using multiple domains

[nickhas]

I was reading yesterday's featured post and got to thinking about my own situation. I was thinking about using my primary keyword in the domain name but it's not great for a permanent business domain to advertise.

As such, we are considering using the keyword domain name as the primary domain with a vanity domain that we can use in advertising (we would use a 301 redirect).

What do you think about this practice? Worth it or no? Am I giving myself an identity problem if I do this? Will I be confusing visitors that end up at a different domain than the one advertised?

[chiron]

Shorter or even purposed-use (e.g. mybrand+TV.com) vanity domain names work well for TV or radio DR... especially if the domain types-out like it sounds - I'd suggest not resorting to hyphens/dashes, and of course one-word is only useful if it's not a probable in the final rounds of the National Spelling Bee; without "misspellings variation" PPC to support it, a domain like that of Orbitz or would be a bad on radio.

Repeat clients or those responding to a branding effort may also do better with a vanity name, same goes if you are a keynote speaker or handing out flyers or (verbally) naming yourself at a trade show. Basically, if a client has to type it in, it will naturally get reduced by a fair minority.

So go for it if after that, it makes sense - what's $35/yr? But it is very easy, especially for smaller companies, to dilute themselves quickly. Thus 301 redirecting works, but while you haven't posted the two ideas, be sure to carefully consider your brand, proposed "vanity" domain name, and think from the perspective of a consumer hitting a SERP result... if what you are considering as a primary landing page domain name looks long and spammy to you... it will to your clients.

All just my opinion of course.

[rickanderson]

Originally Posted by nickhas

I was reading yesterday's featured post and got to thinking about my own situation. I was thinking about using my primary keyword in the domain name but it's not great for a permanent business domain to advertise.

As such, we are considering using the keyword domain name as the primary domain with a vanity domain that we can use in advertising (we would use a 301 redirect).

What do you think about this practice? Worth it or no? Am I giving myself an identity problem if I do this? Will I be confusing visitors that end up at a different domain than the one advertised?

Nick

if you give some specifics you might get a specific answer....

if you tell me your company name, where you're located and what you do i can tell you the best possible domain name.

im gifted that way.

regards
rick

[incrediblehelp]

Why not just send them to sudomain to subfolder in that case?

[gawotn]

I think that this person brings up a good point, which I have never seen answered in any posts that I have seen about this, in any forum that I have read.

I sell domain names (among other things) + host accounts and I always recommend to my clients purchasing several domain names. For instance, if the company name is Ben Johnson company, I recommend benjohnsoncompany.com, for those looking for a website based upon the company name.

Next, if they are in the diaper cleaning business, I recommend getting a name such as cleandiapers.com, to indicate what they do for advertising purposes.

Next, for e-mail purposes, I recommend a very short domain name, such as bjc.com, so people can e-mail ben@bjc.com, instead of ben@benjohnsoncompany.com (saves typing a long e-mail address).

Finally (and not so much anymore), I recommend a search engine name, such as clean-diapers-dallas.com for keyword presence in the search engines.

Now, since they have all of those domain names, I will park them all on their hosting account so that if someone types in any name, it will go to their website home page (makes sense).

So, as far as the search engines are concerned, wouldn't they just index the first domain they see, then disregard all of the rest, such as when an article is on numerous websites?

I also see, an example of a 25 page website that maybe 5 pages are indexed under 1 domain name, another 5 pages under another, and so on.

This is a common situation for I'm sure a lot more people than you would think, they just aren't posting about it. Is it so wrong to do this?

[kronikmedia]

I have a similar situation. After carefully considering all the penalty issues and search engine optimisation techniques I have decided to go with the following approach for promoting my own web design company website.

Our main web design company website resides on our primary domain name which is our company name so essential for branding. We have also installed a wordpress blog offering web design, e-commerce and search engine marketing resources for website owners and businesses. The blog resides in sub directory of our main web design company's website. This was important as we wanted the blog to add valuable new content to our main website. However after while we realised that it was getting increasingly difficult to promote our blog independently as the url for the blog is t a sub-directory on main web design company website. As such we have created a landing page/home page for the blog on an independent domain name which has been selected with keywords in mind. There is no duplicate content as the new domain only contains the homepage and then user is re-directed to our original blog for any other pages, posts or articles. There was no need for any redirects.

I don't know for sure how well this will work out for us as we only just implemented this set-up. We have certainly addressed all the concerns, penalties and search engine guidelines.

[andrewbrott]

The idea that kronikmedia has suggested is also what we are looking to do, with the exception of using mulitiple domains that consist of different key phrases in the domain names. We were thinking of possibly doing multiple blogs to each one to ensure different content specific to the niche, then redirect to the main site.

Will too many different domains hurt us in the long run?

[andrewbrott]

I would appreciate opinions on an idea I have come upon to try to get a better presence on the net for my company, yet not violate any search engine protocols.

I have a question regarding multiple domain names and using wordpress mu to develop your site in regards to search engines. First of all, do you all think that developing a site only with wordpress should work ok as far as search engines are concerned?

Secondly, and I apologize because this may be long, I have several domain names and 1 main company site. The main company site will have the home page, contact form, and portfolio only.


Each secondary domain is made of up keywords related to the services we offer and a region we work in. such as nwservice1.com or nwservice2.com. I have gone so far as to also get northwestservice1.com and northwestservice2.com. We also have oregonservice1 and oregonservice2. You get the idea.

I intend to only put content in a single page on one of these domains for each service we offer, possilbly one page for each region. The others domains for that region will be a 301 redirect to the page that relates to each service for that region.

All domains will link to the main site for the portfolio, contact form, etc. So I may have 1 main site and 3 or 4 satellite sites with the pages relating to our services. The rest would be redirects.

My plan is to use Wordpress MU to maintain the main site and each page in the other domains.

so basically, I have a wordpress site, but pages relating to service1 will be on a satellite site only with links back to the main site. I hope to avoid duplicate content by having the same page on the main site and the satellite site.

Will going back and forth like that harm my main site ratings? I think Wordpress MU will be the easiest way to maintain the whole "site" from one point.

Thoughts?