July 4, 2008

Multiple Domains

It's a not uncommon practice for people to purchase many different web addresses, and point them at one single website.

The reason people do this, is that a web address containing a keyword will tend to rank well on search engines when someone searches using that keyword or phrase. If a company has a list of several keywords for their products or services, they may perceive that that would allow them to rank more highly for each individual keyword by having a domain with that word in it. By then pointing all of their domains at one website they maximise their opportunity of their site being found.

In practice, this isn't the best thing to do at all. Many search engines view this as a "spamming" technique, and can penalise the listing of sites as a result. It may well be that the top five results for a particular keyword search all seem to be different websites, but all click through to the same place. As an end user, that would be immensely frustrating. The thing to bear in mind as well is that much of your site's relevance comes from other external sites that link to it. If you have four or five good links coming in to your site, better that they all point to one domain, rather than to one each!!

Protecting your trade name by buying several domains (eg .co.uk and .com) would be an understandable and acceptable practice, however, pointing 'www.keyword1.co.uk' and 'www.keyword2.co.uk' etc to the same website would be likely to be viewed as spamming by many of the search engines, and could result in your being dropped from their index.

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