Are domain variations hurting our rank?

[alism]

Hi,

I have a client who registered many different variations of their domain name, that are pointing to the website. Now I see that many high value links are not linking to the main domain, but a hyphen variation.

So when the main domain is something like www.brandservicename.com

The links go to www.brand-service-name.com

I suppose they should change all those links (if possible), but does it really make a difference?

Thank you!

[BruceA]

This is always the challenge for buying multiple domain variations.  Matt Cutts mentioned this on one of his webnars.

As long as the 301 redirects are working and also rel canonicals are in place and href lang tags where appropriate then Google will know which site is the primary site and that they are related. But you may in my opinion loose some quality as this will be shared between the different .com sites.

Google would really prefer that you focus your energies on building "One" strong site and develop links to that site. I am not sure why you would want loads of .coms active though.  I can understand brand protections, so buy the domain but leave them dormant.

If it were (edit typo) me, I would only 301 local domains to the .com site and not .com to .com.  This for me is confusing for the end user.  301 redirect for "www.brandservicename.ca" or www.brandservicename.de" with the right heading href etc. but not  www.brand-service-name.com to www.brandservicename.com.

Other Mozers' opinions will be useful too

Bruce

[sachin-sv]

Hi Alism,

Are they not redirecting (301) all domains to the main domain?

Are they doing link building for other domains as well?

[alism]

Hello,

they are all 301 redirects. At first they build the links for the hyphen-domain, but than decided to keep the non-hyphen domain as the main one.

I am just wondering if the redirect transports 100% of the link power to the main domain.

[BruceA]

No it only transports approx 90-99% of the power.  You lose some in the redirect.

Bruce

[sachin-sv]

If you can, then modify those links and direct them to the main domain. If not, don't put much effort...rather, I would advice you to invest that time in creating new more relevant links which can help you more

Also,  there is no difference between a 301 and a link in terms of PageRank dilution.

According to Matt, if you have many redirects, like chains of them from one url to another to another, that is a known bad thing. But one or so won't hurt you.

Here is video link where Matt has answered the question- What percentage of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect?- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw