just liked. I saw them, bought them. So instead of having them go nowhere I had them pointed to my site. Most of my links are in google and altavista go to my two main urls, but I have found every single one I have looked for in google (I have not looked for them all :)

I really need to put some unique word on my pages as of right now I have no way to tell you how many links I have in google. Some searches that only bring up me and not others have reached as high as 60,000 in google and is running around 36,000 right now. I will say that I am willing to bet that almost everyone of those is a unique page. (If google ever spidered my entire site I would be looking at atlease a 250,000 pages and will probably because of an expansion reach five million by the end of the year).

I also am a tiny site, just have lots of content that has been created over the years, and lots of dynamic content that have completely normal urls. (ie the forums on my site have urls that do not even have numbers to refer ot the posts and threads).

I am guessing that right now I have maybe 50,000 in google - 30,000 in altavista, a whole 10,000 in all the web.

I do not have good page rank, and in fact have very poor returns on what my targeted traffic would be. I do though enjoy going through the one thousand or so referals I get a day from search engines and seeing the terms thats I do come up number one for. (some of them blow my mind to be honest, as they are terms hard fought for).

Whats this all mean? Hell if I know, just thought I would throw it out there.