Multiple Domains

Are multiple domains good for SEO? Many businesses are offered domains similar to what they already have but are these domains beneficial to help your search engine optimisation?

Quite a common question we are asked by our clients is whether purchasing an additional or multiple domains is beneficial for their existing website. As we mainly deal with small to medium businesses, the short answer is no. Purchasing additional domain in the hope it will help your current website could actually harm, rather than help, your website’s SEO as well as confuse potential customers and the search engines.

What is a domain?

A domain is the website URL i.e. www.eastleighseoservices.co.uk.  A domain identifies the website, which is translated from an IP address, and is unique to each website.  Like a physical address or telephone number.

Multiple domains pointing to one website

A multiple domain strategy will only really work if you have multiple brands that can be used to fill a related market niche – probably having a different website corresponding to each domain.  This could take a long time to work – costing extra hours, energy and money. So it’s not really beneficial to smaller businesses.  Even if you opt to have several websites with different content, you’ll be competing with yourself to be ranked on the search engines.

However, if you do want to pursue this idea there are three main ways of purchasing new domains that may help:

• Buy completely new domains –  (Cheapest and safest option) don’t use ‘exact’ keyword match domains, use partial match instead. Try to stay under 15 characters and buy .co.uk. We recommend Tsohost to purchase domains.
• Buy an expired domain – Buy with caution! The expired domain may not be healthy enough and could actually have bad or untrustworthy history!
• Buy existing domains – Could be expensive – and heed the above about the history!

Having multiple domains pointing to the same website can cause duplicate issues on search engines. They will recognise the domains as separate entities serving exactly the same content.

In short, when a company sends you an email offering you to buy a domain that sounds like it could complement your existing domain you’re better off refusing. Especially if you are already embarking on an SEO strategy for a current business domain.