Dear Jill,

First, I must commend you on your excellent and consistent work that you provide in each newsletter. It's one of the few emails that I look forward to getting each week.

Our company in Pittsburgh offers many different services. Right now we have top-ten rankings in Google, MSN, etc. for our regional keywords.

So, what we have done is bought some domain names (pittsburghkeyword1.com, pittsburghkeyword2.com, pittsburghkeyword3.com, etc.) and we are going to make these sites content-specific to their URLs. The goal is to now go after national rankings for certain keywords. I have a few questions about all of this:

1.) Since we already have a top-ten ranking for the keywords, are we hurting our main site by creating a "sister site" that hopefully would become the highest ranked site for that phrase?

2.) Will the search engines consider these sites as spam since these "sister sites" all refer to our main site?

3.) Is it realistic to think that we can attack the general keywords (without Pittsburgh) to get high rankings even though the URL is pittsburghkeyword.com? (Since Pittsburgh precedes the keyword, will the search engine disregard it?)

Anything that you can refer me to would be great.

Thanks again,

Paul

Hi Paul,

It seems to me that you'd be treading in dangerous waters to do what you are thinking about doing. The reason is because it sounds as if you're thinking about creating new sites for the sole purpose of gaining extra exposure in the search engines. This is *exactly* the kind of thing that the engines (most specifically Google) would prefer that you DON'T do. It doesn't sound as if you believe your users would be best served by having multiple sites, or anything like that. It appears to be strictly a search engine strategy, and one that I would heartily recommend against using.

So with the above in mind, let me answer your individual questions:

1.) Would you be hurting your main site?

There would definitely be a chance that you would be hurting it. For one thing, you'd be competing with yourself on the same keyword phrases. That's not necessarily bad, as you probably don't mind which site you get found under. However, the risk of Google banning all of your sites is real, which of course would hurt your main site! Google is getting better at analyzing sites that are in their own little cluster. The sites generally all link to each other, but have very few outside links. This is a huge tip-off that they are all owned by one company who's trying to gain extra search engine exposure through multiple domains. It's really one of the oldest SEO tricks in the book, and it's taken the search engines a long time to develop ways of fighting against it. Google seems to have found a way, and sites are getting penalized every month for this sort of thing.

2.) Would the sites be considered spam?

Yes, as stated in my answer to #1, if they did indeed analyze the situation, it would probably be deemed spam by most engines, especially Google. One of the biggest tip-offs would be the fact that they all pointed to the main site. But even if you figured out a good way to do it so they didn't all point to the main site, it would be considered spam once it was brought to their attention. More and more Web site owners are snitching on their competitors these days, so you really have to watch your back!

3.) Could you attack the general keywords with a Pittsburgh URL?

Since words in the URL have very little to do with how you rank in the search engines (if all else is equal), then sure, you could attack any keyword phrases you want to attack. However, anytime you attempt to optimize for general keywords (as opposed to specific keyword phrases) you will make your job more difficult. If you're thinking about optimizing for one word such as "multimedia," for instance, you probably won't have a shot regardless of the URL you're using. Not only that, but someone searching for "multimedia" or nearly any single-word keyword could be looking for something totally different than what you offer.

Search engine optimization is about targeting keywords that describe exactly what you have to offer. This almost always means that you should be optimizing for multiple-keyword phrases, not single keywords. They will be easier to get ranked with, and they will generally convert your visitors into buyers more easily.

Jill