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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26 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
10. Mike | August 8th, 2008 at 3:38 am

Interesting read. I’ve got a site at http://www.nsartonline.com and am in the process of considering multiple variations on the domain name in order to capture more traffic in the event someone types in the company name, which varies a bit from the domain name. After reading your article however, I’m not sure how valuable that would be so I’ll consider holding off for now.

Thanks so much for the information!
11. The Credit Agency | September 10th, 2008 at 1:08 am

Interesting thoughts…… mirrors what I’ve recently been thinking!

In our case we’ve got our main website http://www.TheCreditAgency.co.uk and additional domains such as http://www.online-credit-reports.co.uk.

We’ve noticed some content is indexed for the second domain but not for the main domain. What happens if we remove the second domain from operation? Will our main domain then get considered to be the ‘Original Content’, or is it too late for us after the content has already been indexed?
12. Chris | September 17th, 2008 at 3:31 pm

I read your info multiple domain names 1 site - with great interest. We run a B&B business on http://www.convictbeachhouse.com and I have started to run a separate domain on the same site http://www.tasmanpeninsula.com.au to promote the region and help a few smaller operators to market together. When I first launched the site it was ranking very high and now I can’t find it anywhere on google? I am using a forward from http://www.tasmanpeninsula.com.au to http://www.convictbeachhouse.com but obviously something has gone wrong? Can you give some insight? Many thanks, Chris
13. Eric | September 24th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

I have a question… I have one niche and bought the top 20 keyword domains. I have created 1 wordpress site focusing on the 1 domain name keyword throughout the site. I want to start a second site, almost identical, but change the keyword throughout the site to that specific domain keyword, so they will not be exact, but very similar, what are your thoughts on this kind of thing? I don’t think they will be competing because they are for all different keyword phrases.
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21. Allan | February 27th, 2009 at 6:00 pm

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23. Jay O'Connell | March 30th, 2009 at 12:23 am

I’m starting a side business doing different types of photography; we’re using the photography as one of many loss leaders as we build a rental multiple listing service for the Boston Metro Region. I wanted to expand beyond cheap apartment photos into other cheap photos; cheap headshots, cheap food photography, etc. So I created a site called ‘fastcheapgoodphoto.com.” I want to own the keyword “cheap” for photo stuff in the boston region.

I realized that my domain didn’t have the word ‘boston’ in it, and I’m a local business, so I bought a few domains which added “Boston” to the URL and did a redirect on them from whatever company google contracts with to do their domain name pointing for domains bought under their umbrella.

Bad idea? I _think_ that I’m doing a 30 redirect; how do I make sure?

I built fastcheapgood photo in a few hours, and spent all of 30 or 40 bucks on domains, so obviously, I’m willling to rethink this whole thing if I have to.

any thoughts?
24. tara | March 30th, 2009 at 6:44 am

Hi…I have a question/concern. I started my website about a 6 months ago and withi a few months, I had ranked on page 3 for bellingham real estate. Currently, I’m revamping the site, and have added a few more niche specific domain names to the website hosting account.

I was told that this was the best way to go about adding the new domains, rather hosting them with a different host and forward via the 301 redirect. I asked about the duplication of content posibilities, and they said if wouldn’t affect my ranking, etc. Since adding them I’ve dropped into oblivion in the rankings…but, I also have alot of changes behind the. I w
25. danny | May 25th, 2009 at 1:51 pm

Well, you said 301 redirects are better, but there is a problem here.

When I redirect my site for example http://www.redirectsite.com is redirected to http://www.mainsite.com, google does not find any results if clients type “test site” for http://www.redirectsite.com. When there is actual content behind the domein, it does find content.

http://www.redirectsite.com doesn’t have a title, or any contect in it for google to index, so it will not find
26. danny | May 25th, 2009 at 1:56 pm

This website had a javascript error.

I wasnt fnished:

http://www.redirectsite.com doesn’t have a title, or any content in it for google to index, so it will not find anything in the search engine, unless you type the full url manually.

Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

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