Hi Jill,

Love your newsletter and have been reading it religiously for 2 years. It has been a big help with redesigning my site.

Here's my question:

Recently I learned Google has tons of different domains that all point to their Google home page. I thought this was considered spamming?

If this is not spamming, would the same technique work for our site? I would like to purchase a variety of domains that are variations on our original site URL and have them point to our home page. Please advise as I don't want to jeopardize all of the SEO work I have already put into my site.

Thank you,

Louise

Jill's Response

Hi Louise,

Having multiple domain names that all land at the same site isn't spamming, and it's highly doubtful that Google is trying to rank higher in Google by using them!

It's important to remember that there are many, many reasons why companies do what they do. Practically every site in the world has multiple domain names. Many people buy the .com, .net and .org version of their site for branding purposes. Others (like me) just buy domains that they like but have no use for at the moment, and simply point them to their main site.

It's not spamming and there's no deception involved. It's got nothing to do with trying to make the search engines think their site is something it isn't. It just is what it is -- a site that happens to have multiple domain names that all take you to the same place. End of story.

The domains neither help nor hurt search engine rankings as they have nothing to do with the engines.

Does this mean you should buy multiple domains? Certainly, if you feel like parking a bunch of domains at your DNS, you should feel free to do so. Have a field day! I personally own 10 or 20 domain names that I've collected through the years. It's fun! But it has nothing to do with search engines, and has no bearing on rankings, either positive or negative.

On the other hand, if you're thinking more in terms of purchasing and creating doorway domains, that's another story altogether. Doorway domains are sites and/or pages that are created with the sole purpose of manipulating link popularity and gaining extra listings in the search results. Buying lots of domains and adding a little bit of keyword-rich copy on them in hopes that they'll rank highly, and then linking them to your main site (or redirecting them), is definitely spammy. The ironic thing is that it's doubtful those even work for very long anymore (if at all). They're one of the oldest tricks in the book and search engines learned how to filter them out ages ago. They may work for a short period of time until they're discovered, but that's about it.

Personally, I find that it's much more fun to try to figure out how to work with search engines, not against them.

Hope this helps!

Jill

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