Redirecting to an exact match root domain: good, bad, or neutral?

[MackenzieFogelson]

We have a client who wants to secure an exact match domain for their new website, but it's very long.

They're wondering about securing an additional domain that is much shorter for marketing purposes (business cards, email addresses, etc).

We would then 301 redirect the short domain to the main domain. Are we going to see negative SEO implications from that?

[SimonCullum]

Hi Mackenzie

That's a great question.

The main potential drawback with this is:

• If the short domain that's on a 301 redirect is used for marketing purposes, chances are this domain will acquire a lot of the inbound links. Some of that link juice will be lost through the redirects, it's better for Search if all the links go straight to the domain that's hosting the website (homepage and internal pages).

Also, it's not advisable for usability to market & promote a domain that's redirected, doesn't give a great first impression.

Exact** match domains**don't have the SEO weight that they used to (that's the general consensus, especially with regards to Google), so it's not a real must to have an exact match domain.

Suggestion: Perhaps the short domain would be suitable as the actual website address, or perhaps one in-between with a 'partial match' on the keywords, which is both short enough for Usability and short enough to market & promote effectively, whilst still incorporating the main single keyword or two for Search (mainly 'result to click conversion' from the search result snippet that is).

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

[MackenzieFogelson]

Thanks, Simon, that's really helpful, actually.

I appreciate the prompt response.

We were also considering the fact that a lot of links will contain simply the web address, so although using keywords in the domain doesn't give us the "exact match power", it may give us some keywords in our anchor text.

How would you recommend we weight this possibility in our decision?

[SimonCullum]

You're welcome Mackenzie.

I can see the logic in your thoughts around a lot of the links being the web address (which a lot of them will be) which would help search as the keywords would then be in the links, though isn't as straight forward as that unfortunately.

Those links would, I believe, be classed as brand links, so most of the benefit would be based around brand searches which you're likely to rank top for anyway.

All the main search engines love a variety of anchor text in links, covering both generic and longtail phrases.  So as a part of the link management, I'd suggest that when you find a good quality inbound link that is the web address, if appropriate to do so, approach them and kindly ask if they'd be willing to change the link text from the website address to some relevant anchor text of your choosing. Some will oblige, some won't.

Hope that makes sense, not always easy to describe,

Simon

[MackenzieFogelson]

An excellent point.

Again, thanks so much for the feedback.

[SimonCullum]

You're welcome, glad to be able to help