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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Would you rather attack the US Navy with a battle ship or ten potato guns?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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.
Related Questions
-
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 | | GrouchyKids1 -
Using geolocation for dynamic content - what's the best practice for SEO?
Hello We sell a product globally but I want to use different keywords to describe the product based on location. For this example let’s say in USA the product is a "bathrobe" and in Canada it’s a "housecoat" (same product, just different name). What this means… I want to show "bathrobe" content in USA (lots of global searches) and "housecoat" in Canada (less searches). I know I can show the content using a geolocation plugin (also found a caching plugin which will get around the issue of people seeing cached versions), using JavaScript or html5. I want a solution which enables someone in Canada searching for "bathrobe" to be able to find our site through Google search though too. I want to rank for "bathrobe" in BOTH USA and Canada. I have read articles which say Google can read the dynamic content in JavaScript, as well as the geolocation plugin. However the plugins suggest Google crawls the content based on location too. I don’t know about JavaScript. Another option is having two separate pages (one for “bathrobe” and one for “housecoat”) and using geolocation for the main menu (if they find the other page i.e. bathrobe page through a Canadian search, they will still see it though). This may have an SEO impact splitting the traffic though. Any suggestions or recommendations on what to do?? What do other websites do? I’m a bit stuck. Thank you so much! Laura Ps. I don’t think we have enough traffic to add subdomains or subdirectories.
Local Website Optimization | | LauraFalls0 -
Does multiple sites that relate to one company hurt seo
I know this has been asked and answered but my situation is a little different. I am a local electrical contractor. I specialize in a service and not a product. Competition is high in the local market due to the other electrical contractors that have well seasoned sites with very good DA/PA. Although new to the web I am not new to the trade. Throughout years almost back to the AOL dialup days I have been collecting domain names for this particular purpose. Now I want to put them to good use. Being an electrical contractor, there are many different facets of work and services we provide. My primary site is empireelec.com A second site I threw online overnight with minimal content is jacksonvillelightingrepair.com. Although it is a fresh site, there is minimal content and I have put almost zero effort in to it. It appears to be ranking for keywords a lot quicker. That leads me to believe I should utilize my other domain jacksonvillefloridaelectrician.com and target just the keyword Jacksonville Florida Electrician. It leads me to believe I should use jacksonvillebeachelectrician.com for targeting electricians in jacksonville beach. And again with jacksonvilleelectricianservice.com I can provide a unique phone number for each site. Am I going about this all wrong? Everything I read says no,no,no but I feel my situation is a little more unique.
Local Website Optimization | | empireelec1 -
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?
Local Website Optimization | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing
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.0 -
How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO
Hey Awesome Local Folks! I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum: Here's the update announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this: Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages: Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic? I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track: http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/ So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members 🙂 Thanks, all!
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis9 -
SEO Value in Switching to ".NYC" Domain?
Recently " .NYC" domains have become available for purchase to New York City based businesses. I own and operate a New York City commercial real estate firm, nyc-officespace-leader.com. New domain would be www.metro-manhattan.nyc Our existing domain has been in use for seven years.would there be an SEO benefit to transferring our site to .NYC domain? Or would a new domain kill our domain rank? Thanks, Alan
Local Website Optimization | | Kingalan10 -
Website Migration - remove unnecessary sub-folder?
Rebuilding a site that currently has good rankings. The original site was build in Joomla. I am doing the rebuild on WordPress. The old site is at the domain www.savannah-dentist.com, but clicking on any link generates a url with a subfolder; i.e. the website is at www.savannah-dentist.com, click on the logo and you will go to www.savannah-dentist.com/rosenthal/, the "meet the doctors" link goes to "www.savannah-dentist.com/rosenthal/meet-the-doctors" When I rebuild the site, do I have to retain that url structure? If I get rid of the folder and make everything simply like www.savannah-dentist.com/meet-the-doctors, will I be jeopardizing our rankings? Thanks! -Adam
Local Website Optimization | | aj6130 -
Single Site For Multiple Locations Or Multiple Sites?
Hi, Sorry if this rambles on. There's a few details that kind of convolute this issue so I'll try and be as clear as possible. The site in question has been online for roughly 5 years. It's established with many local citations, does well in local SERPs (working on organic results currently), and represents a business with 2 locations in the same county. The domain is structured as location1brandname.com. The site was recently upgraded from a 6-10 page static HTML site with loads of duplicate content and poor structure to a nice, clean WordPress layout. Again, Google is cool with it, everything was 301'd properly, and our rankings haven't dropped (some have improved). Here's the tricky part: To properly optimize this site for our second location, I am basically building a second website within the original, but customized for our second location. It will be location1brandname.com/secondcity and the menu will be unique to second-city service pages, unique NAP on footer, etc. I will then update our local citations with this new URL and hopefully we'll start appearing higher in local SERPs for the second-city keywords that our main URL isn't currently optimized for. The issue I have is that our root domain has our first city location in the domain and that this might have some negative effect on ranking for the second URL. Conversely, starting on a brand new domain (secondcitybrandname.com) requires building an entire new site and being brand new. My hunch is that we'll be fine making root.com/secondcity that locations homepage and starting a new domain, while cleaner and compeltely separate from our other location, is too much work for not enough benefit. It seems like if they're the same company/brand, they should be on the same sitee. and we can use the root juice to help. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | kirmeliux0