Danger! Multiple domain names, 1 site - why it is bad
September 2nd, 2007
I’ve been on an hiatus from writing here, so I thought I might break the trend by talking about the practice of creating multiple websites to ‘corner the market’ - jealously guarding your url to ensure no-one uses a variation.
An example might be registering mysite.com, and then being seduced by the offer (godaddy does this regularly) to register variants of your new domain name (eg .biz, .net, .org) at a ’special discount’ - they don’t offer fries just yet, but domain sellers really are the masters of the up-sell.
I consider registering more than one domain a bit pointless
The days of people memorising and typing a url into a browser are pretty much over - except for a few notable and brilliant exceptions with catchy names like utheguru.com, oyoy.eu and other less successful or well known sites such as google and youtube most people get to a site the new-fangled way - by following links or doing a search. So, really in essence, you’re probably paying extra for not much benefit.
Furthermore, the practice can have insidious side effects - you can actually shoot yourself in the foot.
Multiple domains = Multiple sources of links
When presented with duplicate content, google often seems to pick one page as the ‘original’ and consign the others as unimportant copies, and they don’t rank well.
You could end up with a situation where google chooses a page from each of your site copies as the ‘original’ and you end up with search traffic spread between all four.
Registering Multiple domains for the same site can actually be bad for business
Links to your sites naturally tend to come with traffic - and a lot of traffic generally comes from search… so… you’ll also end up with your incoming links spread between all the copies of your site.
In such a circumstance, the meaning of synergy (the parts are greater than the whole) does NOT apply. You end up with four sites with a quarter of the links they should have rather than one strong site that aggregates all the power of the incoming links in one place - end result? You don’t rank as well as you could.
How to use your multiple domains ‘the right way’
Best practice is to use something called a 301 redirect - rather than having 4 actual copies of your site all competing with each other, a 301 redirect seamlessly redirects clients (and google) to the ‘main’ url you want to rank well. If you google “how to do a 301 redirect’ you should be on your way to understanding that a bit better.
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9 Comments Add your own
1. Chris Hunt | September 3rd, 2007 at 7:06 pm
It makes a bit more sense if you’re outside the US - registering both mycorp.com and mycorp.co.uk for example, but even then it’s only really worth it if “mycorp” is a known brand.
.biz domains and their ilk are just worthless anyway.
2. theDuck | September 6th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Chris - I’m discussing a different animal altogether.
If you have a business that you are trying to target to different audiences, certainly registering country specific versions of your domain can be worthwhile for SEO purposes - I do it with one of my commercial sites.
But, even then, having exact duplicate content on both those domains is going to kill your rankings too, just as I have described here.
3. Spencer | September 9th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Interesting article, we actually registered multiple variations of our URL but now i’m wondering whether that was the right thing to do. I’ll be following your advice with the 301 direct. Thanks for the info.
4. shambhavi | September 10th, 2007 at 9:29 am
Hey Matt!
We just put up this cool splash page, and I was wondering about just this VERY question you address. Psychic? I think so.
I wrote to my registrar, and they suggested using Website Forwarding in order to redirect the .com and .net versions to jayakula.org, the main entry page. Is there anything objectionable about this from your wise persepctive?
Hope you are well and only free-falling out of airplanes for fun.
OM OM OM
Shambhavi
5. Erika | September 18th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
I have to say I really like your website. It’s clean, tidy and easy to read.
So many I’ve seen are too colourful, too many things flashing, too busy. My eyes go round and round in my head. In fact, I think I’ll change my templates right now.
I have a main site “ceconn.com” and the following blogs:
ceconn.com/canwetalk
ceconn.com/saycheese
ceconn.com/whatsmellssogood
Would the 301 redirect apply to me? Probably not.
6. theDuck | September 20th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Hi Erika - in your case you’ve just got subdirectories of the same domain with different content. That’s perfectly OK and you’re right - no need for 301 redirects.
Matt
7. Peter | October 15th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Hhmmm after reading your reply on Erika I think I won’t be needing a 301 redirect eighter.
I got one site with 5 subdomains (they have their own urls) and they all have totaly different content but the maindomain is indexed and the subdomains still aren’t.
I have just set up the 301 redirect after reading your post here. We will see what will happen the next week(s)….
8. theDuck | October 15th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Peter,
Subdomains (ie urls of the form subdomain.domainname.com) are a different animal altogether to subdirectories. Subdomains are seen as completely separate sites by Google - they are indexed separately etc.
If you have 5 subdomains with different content I’m not sure why you’d need a redirect at all under the context I’m discussing.
Subdomains are sometimes really difficult beasts to get indexed - it seems that (particularly if the primary domain is quite new) the ‘bar’ is much higher for subdomains - you need quite a few more incoming links to get a subdomain indexed than you do for an equivalent primary domain.
doc
9. Peter | October 19th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Yep, I definitely notice that right now. While two weeks ago about 52 pages of my primary domain were indexed, now there are only 4 left??
All my subdomains are indexed in google but only 3 or 4 pages instead of all pages.
I will need 100+ links to get those pages indexed I guess.
Few days ago I created a xml sitemap for each subdomaines so maybe this will speed up the proces.
gr,
Peter
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