One of my favorite spoof web sites is the "3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference" by a gifted humorist and blogger, John Walkenbach, www.j-walkblog.com. (All of us have received those junk emails, so I hope you'll click on the image below and get a good laugh today by reading through this 2 page site.)
3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference
One of the break-out sessions at this "pretend" conference is titled -
Practical Discussion:
Mallam Mahmud Abacah answers the question, "Are 10 million emails a day too many?"
The same can be asked, "Are having dozens of domain names for your web site too many?" Absolutely! You only need 1 great one! Not 5, not 10, not 20, or even more. This is a very common misconception by real estate agents that "more is better" - "the more domain names I have pointing to my site, the better all of this will work." This is counter to making a web site search engine friendly. The agent with the most domain names doesn't win! It's the agent who gets their site found who can win. Let's try to understand why buying all of these domain names can just be a waste of your time and money.
Take a look at the image below to understand how the search engines display a site in the search results.
Here is a screen shot from Yahoo! showing the top results from a search for "dana point real estate" in California. Notice the 3 key elements the search engine is displaying. The hyperlink in blue is coming from the "Title" tag in the head of the HTML document. Then the listing's descriptive statement is primarily made up of the "description tag" or the actual text content from the page. Lastly in green, we see the domain name of the web site itself. So the domain name is the least important key for the search results and actually has little to do with it at all.
Does it matter if you use a geographical name in the domain name? Not really. Look above - www.jillmcgovern.com doesn't contain "Dana Point" and neither does www.realatrends.com. Yet both of them are in the Top 3.
From Ross Dunn, CEO of Step Forth Placement in August, 2006 - http://news.stepforth.com/2006-news/Ross-Dunn-Answers-SEO-Questions.shtml
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1. Question: Does a domain name play a part in SEO?
From: anonymous
Ross: Yes it can help but only marginally. If your domain name includes the primary keyphrase that you want rankings for it will help boost the perceived relevance of your website. I generally consider keywords in a domain to be a 1-5% advantage in the rankings war. The simple fact is that before keyword domains really help rankings your site must be well optimized. Theoretically if you were head to head with your competitor and both sites were equal in optimization and online popularity but only site #2 had keywords in their domain they would get a better ranking.
In short, domains play a role in rankings under only the most competitive of terms where every percentage of advantage is a welcome edge.
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You also need to be aware that the top search engines keep threatening to start banning web sites that have multiple domain names pointing to them. They haven't done it yet, but it could happen at any time.
Straight from Google's Webmaster Guidelines -
Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site...
Quality guidelines - specific guidelines
- Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
From Yahoo's Guidelines -
Yahoo! strives to provide the best search experience on the Web by directing searchers to high-quality and relevant web content in response to a search query.
What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted
Some, but not all, examples of the more common types of content that Yahoo! does not want include:
- Multiple sites offering the same content (note: just another way of saying multiple domains bringing up the same site)
Why do these search engines say this? Because search engines are there to help the visitor - not you, the site owner - (and of course to sell pay per click ads). They feel the consumer is being "faked out" if they keep seeing listings in the search results, but when they are clicked, these keep bringing up the exact same site, just showing up under a different domain name. Search engines feel this is skewing the results to the detriment of their visitor. And if the visitor keeps seeing the same site again and again, just under different domain names, the visitor might think that this search engine's rankings are all screwy and leave to go elsewhere. Thus, this search engine looses ad revenue due to a loss of visitors. So Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live are not necessarily trying to be the "Domain Police" - they are just looking after their own interests of providing a positive experience to their visitors so they can sell more advertising.
Get 1 great .com domain name - one that is easy to spell, easy to remember, and doesn't contain dashes ("-"). Spend your marketing budget on getting your web site found by visitors - not on buying a bunch of domain names. Getting found and capturing visitors to your business is what is really important... not how many domain names you own.
If you need more help, just email me and I'll be happy share other SEO ideas with you.
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