URL purchasing strategy

[Petersen11]

Hi,

At my company we have alot of URLs (around 500), which are purchased for different reasons, some for defensive reasons, some because we think we potentiallly could use them in the future.

Now we want to "clean up" this list, in order to minimize costs, butt im unsure about some of the URLs, and have some questions that in some way all are SEO-related.

• How used are the .xxx domains, we have alot of them of defensive reasons, but im not sure that we have anything to fear, whats your take on that? - and arent .xxx domains excluded by the search engines?

• We have alot of URLs which we redirect to our main domain, some of them have been their own domains before, and some of them are just redirects. When i remove these, i get two challenges:

1. If someone links to that domain, i wont be able to redirect them anymore.

2. If the domain have a good Page Authority in itself, i loose that link juice.

• How do i proceed in order to get knowledge about the above two factors, that are crucial in order to decided wheter to keep or delete domains?

[matbennett]

This is all really dependent on how big a target the brand is.  If I were representing a household name I'd buy every permutation I could lay my hands on.  If it was a 1 man band I'd probably buy just the most obvious exact match names.  For most projects it would be somewhere in between.

As an example, I've not bought the .xxx names for anything. I don't see that any project I work on is particularly a target for anything that negative and certainly none of them are likely to move in to that market.   It all really depends on what you are defending against.

Redirects

First, the obvious point: You do have 301s in place right?

Moving on your points 1&2 assume that those domains have some link equity.  You can check this in open site explorer. enter the redirected domain then read the message in the yellow box. click the link in there and it will show you the links pointing to that domain.

Open Site Explorer doesn't show you all links, but it will show most of those likely to be passing value.

That should show you which domains are worth keeping based on link equity.

[JustinTaylor88]

Hi

It definitely makes sense to clean up your domain list, an extensive domain list is often time consuming to maintain and frequently the majority of the domains deliver little or no value.

I would personally take the following approach:

1. Is the domain worth having and does it represent any value to the business?
A: yes - keep it
B: no - go to question 2

2. Does the domain offer any benefit to the site in terms of link juice/domain auth/page auth etc (I would check this thru Open Site Explorer, Majestic and Ahrefs if you have access to them)
Yes - Keep it
No - got to question 3

3. Is the domain potentially harmful to the site?
.xxx domains are indexed by Google, enter the following into the Google search bar "site:*.xxx" and you will see plenty of sites. My concern would be .xxx site are targeted to porn industry, if your website has no relation to this industry Google could decide to penalise you for this in the future, so i would be very tempted to ditch/park all the .xxx domains unless there is a good reason for keeping them.

Ultimately any decision to ditch domains should be taken with caution, as once you loose a domain, you can't get it back cheaply or easily.

I hope that helps

Justin

[Petersen11]

Hi,

Thanks for reply - yes, we have the 301 redirects in order.

We are quite a big company, and high profiled, so we have to be aware of competitors or other people who wants to damage our brand, but then again, we also need to cut our costs :-).

So the way i will proceed with this is:

1. Make sure we have the most important branded URLs, or actually all of them, so all ourdomain.everything, so that we also have www.ourdomain.xxx.

2. Go through the URLs we have, and keep the ones that give us link equity - i will test this via Site Explorer, and get rid of the ones that does not have any link equity.