Will multiple domains from the same company rank for the same keyword search?
-
I'm trying to convince people that we need good marketing reasons for starting multiple domains, as it will be more difficult to rank multiple sites. Does anyone know if Google actively discourages multiple domains from the same company appearing in the search results for the same keyword? We are creating a separate content website which is related to an existing company website. Would you agree that is best to have these sites on one domain with the content site on a sub-domain perhaps? I'm worried about duplication of effort and cross-keyword targeting in particular.
These sites would not have duplicate content.
-
you took offense for how I communicated, and for that I apologize. However if you read the opening of my initial response, I stated that what I was going to write was a more complete response because over-simplification is very dangerous in our industry. People make jumps and leaps of assumption all too often when they don't have a more thorough understanding of the nuances of acceptable vs unacceptable.
-
As you yourself pointed out, there are perfectly legitimate reasons for owning multiple domains that all rank for the same term (ex: nike.com, nikeinc.com, nikeplus.com, etc). Not sure why you are arguing with what I wrote.
-
this is a matter of semantics. Attempting to rank multiple sites for the same phrase IS a spam tactic, and thus a site WILL be penalized for it if that's the intent. I've done audits on enough sites that had been penalized and came to me for help as a result that I know this to be true.
-
Where in Google's TOS does it say that ranking multiple domains for the same phrases is against the guidelines? My original answer is correct: Google will not penalize you for owning multiple domains, only if you are being spammy about it.
-
Actually the correct deeper answer based on both Google policies and SEO best practices is as follows:
- It is directly against Google's terms of service to attempt to rank multiple sites for the same phrases.
- When you have more than one site that contains content that directly competes against any other site, whether its a site you own or someone else owns, or even other content on your own site, Google's multi-algorithm system attempts to determine which site deserves the higher ranking for a particular phrase or search query. In that process their system attempts to then determine whether any of those shouldn't even be indexed, let alone show up in search results.
- Based on these considerations, any of your content could quite possibly suffer from either a loss of position it should otherwise deserve, or even have some or all of its content deindexed. And in a worst case scenario, you could be penalized as well.
SO - the only issue then is this - WHY would you want multiple sites? Do any of the following reasons match your vision? If so, then you CAN have multiple sites IF they are done properly.
A) If you've got a big active brand, with a lot of customers/clients, it can help to create multiple sites often including:
- Corporate Site
- eCommerce Site
- Careers Site
- Community Site
- Charitable Giving Site
- Customer Support Site
B) If you have specific separate and quite distinctly different service or product offerings, you can create multiple sites so that the very different topical intent of each site is kept uniquely refined in that specific funnel and doesn't "pollute" or "dilute" the umbrella topical focus of each niche.
C) If you have an eCommerce site (where intent is online sales) you may have a desire to have a separate community or blog site (where intent is informational) as another way to keep the "intent" funnels cleanly separated.
NOTE:
It is VITAL that you understand the concept that when executed properly, multiple sites are very useful. However, these need to factor in the following:
1. Every site needs to be able to pass the "5 Super-Signals" test:
- Quality
- Uniqueness
- Authority
- Relevance
- Trust
In regard to the above, content needs to be truly unique across each site. While you can have similar content specific to your brand identity, and even some similarity about the umbrella topic of your product or service offerings, this needs to be done in a way that does not violate the "multiple sites for ranking domination" except as it relates to your brand (as opposed to generic non-brand product or service offerings).
2. Each site needs to have a LEGITIMATE business case reason for its existence not considering SEO - the "why this site exists" question needs to pass muster.
3. Every additional site you create requires its own consistent quality effort, as well as trustworthy off-site reinforcement. If a proper concerted effort cannot be maintained over the long-haul on multiple sites, it is much wiser to go with one single unified site.
-
Google won't actively penalize you for owning multiple domains, unless you are going out of your way to be spammy about it. However, you will need a lot more resources in terms of link building, social media promotion, content production, etc.
In general, the best practice from an SEO perspective is to have a single site with the all the content living in subdirectories of the domain. Subdomains are considered in many cases to be separate sites, so you would run into the same issues as having multiple domains.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Shopify Site with Multiple Domains?
Hey there! My client has a website on Shopify. I don't even know how to open this can of worms, but let me try. The site URL is: https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/ However, there is another (older?) URL that gets updated as the main site gets updated and shows the exact same content. It's a straight duplicate, but is it's own URL and doesn't redirect to the main site. https://www.powerchairrecyclers.com/ And this isn't the SITE.Shopify back-end site name that was used for set up initially. I just have no idea what's going on here. Not sure if it's a serious error that needs to be fixed, or if it's something weird with how Shopify work. Any insight would be immensely helpful. Thanks! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Can you give me some advices to rank this domain?
Hi Moz community, I've a coleague that's working to rank this site: www.devsar.com. The selected keywords are:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaston Riera
Mobile development
Web development
Django Development
Python Development I've checked the site: It's fast and clean. Has a good PA and DA. It's responsive and good lookking. Meta description , title, hreflang.. everything in order. Link profile a little rare (checked with ahref.com), it's because someone made a mistake redirecting some expired domain Can you help me to help my mate out?
Thanks
GR.0 -
Home page ranks for most keywords with no SEO
Hi Guys, The keyword I am trying to rank is on seperate page with its own Optimization in place. However the HOME page of website starts ranking for that keywords . The keyword is mentioned on Home page Just once in content description, that's all. What should be my ideal strategy. Deleting the Sub Page, will that improve the SEO of my home page and improve the Rank for that keyword ? Also I can see my Own YELP pages rank better than the actual website for few terms . Any way around this ? A Part from building links to page ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00071 -
Low Domain Authority & Ranking
My Domain Authority has tumbled in the last six months from 28 to 21. Search traffic has dropped from about 4,500 per month to 3,000 per month with most of the drop being in the more competitive terms. Lead generation is off by about 70%. This is after spending $12,000 on "optimization" with a MOZ recommended SEO firm and spending another $17,000 implementing their suggestions. My real estate brokerage firm has completed some press worthy deals in the last month. If I can get these deals mentioned in a reputable newspaper like The New York Times (or other real estate publications like NY Observer, Real Estate Weekly) will this help domain authority? If my domain authority is this low, how difficult is it to move it higher? Before reaching out to these publications, should I create a blog post about these transactions on my website? Any suggestions as to how I can improve domain authority? My URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I should add that my SEO firm had about 30 toxic links removed and filed a disavow for about another 80 links. MOZ is only showing about 25 domains linking to our site. I suspect not enough to get us to rank. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Multiple, Partial Redirecting URLs from old SEO company
Received quite a surprise when I gained access to the Google webmaster account and saw 4 domains that are link to my clients domain and the number of links for each domain range between 10,000 and 90,000. Come to find out this was a result of their former agency. The business is very local central. I will use the example of a burger place. They main site is burgers.com and burger places are listed by city and state. Their former agency bought several domains like californiaburgers.com and duplicated the listings for that state on this domain. You can view certain pages of the second domain, but the home page is redirected as are most of the city pages with 301s to the main burgers.com domain. However, there are pages on the additional domains that do not redirect, as they are not duplicated on the main domain so nowhere to redirect. Google has only found four of them but looks like there could be at least 50. Pages that are not redirected are indexed by the engines - but not ranking (at least not well). There is a duplicate content issue, although "limited" in the sense that it really is just the name of the business, address and phone number - there is not much to these listings. What is the best approach to overcome? Right now GWT is showing over 300,000 links, however at least 150,000 to 200,000 of that is from these domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeverSEO0 -
Could ranking problem be caused by Parked Domain?
I've been investigating a serious Google ranking drop for a small website in the UK. They used to rank top 5 for about 10 main keywords and overnight on 24/3/12 they lost rankings. They have not ranked in top100 since. Their pages are still indexed and they can still be found for their brand/domain name so they have not been removed completely. I've coverered all the normal issues you would expect to look for and no serious errors exist that would lead to what in effect looks like a penalty. The investigation has led to a an issue about their domain registration setup. The whois record (at domaintools) shows the status as "Registered and Parked or Redirected" which seems a bit unusual. Checking the registration details they had DNS settings pointing correctly to the webhost but also had web forwarding to the domain registrar's standard parked domain page. The domain registrar has suggested that this duplication could have caused ranking problems. What do you think? Is this a realistic reason for their ranking loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Mobile friendly version (CSS) - helps in rankings on mobile searches?
Does anyone know if there are any theories or evidence that a mobile optimized website (CSS) has better chances of ranking on Mobile platforms - assuming links and other factors being equal? In other words, is Google able to identify that a website has been optimized for mobiles and gives them preference/weight to rank over other websites that are not mobile optimized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Syed10 -
My site has multiple H1's, one in the logo image and one as a header. Is there any official stance from the search engines on this?
In doing some research on this issue, I came across this blog post which seems to suggest it certainly will be a trigger to search engines. http://www.seounique.com/blog/multiple-h1-tags-triggers-google-penalty/ Could be a false positive on his specific case, but I was wondering what the community thought. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0