Lots of [keyword]in[city].com domains - what to do?

[RedKeyDesigns]

A client of mine had purchased a lot of domains. They all start with the same keyword following by "in" following by a cities name. The cities are all the cities around their location. They had the pages set up to all look the same with very small differences in content. A bunch of duplicate content. All of them have a DA of 8 and PA of 19. There are 35 of them total. They get roughly 30-60 hits a month each but it's mostly all spam.

The idea was for users to type in [keyword] in [city] in Google and these websites show up. A competitor of my clients had done something similar which was working for them. The main website (separate of these) gets ~1500 visits per month of non spam traffic and gets ~10 referrals from these websites.

What should be done with these domains? Chalk it off as a bad idea and have them 301 to the main website until they expire? Or can they be changed into something useful? If so, how?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Note: I did search for this similar topic but it was hard to search it out and I did not find an answer.

Thanks!

[EGOL]

What should be done with these domains?

I'd let them expire and use the savings to buy beer.

I got lots of beer money now that I allowed my domain collection to expire.   I probably could have made more money listing them on Sedo and waiting for dumbos to buy them.

[Chris.Menke]

I second the beer money strategy : )

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Redkey!

Oh, my, I do not envy you this situation. What the client has done is one of those few things that would actually make me turn and run, but if you are already under contract with them, these would be my suggestions:

1. First, have a really good and honest chat with the client about the 'iffiness' of their chosen strategy. Tell them that you totally get that they were just imitating what appeared to be working for a competitor, but that the competitor is in danger of big let down at any time in the future if their microsites are, in fact, duplicative/thin/spammy. If the client is in a market that is a spammy or non-competitive one, the competitors' pages may be really old ones that are just gathering dust, waiting for some update from Google to blast them into oblivion. I know this kind of junk exists out there in the SERPs, and that some of it is still ranking well (sadly) - I run into it not infrequently. I consider it an object lesson in Google's failure to deliver quality for some phrases, but not a smart opportunity for creating a marketing strategy. Google is always trying to improve result quality, and one day, I believe these types of sites will meet their deserved doom:) I would talk all of this over with the client and describe the strategy as clumsy at best and very risky at worst.

2. There are very few instances in which I can imagine that a single business could turn out 35 highly valuable city websites. Unless there is some extremely decisive factor that makes Boston Business different from Cape Cod Business, there is really no legitimate reason to have different websites. I would, indeed, advise the client to let them expire, unless he can explain a real-world reason for having a unique website for each city, backed up by a plan to create completely unique content for each of the sites.

3. The preferred approach here would be to help this client take new pride in a single website for his brand, with strong, unique pages for each city with which he has a legitimate relationship. By building out an extremely strong, helpful, accurate website, he will be building his brand and doing what he needs to to alert bots and humans to his presence in the various cities. I don't know the nuances of your client's business, if it's single-location or multi-location, if it's B&M or an SAB, but, in general, this would be the very best approach. If he can take all of the effort he's likely been putting into managing 35 different websites and put it into managing just 1, think how awesome his site could become!

You might like to read:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

I hope this straight stuff from me is helpful. You actually have the opportunity to educate this client and put him on a much better path that could serve his business well in future!

[MiriamEllis]

Chris & Egol - you guys are a couple of jokers