After a recent discussion with a friend on facebook I decided to leave a tip about SEO and registering multiple domains. There is a common misconception that registering many domains loosely based on keywords for your main website, and filling them with multiple backlinks to the site you wish to rank well for will serve your website well from an SEO perspective. Sorry but thats not how it works anymore in my opinion. Why?….
Well…. firstly Google isn’t stupid, it’s algorithms are very sophisticated and to be honest no body really knows what or how they go about ranking sites, Google only give guidelines that they promote to be good practice that we should follow and this is what I base my opinions on.
There are two types of SEO: onsite seo, everything that is coded on your website pages. The other is off site seo, these are all the links that are on other website domains around the internet that point to your main website.
In recent years Google released Caffeine & Panda, these are just a couple of many algorithms that Google use when a search is submitted in the Google search engine. They are based on websites having fresh and active content. Fresh meaning recently added content to the internet like, news, new pages of content, captioned images or blog items added to a site. Active meaning content that changes on those page ie comments on a blog, twitter feeds, news snippets that change on a regular basis.
So lets call your main site A. You have several other sites that corner keywords and domains etc, lets call them N (several sites) Now in order to get good results from N you have to keep them Active and Fresh – this doesn’t generally happen as they are left static although they do have lots of keyword and links etc pointing to A it’s worthless link juice as they are left static. The more a site becomes stagnant the less likely Google is going to consider it as good link juice and spiders it less and less. You are better off getting good quality links on a site that is active and constantly changing, for instance the BBC website, of course this is hypothetical 🙂
This also works in reverse. For instance if you add fresh content to site A, Google is more likely to come back and spider the site because the site has changed and has fresh content. Again this will encourage what’s known as link baiting. If your content is good and you use sharing functionality like the Facebook like button, share on twitter, Google +1 etc, your visitors might like to share this information, thus site A gets a backlink on a frequently spidered social media site. In turn this means your site is regularly index as well and thats a good thing!
It’s also worth mentioning that newly registered domains are sandboxed by Google for an initial period, maybe 6 or even 12 months depending on the activity of that site. The site has to gain authority and trust first before Google will give it any respect and consider any links to be good link juice.
There are good and bad strategies and what I’m really saying here is, if you are going to register multiple domains stuffed with keywords then you really need to keep those sites as active and fresh as your main site to make that strategy work from an SEO perspective. What do you think? I would love to get your feedback.