420 Design Blog
Multiple domains, one site and Google
12 May 2006 | Angie H
Some website owners are so determined to get ranked well on Google that they buy up a bunch of domain names and simply redirect them in some way to their primary site. Unfortunately, this has been a no-no for some time now. What's worse, I only just found this out. The good news is, none of our clients have done that as far as we know. (Whew!)
Why not?
To put it as simple as possible, search engines like Google consider all those domains as duplicate content. Duplicate content is considered search engine spamming. In some cases, the search engine will simply ignore the other domains and just rank one (making all those domains a waste of money). But most often, all the domains get penalized or completely banned. Here's the bit that is important to note though: getting penalized will happen if you are actively promoting the other domains. That includes submitting to Google and other search engines for indexing.
Huh?
Yeah, I had to wrap my head around that one too. Let's use this very site as an example. We have one other domain that is parked on our servers. Typing it into a web browser brings you straight to this site. We've been doing this for at least 3 years and it hasn't affected our search engine ranking. (Note: doing a search on Google for the exact domain, however, brings up no results.)
So what gives? Well, we don't promote the second domain. At all. Ever. It's there mainly to protect our brand. For instance, try typing in www.gooogle.com (notice the extra 'o'). It takes you straight to the site you meant to go to. We've essentially done something similar.
So now what?
Having several domains isn't necessarily a bad thing, particularly if you're in it to protect your brand (for example, having .net, .biz, and .org versions of your URL). They won't, however, help your search engine ranking.
Instead, it's better to focus on your primary domain. Not only will it save you money in the long run, it'll keep you from losing sleep at night wondering if your site will be banned from Google. It's just a better idea to make your one site as good as possible for Google and other search engines.