Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
-
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far.
My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect?
What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords.
Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings?
Thank you!
**Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
-
I had previously learned the deeper a keyword was in the URL, the better it was for ranking in SERPs. I am uncomfortable now because I can't remember where I learned that information or from whom. I spent about 90 minutes today watching all of Matt Cutt's videos discussing the topic. I also read numerous articles.
In short, I could not locate any conclusive information on this topic. Everyone agrees it is good to have keywords in the URL, but no one shares if there is any higher value at various positions within the URL. I began a Q&A topic to seek more information on this topic. http://www.seomoz.org/q/keywords-in-urls-looking-for-consensus
-
Hi Elad. In my mind the concept is still the same - whether you are building keyword rich domains for attempting to increase PR or for attracting the traffic for those keywords they are not going to be terribly effective.
A keyword rich domain may get you some traffic if it's a low competition keyword. But then, it wouldn't take much else to get the same result (i.e. building one or two links to that page).
Check out this video by Matt Cutts:
-
Noted. Thank you.
-
Thanks for the reply.
The link you provided talks about using the minisites as a link building tool in order to boost pagerank. I already know this si close to useless for PR.
About the folders, are you sure having keywords in the folder structure is as effective as having them in the domain name itself? My experience (very short, but observant) shows otherwise.
-
I'd be more inclined to put the time and resources into optimizing your main site. Build some links, make sure your on page is flawless.
-
@Dunamis, the link you offered focused on using other sites as a link building strategy. That Q&A is focused on the value of the links. I believe Elad's inquiry is focused on the value of improving ranking for a particular term.
@Theo, your concerns are valid, but I didn't get that feel from Elad's question.
Please allow me to clarify the response I offered.
The best practice is clearly to optimize pages on your existing site for the keyword search traffic. This can be achieved through good SEO strategies and offering great content.
I could have offered this answer and ended the post, but I prefer to always include a direct response to the original question. I even qualified my answer twice with "what you describe is ok" and "as long as you don't violate any rules or offer spam". I wrote those phrases specifically to ensure the advice I was offering could not be manipulated into taking the doorway page path.
-
Check out the replies in this post - it's a very similar question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-are-the-good-strategies-using-satellite-sites-in-seo
Keywords in the url are being devalued. Spending time on a bunch of microsites is not going to benefit you much. While you may get some small benefit from having a keyword rich domain, there are a lot of other factors to help you rank. So, if you're going to spend time building links to these little domains, your time would better be spent building links to your main domain.
I would agree that you should have folders on your site so instead of creating the domain best-sunglasses.com have www.mydomain.com/best-sunglasses/
-
"What you describe is ok, no policies are violated."
I strongly disagree on this one. What he describes sounds an awful lot like Google's description of a 'doorway page', which are explicitly against Google Webmaster Guidelines:
"Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination." (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355)
In light of the above I would advice against the practice your describing. Instead I would optimize (sections) of the main site for such keywords or set up independent (complete and value adding) domains for these keywords you'd like to rank for.
-
Will this help?
It can, but the better approach would be creating pages on your existing site optimized for your key phrase. If you wish to purchase the domain "best-sunglasses.com" why not just creating a page on your existing domain? http://mydomain.com/best-sunglasses
Is this ok, or against some Google policy?
What you describe is ok, no policies are violated.
Can this hurt the main site rankings?
As long as you don't do violate any rules or offer spam, then no.
I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords...
There are over 200 factors considered in determining a search result's location. If the pages which outrank you appear as you describe, then you should be easily able to outrank them if you optimize your site better.
In short, learn more about SEO. Improve your site and you will outrank the others easily, and without purchasing exact match domain names. An excellent place to start is this guide: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
Good Luck
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
-
My site was hacked and spammy URLs were injected that pointed out. The issue was fixed, but GWT is still reporting more of these links.
Excuse me for posting this here, I wasn't having much luck going through GWT support. We recently moved our eCommerce site to a new server and in the process the site was hacked. Spammy URLs were injected in, all of which were pointing outwards to some spammy eCommerce retail stores. I removed ~4,000 of these links, but more continue to pile in. As you can see, there are now over 20,000 of these links. Note that our server support team does not see these links anywhere. I understand that Google doesn't generally view this as a problem. But is that true given my circumstance? I cannot imagine that 20,000 new, senseless 404's can be healthy for my website. If I can't get a good response here, would anyone know of a direct Google support email or number I can use for this issue?
Technical SEO | | jampaper0 -
Trying to Optimize my site for one keyword any advice please
Hi, we are trying to optimize our site www.in2town.co.uk for the keyword of lifestyle magazine. We are having trouble with this. We were last year number one in google for the keyword and then the end of last year we went to position four and now we are on the bottom of the second page and we are not sure what is happening. here is the text view of the site http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5U281SBmDlUJ:www.in2town.co.uk/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=uk&strip=1 I am just wondering if we need to do a better description of the lifestyle magazine at the top as i know it says you should have your keyword within the first 100 words Any help on trying to solve this problem and get the page back where it belongs will be great. I know we have a lot of text on the page so google maybe finding it hard to find out what keywords are what but the only keyword we are interested in this page is lifestyle magazine, in the near future we would be looking at including lifestyle news many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Should this site start again on a new domain
Hi We have not done SEO on this site they have used another company who looks like they outsourced and the links have been built by a third party all blog networks and this company have said they cannot get the links removed. Google flagged artificial links on this web site in February and in April it lost over 10000 visitors in a month and its just free falled ever since. The categories have been recreated and no redirects created due to the amount of backlinks from the blog sites to the original category pages but the site is not recovering its down to 1500 visitors a month and used to get 14000 a month. So should my customer ditch the domain and move this site to fresh domain? http://www.kids-beds-online.com Any answers would really be appreciated. thanks Tracy
Technical SEO | | dashesndots0 -
Keep the blog separate or incorporate into main domain?
So my organization currently has both a main site and on a separate domain and separate host a wordpress blog. (our own domain not a wordpress.com) the content posted on this blog is local, community driven, and related to our business but it is not used in anyway as a "sales" tool. It's more for interaction purposes with members and employees. This blog has a lot of content and is updated with new posts very often. (generate traffic from a pretty wide variety of searches some related some not) My plan has been to 301 the old domain and move the wordpress blog over to our root domain in a subdirectory such as oursite.com/blog. Does anyone have tips for moving a blog over like this? I'm concerned about any link juice it has dropping off and since it does provide some links to our root site currently (since it's basically a separate site). Basically i'm wondering if it'll be worth the effort or if i should just keep it separate and focus on other content gen strategies.
Technical SEO | | SCFederal0 -
Site disappearing from search for a certain keyword
I was wondering if someone has encountered the same problem as me. I was doing some changes on the frontpage of one of my clients' website, especially some redirections, and my site has disappeared from Google for the main keyword on the page. So, if I look for my page on Google, instead of seeing my page first, I no longer see my page, at all. All I've done was a 301 redirection from index.html to the domain name. Now, I changed everything back to how it was before. More precisely, I've done that 2 weeks ago. But, no change in Google. I checked Bing and Yahoo, my site appears first when I search for that specific keyword. Any ideas how long will it take for Google to see that I am not doing anything wrong with redirections? Or any idea at all?
Technical SEO | | webmasterles0 -
Old owners links pointing to new owners domain
We have a number of web sites. We recently acquired an excellent domain name, it happened to be owned by one of our competitors. Our competitor has a lot of web sites, each domain having a basic 5 page unoptimized site with one of those pages little more than a link farm. They have over three hundred domains with all but lets say 10 of them consisting of basic 5 page sites with a link "directory" on one of those pages. - the directory page is the same on every single site/domain. One of the links from that directory is going to our newly acquired domain and newly optimized web site. Being new to this, should this pose any kind of concern for us? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | PlasticCards0 -
Google.ca is showing our US site instead of our Canada Site
When our Canadian users who search on google.ca for our brand (e.g. Travelocity, Travelocity hotels, etc.), the first few results our from our US site (travelocity.com) rather than our Canadian site (travelocity.ca). In Google Webmaster Tools, we've adjusted the geotargeting settings to focus on the appropriate locale, but the wrong country TLD is still coming up at the top via google.ca. What's the best way to ensure our Canadian site comes up instead of the US site on google.ca? Thanks, Tory Smith
Technical SEO | | travelocitysearch
Travelocity0 -
If I point a domain name to a new faster server, will I lose some keyword ranking?
I'm redesigning a client's site, breaking up content into separate pages and moving the site to a managed server keeping the same domain name. Will I lose any link juice or keyword ranking for site even if I 301 redirect the old pages to the new titled pages?
Technical SEO | | sirmarkthomas0