The (Domain) Name Game and SEO

Finding the right domain name is a big decision and a lot has to weigh on it. Branding, SEO, and ‘catchiness’ are just a few.

But once a good domain name has been found, does the issue lay at rest?

Do you really need more than one domain?

As with most things, this completely depends on your overall online strategy, and the kind of business you are marketing for. The following are some of the common strategies related to domain names, and how they may (or may not) be effective in certain cases.

Should you buy keyword-laden domains and redirect them to your main domain?

Probably not. This is an unfortunately common myth – that buying a bunch of domains and redirecting them to your main domain will somehow magically give you high rankings. This is not the case, though it would certainly make my job easier!

Buying a bunch of new domains and redirecting them to your site will do absolutely nothing for your SEO, as Google will see the redirection, and completely ignore the redirected domain as if it weren’t there. Buying www.cars-cars-cars-cars-cars.biz and redirecting it to your auto dealer site will not be helpful. Sorry.

The Exception:

The one case where it may make sense to do this is in extremely competitive niches, to prevent your competitors from nabbing great domain space. For example, see how many lawyer.com variations there are in your nearest metro area. How big of a coup would it be for a savvy attorney to grab a big block of localized .com domains in his city? Probably worth the money, though there would be diminishing returns to scale. The value of grabbing those domains for every TLD(top level domain) would likely be negligible at best.

Should you buy all of the top-level domain variations of your domain and redirect them to your main site?

It depends. This is another strategy I see rolled out, or at least considered, by almost every business under the sun. Many business owners can get worried about surreptitious competitors buying up the .biz version of their site and ruining their SEO.

The fact of the matter is that for most businesses this is simply not a realistic situation. The work and capital that would be required by a competitor to undertake such a strategy would be considerable. This is not a new web-spam strategy, and is one that Google has been very intelligent about combating. By taking domain age, trust, and PageRank into account, it is not a simple matter for someone with the .biz version of your domain to mess with your search engine rankings.

That being said, the larger a business becomes, the more they should worry about this. A company the size of Amazon.com has a reasonable concern that people may imitate it for either phishing or simply for traffic purposes.

While for most business I would certainly recommend buying the .net version of your .com site (or vice versa), going much further than that has very limited value unless your business is a major household name.

Should you buy common misspellings of your domain?

If your traffic levels warrant it, yes. A neat trick of experienced web professionals is to buy up domains like examplecom.com and exampl.com to catch common misspellings of your domain name, and redirect those users to the correct page. While a neat trick, this is only really useful for sites seeing enough traffic (and generating enough profit) that the income from those redirected people would cover the cost of the domain name ownership. Useful for your music blog? Probably not. Useful for your popular and profitable real estate website? Yes.

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