Nowadays we see a situation when business site owners own multiple domains for the same business instead of having one sole domain for their website. This brings up a valid and good question: multiple domain SEO – good or bad?

There is no single answer as to whether it is good or bad in respect to SEO, however, professional SEO managers are quite skeptical about increasing their number of domains under one business umbrella.

Why do companies buy multiple domains for their business?

There are a couple common reasons why this is done:

1. A company purchases combinations of the company name and different domain suffixes in bulk to protect its web traffic, brand name, SEO, and business positioning from supposed rivalry of the same-named or similarly named businesses or competition. This is done in an attempt to secure their web site’s traffic from unwanted business competition.
2. A company aiming to reach the top of the search lists will use frequently searched word combinations as a basis for the domain name. For example, if you are selling grass seeds you may use grass.com as your primary domain, and may buy such domains as greengrass.com, growgrass.com, rocky-mountain-high-grass.com and many other combinations. What type of grass we are discussing here, we will leave to your imagination.

What is bad about it?

The idea of running several domains as mentioned above would suggest increased site traffic and better ranking results. Nevertheless, the mentioned approaches are not as efficient as it may seem for the following reasons:

Advertisement

1. Several similar domain names can simply confuse clients and lead to an uncertain impression from them.
2. If the site owner decides to duplicate the existing content from the primary site to a newly registered domain, the latter may become invisible to search engines. Search engines such as Google will penalize sites that have duplicate content, so as of this writing, it is wise to avoid it. Obviously, this big drawback nullifies all the time and money investment done by the site owner.
3. The site owner may decide to create unique content for the newly bought domains. It can  definitely bring more traffic, but would consume a large amount of time for the new site creation, management and SEO support involved with making and maintaining several unique web sites.
4. Money from extra costs which are spent on new domains, hosting, development and technical support for several sites could instead be put into an upgrade of the existent web content as well as good advertisements or marketing campaigns that yield better results.

Cases when multiple domains are justified

The opposite notion is applicable when it comes to an area specific business. If you decide to sell your evergreen grass in Greenland (why not?) it will be a wise SEO decision to emphasize on your geographic location by using a country-defined domain suffix. If you want your site to be seen in local Google rankings (google.gl in our example case) please don’t forget to use the domain suffix .gl on your company domain name (www.grass.gl). This solution will work the best in combination with unique content and information suitable for local customers such as contacts, order regulations, local currency acceptance, and the like.

Conclusion

As it can be seen from this article, running a single site requires less effort than working on multiple domains. Focusing your resources on one company website is a way to hit the goal of having a highly-effective and well-managed business tool.

If you have any ideas or questions about this post please feel free to comment here!