What Should I Do With All My Domain Names?

Most of us have them.  A batch of great domain names that we will use “someday”

How can you best leverage all those domain names for search?

BACK IN THE DAY – the domain name carried huge search weight, and people would buy great names, and park one on top of the other.

SO.. you would have 1 site, that site would have 5 different names.  Ultimately, they were the same site – there were not 5 sites – only 1 – but 5 good search names.  This used to be good for search.

NOW – what happens is Google sees these as 5 separate sites, each with the exact same content – and you get what’s called the “duplicate content ding”  where instead of helping, you are actually hurting your search weight.

Instead of parking, you can forward.  So if someone types in ABC.com  they will automatically end up at 123.com.   1 domain name forwards to the other.

This gives ZERO search lift and strikes me as an odd effort.

The RIGHT way to do this is different sites for each domain name – and links from each of the secondary domain names to the primary domain name.

So ABC is a unique mini site – with links to the primary site  “for greater detail”.

This gives you relevant quality backlinks with no duplicate content – providing search lift.

This also means managing and maintaining multiple sites – while that involves some investment in creating the mini site, and some time keeping it up to date – it is the most effective way to leverage multiple domain names for the same business.

Finally, is the issue of competition.   If you give away a great domain name.. say TampaHomeHealth.com  (purely as an example) someone else will pick it up in a heart beat – expiring domains are listed and bought and sold constantly.  Do you want to “give away” a domain name with far more search appeal to a competitor.  TampaHomeHealth.com  has far more search weight than OurNameHH.com

We have clients that chose to not invest in separate mini-sites, but continue to pay the $10 a year to keep the other domain names doing  NOTHING with them, just to keep the domain names out of the hands of competitors.

So..

• parking multiple domain names on a single site – search negative.
• forwarding multiple domains to a single site – search neutral
• developing separate unique mini sites for multiple domains, with links to the primary site  – search positive.
• domain banking, keeping domain names without using them – search neutral, but it keeps strong names out of your competitors’ hands.