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A competitor of mine has around 300 useful domain names that reflect individual topic areas that his main website (website.com) actually fulfils reasonably well.
One of the three hundred or so doains appears in google as :
Awebsite.com
www.awebsite.com/ - Similar
The domain is not a website as such, just a mask of the main site and he uses a robots.txt in the root :
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: *
So what you see when you click through to the listing is a page of content that is exactly the same as the content on his main site at website.com/a
He actually therefore has this domain appearing (as an exact product/keyphrase match) at position 3 or 4 and therefore as an exact match he must be getting reasonable clickthrough traffic - especially as, ironically, the listing actually stands out from the surrounding results.
Why is this important?
I have around 200 domains that relate closely to a large main website. I am not overly technical so not quite sure exactly what's going on, but I am thinking it may a good way to potentially get additional traffic from SERPs - as well as the Typein traffic I will get thanks to the generic nature of the domains I own.
I am currently setting up 301 redirects on all domains in to matching deep area content.
A few questions :
i.Is this simply a masked page that work's on the fly thanks to a bit of clever php (pulling main site content back on request) backed up by a robots.txt at root to stop G spidering and seeing as duplicate content
ii.Is it a complex 301 arrangement again using a robots.txt? (I don't see how it can be)
iii.It is some black hat cloaking?
iv.Is it against G ToS - seeing as he is not asking G to spider - but he is cloaking or replicating content
v.Does it require IBL's to all of the domains in order for G to see them as being 'beneficial' despite the no spider rule and no 'unique' content
Thanks for any help anyone can give. Just keen to find out how this is working and whether it's a risk or not.
TW
It's hard to tell whether there is heavy search engine manipulation (BlackHat SEO) at play here; with what little information you can provide, although it seems likely to me like there is a little more search engine trickery at play than what initially meets the untrained eye.
Perhaps these 300 or so "shadow" domains your keyphrase competitor uses (to artificially empower main domains externally) contain vast more than just landing page redirects or webpages full of duplicate content.
