Have you received a phone call offering you a fantastic opportunity to buy a domain name? Will extra domain names help your SEO?
Perhaps someone who runs the same kind of business as you, based in the same area and who has a very successful website, has decided to retire. And theyโd like you to have first chance to buy their domain name.
Sound to good to be true?
Sorry, itโs a load of poppycock.
Itโs funny, but in the last couple of weeks Iโve heard of an electrician, a solar panel installer and a double glazing installer all deciding to retire. And their business is so successful, theyโve decided to close it down rather than sell it as a going concern. Amazingly, they all had websites that had their type of business and their geographical location as the domain name, and not their company name.
How convenient. And for only a few hundred pounds, you can have that domain name. Quickโฆ hang up the phone.
Why buying extra domain names is a waste of money
- A domainโs Google ranking is based on a complex combination of the content, incoming links and social sharing of all the pages on that site. Change any one of those and the rank is recalculated. If youโre not buying the whole website, youโre not buying the rank.
- Google is very good at spotting duplicate content, so having multiple domain names pointing to the same site is pointless and can even be harmful.
- If you create separate sites for each domain name, each website needs to be unique enough, with itโs own content and popularity to rank in its own right. Itโs hard enough ranking one site, never mind 3 or 4. And then youโve got your own sites competing against each other.
- In September 2012 Google launched the EMD update โ a filter on โexact match domainโ to prevent poor quality sites from ranking well simply because they had words that match search terms in their domain names. The EMD update only affected a tiny percentage of websites but, as a sign of things to come, if Google donโt like it, then we definitely donโt like it.
- Many people consider this kind of domain name spammy โ they would rather do business with a company that has a recognisable name.
So an exact match domain never works?
No, they can still work well, for the time being at least. If you have a specific service that you provide in one small location and donโt currently have a website, then it may well work for you. For example, we recently built a site that went straight into position one, page one of Google for โwhitstable house clearanceโ โ the same afternoon that it went live. Of course, type in any other location near to Whitstable and it wonโt rank at all. So then youโve got to either start building lots of unique sites or put so much more content on the original site that the exact match becomes pointless.
If you already have a website then, in most cases, you are far better off spending any time or money improving that site, rather than going off buying more sites. If you need some help with that, or you think you may be one of those special cases that can benefit, then we can help โ it costs nothing to ask.
Have you received one of these phone calls?
Weโd love to hear about it in the comments box below!