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Q: I have an established website for my consulting business (let’s call it my-boring-name.com.) I’ve recently added a really exciting white paper to my site, and I think I can get a lot of links to it – especially if I register a new and memorable domain for it (let’s call it really-exciting-paper.com). I feel strongly that I’ll get more traffic and links if I use this new domain! But I want to keep my old domain around too because it’s doing well.
My hosting company offers a service that they call a pointer domain. As I understand it, this means that users entering really-exciting-paper.com will always see really-exciting-paper.com as the URL in the browser address window, even when they click into pages on my-boring-name.com.
I’ve been reading on the Internet that pointer domain is also called domain masking, and that it isn’t a good idea. Why?
A: The warnings you read online are correct. The problem with domain masking is that it creates perceived duplicate content in search engines, particularly Google. In the example above, Google would see the two addresses, http://www.my-boring-name.com/page.html and http://www.really-exciting-paper.com/page.html as two different sites showing the same content. Because Google and other search engines do not want to display multiple copies of the same content in their search results, they will likely choose one or the other of these URLs to index. Worse yet, if Google runs into a lot of duplicate content on your domains, it might decide that one or both are not worth visiting as often. Other penalties may also be possible. In short, it’s likely to be detrimental to your search engine presence and not a good strategy.
Your situation is fairly common. Even our own website, at http://www.yourseoplan.com is serving the dual purpose of being a companion site to our book, as well as a corporate brochure for our consulting business. A separate URL,http://www.gravitysearchmarketing.com redirects to the services page using a 301 redirect.
Here are a few options that might work for you:
- You could keep the two separate sites and build each of them up with unique content, and be transparent about the interlinks between them. This would be along the lines of someone like Jim Boykin, who has a corporate site at http://www.webuildpages.comand an individual site at http://www.jimboykin.com, each interlinking with full disclosure.
- You could combine your materials into a single website. This is the approach we took with this site.
- You could set up the two separate websites and then wait for a period of time for links to really-exciting-paper.com to build up. Then you could set up a 301 redirect to pass the accumulated link equity to the other domain.
- You could follow the pointer/masking approach that you describe, and then just let the chips fall where they may, assuming that one or both of your URLs may get penalties.
- You could proceed with the pointer/masking approach, but exclude indexing of one or the other URL using the robots.txt file. While we do not know for a certainty that the link “juice” will still carry through the unindexed site to the indexed site, we think it would.
You can probably guess our recommendation by seeing which approach we took on our own site (combining into a single site). We also think that Jim Boykin’s approach has merit if you have the ability to develop significant unique content on each site. The 301 redirect option will definitely pass the link equity, but is more of a “one time” event, not a solution for the long term. The last two approaches are your two extremes: take all the risk, or remove risk entirely. We hope one of these ideas will suit your needs and preferences!
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
So what if you don’t mask, but do point the site? I am a domain reseller and have 500 some domains all pointing to the same site. Buyers complained that when they went to the link (my main page) that they couldn’t quickly see their name so then questioned if we really held the domain, so I added masking a few months ago. Now, if I search “vistala,” a sample name I might own, my page doesn’t show up high among the searches, even though I may own “vistala.com.” To be honest, my site never seemed to rank high, before or after I did the masking. Yet, for one of my domains a “VistalaEnergy.com” incorporated. Before the company, I showed up pretty high. Now with their press relseases, I’m lucky to get 5th or 6th page. Does NOT masking help and/or any other hints?
The domains of mine that rank high and the ones that don’t seem almost entirely random. Not sure if there are any things I can do with such a unique set up. My main site contains purchase information and lets people see our other holdings, but doesn’t win us any points with Google, I’m sure.
Doesn’t owning the .com of a search word put you higher in the search? It used to! If you look at “naming” you see “naming.net” and “naming.com” ranked pretty high (and have been for years), but the company that bought that .com never made it very high BEFORE they bought the name.
Just curious.
Hi I bought new domain hireoscommercedeveloper.com and forward it to http://www.hideveloper.com, will it work for seo my keyword is “hire oscommerce developer ”
Thanks
Dev
Hideveloper.com
Recently I went to GoDaddy as I was considering masking one of my domains. As I was doing so it gave me a form to fill out that included a description, and keywords, etc. I don’t remember filling out such a thing before and was wondering if maybe that was a better option than it once was because of this.
Let’s assume the site is going forwarding and masked to a clickbank site. It would seem that masking where you have the opportunity to match some of the keywords of that website it’s being forwarded to might help your domain being forwarded to rank a bit better than if you didn’t mask it (in that case not being able to match keywords, etc.) Anyone care to comment?
Hi Chris,
Most SEOs believe that having an exact match domain name does help the site rank well for that keyword. For example, if your top target keyword is “blue raincoats”, then having the domain name “blueraincoats.com” for your website may help you rank well for “blue raincoats.” However, it’s not known whether this is a direct factor, or if this is an indirect factor and the ranking improvement comes from the fact that many inbound links use the domain name as the linking text, so if your domain name is “blueraincoats.com”, you’ll get inbound links using the text “blueraincoats.com” as the linking text, and this will improve your rank for “blue raincoats.”
-Gradiva
Hi Chris,
If you want each individual domain to rank well for the keyword that you have in the domain name, I would suggest not masking, and adding individual, unique content on each of these domains that is relevant to the topic. You could then link to each domain from your own business page, which hopefully has some legitimate power to share with these domains. Work on building power to your central business page (which you keep and don’t sell, so it will continue to be an asset for you in the long term), and then you’ll be able to pass SEO power to your domains when you need to.
-Gradiva
Hi,
The question for me is does a keyword-rich-generic domain name with no website, no relevant content as a value in the Google algorithm. If it does then I’ll surely redirect it to my made-up-unknown-name domain to increase traffic. I doubt that’s the case since being the owner of a keyword-rich-generic domain name only says to Google that you had the money to buy it not that you have something relevant, interesting to publish in regards to those keywords. On the other hand if the website content of my made-up-unknown-name is relevant to the redirected keyword-rich-generic domain name, would that make the redirection worth it? I am still trying figure this one out.
Nice article.