Okay guys, this is a hefty question that I hope someone can enlighten me.

 

I have one main domain... and I have about 30 other domains all relating to my domain in some way. They are 301 redirected to the main domain or some variation of the main index page. They are all in Google's Webmaster tools. When I go to look at where my domains are showing up in the search results the only one that shows me results in the main domain. None of the others have data. The whole idea of having these domains is to help me with placement but they're not being seen. How can I get them to be seen. Some are addon domains with my host Bluehost and others are parked. What's the difference and does that matter? Please enlightenmen. Let me know if I need to clarify anything

because your doing a 301 from the domain google wont list that domain in the serps, but they do exist so are in webmaster tools...

 

and its debatable that they are actually helping your rankings and if they are it's likely that in the future this method will be classes as black hat resulting in a ban.

 

hope that helps

okay that kinda make sense but I also have a main domain that is connected directly to the hosting account. the main domain that I was talking about is actually parked and it's in the SERPS because I use it for everything it's the one that's showing up in the SERPs so one would think that since it's a parked domain then it wouldnt' show up in the SERPs but it does? Since it does what do I need to do to replicate this? I'm sorry this is getting really confusing but I don't want my domain listed in this because it will show up in the SERPs and I don't want this associated with my company's name. Will this happen? god i'm in circles

OK, I'm lost! Trying to keep your real domain names out of it let's use some phony names... is this right:

 

Your main domain is farm.com

 

You've also got pig.com, cow.com, chicken.com etc.

 

And all these 'animal' domains are redirected to farm.com.

 

But farm.com is actually parked on land.com?

 

But you want the 'animal' domains to appear in the SERPs?

 

yea that's right. but farm is parked at land and and farm is the one in the SERPs. So I want the pig cow and chicken to be in the SERPs too.

I'm no expert on redirects but a permanent redirect (301) tells search engines that the webpage has permanently moved to a new page so they will 'ignore' what they see as an obsolete page. If search engines didn't do this you'd have 30 sites with duplicate content.

If 'farm.com' is parked on 'land.com' are you using any redirects from 'land.com' to 'farm.com'? I have my .com parked on my .co.uk site and everything redirects to the .co.uk version.

I'd imagine (again I'm no expert) that all these empty domains aren't doing anything for you (it sounds 'blackhatty') and the only way to get the 'animal' domains in the SERPS is to turn the redirects off but then you'd have to give them all their own content.

I'd imagine (again I'm no expert) that all these empty domains aren't doing anything for you (it sounds 'blackhatty') and the only way to get the 'animal' domains in the SERPS is to turn the redirects off but then you'd have to give them all their own content.

 

 

yes it is very blackhatty... um if you want cow.com, pig.com and rat.com to show in the serps, what do you want them to show?

 

if you screw about with things to show farm.com content on the animal domains then thats just dupe content and farm.com will get penalized.

 

also google are a domain name registrar, they just dont sell domains... what this means though is they know land.com, farm.com, cow.com, pig.com all belong to farmer jiles.

 

you need to be VERY carefull how you play with your domains....

 

google show listing results of content without content there is nothing to list in the results...

Okay that make sense. But what if I have ant.com point at a page that's about ants? Is that bad? I mean if I do landing pages that are relevant and aren't just wasted space, but have separate domain names going to them.

 

For example having a page about philadelphia web design and having a domain name like philadelphiawebsites.com go to it. It would be like a landing page but it also wouldn't because it would be pertinant information.

 

Thoughts?

 

-Seth

Forgetting about SEO for a minute (how can I be so blasphemous) and just looking at good business sense...

 

If your farm.com is all about farm animals then if you created satellite sites that focused on specific animals and pointed to farm.com you'd be able to catch different kinds of customers with content specifically designed to catch their attention, pre-sell and lead them to find out more about other animals.

 

Back to SEO (groan!) - apart form just links pointing to farm.com, you'd get a ton more flexibility as you'd be able to optimise each animal website independently. That also goes for other forms of marketing too.

 

My advice for every 'SEO effort' is at least have a real think about whether it's good business sense - what benefits does it give you for real traffic? Of course the best thing is to focus on the business sense first and worry about SEO second.