• ramc-7JcUnB

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Turn SEO data into actionable Content Briefs
          Moz Pro

          Turn SEO data into actionable Content Briefs

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
          Moz API

          Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Local SEO
        4. Local Website Optimization
        5. Does building multiple websites hurt you seo wise? Good or bad strategy?

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Does building multiple websites hurt you seo wise? Good or bad strategy?

        Local Website Optimization
        6
        7
        4808
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • Berner
          Berner last edited by

          HI,rategy.

          So I spoke to a local Colorado seo company and they suggested to find whatever keywords is the most searched under my GWT's and put .com behind it and build other sites for other keywords.

          I was curious about this type of strategy.

          Does this work? This seo guy said I could just get a DBA bank account and such for each domain name etc.

          I am not wanting to mislead anyone, but I am curious if for the sake of promoting other services, if creating other websites with partial and EMD's are worthwhile?

          Another issue I worry about is if I put my companies phone number, then next thing you know there is 3 or 4 sites that use that same phone number. To me this does not build trust with Google.

          But being I am learning, maybe this is a common strategy, or doomed from the start.

          Just curious what you think. Would you build other sites to try and rank for other services? Or keep one sites and maximize it?

          Thank you for your thoughts. I just do not want to pay $3000 per site if it will hurt not help.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • KeriMorgret
            KeriMorgret @LesleyPaone last edited by

            Also, be sure to read Craigslist's terms and conditions for frequency of posting, and where you can post pets. If people think you are a puppy mill, you're likely to have your ads quickly flagged.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • JaneCopland
              JaneCopland last edited by

              Agree with everyone else here - this is a pretty horrible strategy when done solely for SEO purposes, and usually ends up being very spammy. Most businesses don't have a broad enough catalogue to warrant multiple sites, and the benefit of having keyword-rich domain names (even, or especially exact-match domains like carinsurance.com) is negligible nowadays. Google had to crack down on this, as domain names used to be a very easy to way to rank.

              Google is good at figuring out who owns which websites, so unless you are incredibly dedicated with your efforts to hide details, a network of sites like this is likely to be grouped together - Google will probably know they're all yours. Whilst that alone isn't a terrible thing (lots of businesses own more than one domain), Google has seem networks created for SEO purposes like this so many times that the view they'll take of it is dim. Something as simple as the same Local / Places / telephone information would be more than enough to make that connection.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • EGOL
                EGOL last edited by

                Would you rather attack the US Navy with a battle ship or ten potato guns?

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • GaryVictory
                  GaryVictory last edited by

                  Just stick to one site Berner.

                  The SEO company you employ "should" also be responsible for researching new key word opportunities within your industry (no just you helping them), and "should" assess the kind of traffic you "may" achieve as your project progresses. Assess competition is crucial, or you could be wasting your time.

                  Different pages on your site can be specifically targeted for certain industry "key words" and "geographical locations."; some competitive and some may not so.

                  All this depends on the strategy your guys employ..

                  For example, go create a page on your site specifically for individual case studies. What did you do? Where was it? What was the outcome? How does this benefit new customers? All these questions can help achieve great content for your customers, which is great for SEO.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • LesleyPaone
                    LesleyPaone @KeriMorgret last edited by

                    I agree with Keri. This in my opinion is a horrible strategy. There are only a few times I would recommend something like this and your case is not one of them.

                    The times I would recommend this is if your products are broad enough to support a whole site. For example I have a client that sells medical needs such as scooters, lift chairs, bathroom accessories, wheelchairs, and things like that. We did make him another site to focus specifically on scooters, just because it is a hot market. But at the same time going into this I advised him of how much work it would take. Rewriting all of the content for the descriptions, and everything else on the site.

                    I mentioned before that I have read a couple of your posts. One of the biggest things that I would advise for you is to work on marketing along with SEO. If I were you, I would post to craigslist every day, when you have dogs available. This does absolutely nothing for your SEO, but lets be honest, you want to move dogs, you don't want people to just come and read your site. I am sure this is no secret, but the time that I have found to post to craigslist is about 8:50 in the morning. It takes about 10-15 minutes for your post to become live on CL, so your post will show up shortly after 9. This means it will be one of the first posts that people will see. See the theory that I use, and it works with most businesses is that workers come in and screw around in the morning. I would hit all of the local sites like backpage, kijiji, and craigslist if I were you.

                    A lot of people treat Google and other search engines like they are the end all know all of everything. But honestly, in some situations they are not. Recently we had a new concrete patio poured. Craigslist was the first place I looked, then I researched the people individually on Google. I think a lot of people do that for local services still.

                    One last thing I would like to mention, if you do make posts on craigslist, create an image for the post. Upload the image to your website and embed the image in the post with html. The reason being is if you just upload images in their viewer, you cannot track them. Doing it this way, you can track them and find the best time to post your ads.

                    I hope this helps a bit.

                    KeriMorgret 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • KeriMorgret
                      KeriMorgret last edited by

                      I'd focus all of your efforts on one site, and make that site be the authority for your particular field. You'll have only one site to maintain, one site that gets authority from people linking to your content, one business name to maintain, etc.

                      LesleyPaone 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • 1 / 1
                      • First post
                        Last post

                      Browse Questions

                      Explore more categories

                      • Moz Tools

                        Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                      • SEO Tactics

                        Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                      • Community

                        Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                      • Digital Marketing

                        Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                      • Research & Trends

                        Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                      • Support

                        Connect on product support and feature requests.

                      • See all categories

                      Related Questions

                      • GrouchyKids

                        Local SEO Over Optimization

                        We are targeting a bunch of services for our local business that works in and around their location.  I'm concerned about over optimization and need some guidance on whether these points should be resolved. The company is based in a city and works mostly in the city but also in the surrounding areas.  Currently, the site has 6 services pages (accessible via main nav) targeting the same location i.e. “Made Up Service London”, “Imaginary Service London” (with URLs and H1 tags etc. in place containing this location).  However this is soon going to become 9 services pages, I am concerned that the repetition of this one location is starting to look spammy, especially as its where the company is based. Initially, I also wanted pages targeting the same services in other nearby areas.  For example “Made Up Service Surrey”, “Imaginary Service Essex”. This has not happened as the info available has been too sporadic.  I was going to add links to relevant case studies into these pages to beef up the content and add interest. To that end, we came up with case studies, but after a while, I noticed that these are also largely focused on the primary location.   So out of 32 case studies, we have 19 focused on the primary location again with URL’s and H1 tags etc containing the location keyword.  So in total, we have 25 pages optimized for the location (soon to be 28 and more if further case studies are added). My initial feeling was that the inclusion of pages targeting services in other locations would legitimize what we have done with the main pages.  But obviously we have not got these pages in place and I question whether we ever will. What is my best course of action moving forward?

                        Local Website Optimization | | GrouchyKids
                        1
                      • mkbeesto

                        Subdomain vs. Separate Domain for SEO & Google AdWords

                        We have a client who carries 4 product lines from different manufacturers under a singular domain name (www.companyname.com), and last fall, one of their manufacturers indicated that they needed to move to separate out one of those product lines from the rest, so we redesigned and relaunched as two separate sites - www.companyname.com and www.companynameseparateproduct.com (a newly-purchased domain). Since that time, their manufacturer has reneged their requirement to separate the product lines, but the client has been running both sites separately since they launched at the beginning of December 2016. Since that time, they have cannibalized their content strategy (effective February 2017) and hacked apart their PPC budget from both sites (effective April 2017), and are upset that their organic and paid traffic has correspondingly dropped from the original domain, and that the new domain hasn't continued to grow at the rate they would like it to (we did warn them, and they made the decision to move forward with the changes anyway). This past week, they decided to hire an in-house marketing manager, who is insisting that we move the newer domain (www.companynameseparateproduct.com) to become a subdomain on their original site (separateproduct.companyname.com). Our team has argued that making this change back 6 months into the life of the new site will hurt their SEO (especially if we have to 301 redirect all of the old content back again, without any new content regularly being added), which was corroborated with this article. We'd also have to kill the separate AdWords account and quality score associated with the ads in that account to move them back. We're currently looking for any extra insight or literature that we might be able to find that helps explain this to the client better - even if it is a little technical. (We're also open to finding out if this method of thinking is incorrect if things have changed!)

                        Local Website Optimization | | mkbeesto
                        0
                      • 100yards

                        I have a client in Australia that is going to set up a website that is in Chinese to service their Asian customer base (Indonesia, Singapore, HK, China). What domain should they use?

                        They're website is hosted on a .com.au domain. Should they host their Chinese language pages under their current domain (.com.au) using a subdirectory (i.e. /asia) or should they use another separate domain that they own that is a regular .com? Or does it really not matter?

                        Local Website Optimization | | 100yards
                        1
                      • LittleDog

                        Should I open a new domain and website for a new location under one company?

                        Hi my name is Gina and I wanted to ask for some advice. I'm thinking opening a diff location and was thinking if its a good idea to open up a new domain and new website? And why that may be a good idea and why or a bad idea and why?

                        Local Website Optimization | | LittleDog
                        0
                      • Adam_RushHour_Marketing

                        Subdomain for ticketing of a client website (how to solve SEO problems caused by the subdomain/domain relationship)

                        We have a client in need of a ticketing solution for their domain (let's call it www.domain.com) which is on Wordpress - as is our custom ticket solution.  However, we want to have full control of the ticketing, since we manage it for them - so we do not want to build it inside their original Wordpress install. Our proposed solution is to build it on tickets.domain.com.  This will exist only for selling and issuing the tickets. The question is, is there a way to do this without damaging their bounce rate and SEO scores?
                        Since customers will come to www.domain.com, then click the ticketing tab and land on tickets.domain.com, Google will see this as a bounce.  In reality, customers will not notice the difference as we will clone the look and feel of domain.com Should we perhaps have the canonical URL of tickets.domain.com point to www.domain.com? And also, can we install Webmaster Tools for tickets.domain.com and set the preferred domain as www.domain.com? Are these possible solutions to the problem, or not - and if not, does anyone else have a viable solution? Thank you so much for the help.

                        Local Website Optimization | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing
                        0
                      • ScorePromotions

                        Expert Advice Needed: Single Domain vs Multiple Domain for 2 Different Countries?

                        Hi MOZers, We are looking for some advice on whether to have a single TLD(.com) or 2 separate domains (.ca) & (.com) Our website will have different products & pricing for each of US users(.com) and Canada users(.ca). Since, we are targeting different countries & user groups with each domain - we are not concerned about "duplicate content". So, does it make more sense to have a single domain for compounding our content marketing efforts? Or, Will it be more beneficial to have seperate domains for the geo-targeting benefits on Google.CA & Google.COM? Looking forward to some great suggestions.

                        Local Website Optimization | | ScorePromotions
                        0
                      • KHCreative

                        Duplicate content question for multiple sites under one brand

                        I would like to get some opinions on the best way to handle duplicate / similar content that is on our company website and local facility level sites.  Our company website is our flagship website that contains all of our service offerings, and we use this site to complete nationally for our SEO efforts.  We then have around 100 localized facility level sites for the different locations we operate that we use to rank for local SEO.  There is enough of a difference between these locations that it was decided (long ago before me) that there would be a separate website for each.  There is however, much duplicate content across all these sites due to the service offerings being roughly the same.  Every website has it's own unique domain name, but I believe they are all on the same C-block.  I'm thinking of going with 1 of 2 options and wanted to get some opinions on which would be best. 1 - Keep the services content identical across the company website and all facility sites, and use the rel=canonical tag on all the facility sites to reference the company website.  My only concern here is if this would drastically hurt local SEO for the facility sites. 2 - Create two unique sets of services content.  Use one set on the company website.  And use the second set on the facility sites, and either live with the duplicate content or try and sprinkle in enough local geographic content to create some differential between the facility sites. Or if there are other suggestions on a better way to handle this, I would love to hear any other thoughts as well. Thanks!

                        Local Website Optimization | | KHCreative
                        0
                      • kinimod

                        SEO: .com vs .org vs .travel Domain

                        Hi there, I am new to MOZ Q&A and  first of all I appreciate all the folks here that share their expertise and make everyone understand 'the WWW' a bit better. My question: I have been developing a 'travel guide' site for a city in the U.S. and now its time to choose the right domain name. I put a strong focus on SEO in terms of coding, site performance as well as content and to round things up I'd like to register the _best _domain name in terms of SEO. Let's suppose the city is Atlanta. I have found the following domain names that are available and I was wondering whether you guys could give me some inside on which domain name would perform best. discoveratlanta.org
                        atlantaguide.org
                        atlanta.travel
                        atlantamag.com Looking at the Google Adwords Keyword tool the term that reaches the highest search queries is obviously "Atlanta" itself. Sites that are already ranking high are atlanta.com and atlanta.gov. So basically I am wondering whether I should aim for a new TLD like atlanta.travel or rather go with a .org domain. I had a look around and it seems that .org domains generally work well for city guides (at least a lot of such sites use .org domains). However, I have also seen a major US city that uses .travel and ranks first. On the other hand in New York, nycgo.com ranks well. Is it safe to assume that from the domain names I mentioned it really doesn't matter which one I use since it wouldn't significantly affect my ranking (good or bad)? Or would you still choose one above the other? What do you generally thing about .travel domain names (especially since they are far more expensive then the rest)? I really appreciate your response to my question! Best, 
                        kinimod

                        Local Website Optimization | | kinimod
                        0

                      Get started with Moz Pro!

                      Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                      Start my free trial
                      Products
                      • Moz Pro
                      • Moz Local
                      • Moz API
                      • Moz Data
                      • STAT
                      • Product Updates
                      Moz Solutions
                      • SMB Solutions
                      • Agency Solutions
                      • Enterprise Solutions
                      • Digital Marketers
                      Free SEO Tools
                      • Domain Authority Checker
                      • Link Explorer
                      • Keyword Explorer
                      • Competitive Research
                      • Brand Authority Checker
                      • Local Citation Checker
                      • MozBar Extension
                      • MozCast
                      Resources
                      • Blog
                      • SEO Learning Center
                      • Help Hub
                      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                      • How-to Guides
                      • Moz Academy
                      • API Docs
                      About Moz
                      • About
                      • Team
                      • Careers
                      • Contact
                      Why Moz
                      • Case Studies
                      • Testimonials
                      Get Involved
                      • Become an Affiliate
                      • MozCon
                      • Webinars
                      • Practical Marketer Series
                      • MozPod
                      Connect with us

                      Contact the Help team

                      Join our newsletter
                      Moz logo
                      © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                      • Accessibility
                      • Terms of Use
                      • Privacy

                      Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.