Value of domain name for domain authority. Please help to figure out!

[kirupa]

I am doing SEO for an appliance repair company. Their company website's domain doesn't have high authority, and I am going to increase that by link earning and content improving. I think a better domain name might also help me out. The current URL contain the word "appliance" but doesn't have "repair" in it. I am thinking a new domain that would contain both keywords will serve better. Could you please share with me your thought on this? Am I in the right direction, or not at all?

I know Google penalizes mirror sites since this they are considered as duplicated content. I'll upload my content to the new domain and make the old one point to that new URL. I am wondering if canonical might help? Or 301 redirect will be a better solution? Any advise would be highly appreciated! Thank you!

[LoganRay]

Hi,

I'd stick with the domain name you're currently using. There is no SEO value to what domain you have. This used to be true ~10 years ago, which is why you see a lot of domains out there like AirConditioningRepairHouston.com, etc.. You may not have much domain authority right now with the current domain, but if you switch, you'll have zero. Additionally, any links you already have will lose about 10% of their value when you redirect them to a new site.

[kirupa]

Thanks for your reply! Would you agree that AirConditioningRepairHouston.com might not have SEO value at the moment, but if it is optimized for the keyword "air conditioning repair" and has my company contact info, my company would benefit overall? Especially if it has stoverepairhouston.com, refrigeratorrepairhouston.com, etc in its disposal? Or it is considered to be a black hat SEO?

[LoganRay]

That's getting a bit into the black-hat realm. I would stay away from any strategy where you have microsites for each service offered. Linking back and forth between microsite domains like you mentioned is going to look very sketchy to search engines. These days, SEO is much more about the quality of your content and how much of an expert you are in your niche, and less about the keywords you can stuff in your site.

[kirupa]

What do you think Google exactly would penalize in this case? Microsites or my company original website?

[LoganRay]

If they can determine that they're connected (which is highly likely since you'd be linking back and forth), all of them.

[kirupa]

But I wouldn't be linking back and forth. All I would do is providing my phone number and service request form. Would that be the reason to penalize me?

[LoganRay]

Even if you're not linking back and forth, you're still diluting your SEO value over many domains, as opposed to providing one place to demonstrate expertise in your niche. However many domains your spreading your content over, is how many times you'll be duplicating some of your work. Say you have 5 domains, one for each appliance type, then you're reporting and conducting analysis for 5 sites, you're updating 5 XML sitemaps & 5 robots files, 5 different sites to get/monitor reviews for, 5 sites to monitor rank for....you get the point. Additionally, if you get a really good link for _one _of those sites, it only benefits that domain, whereas if you're operating all under one site, that link helps all service lines, not just the one whose domain got that link.

[kirupa]

Thank you very much, that helped a lot!

[LoganRay]

Glad to help!

[GlobeRunner]

You may want to consider a .REPAIR new gTLD domain name. One of the keywords is in the ending (in the TLD), and we've seen good results when sites have migrated to an appropriate new gTLD domain name. In your case, you may be able to get a really good, short, memorable .REPAIR domain.

If you migrate the old site to the new .REPAIR domain name  using 301 redirects and the Google Change of Address Tool, you won't see any negative effects--your rankings may in fact get better.

[kirupa]

Thank you for your idea! It haven't even crossed my mind since some time ago I read that .toys, .repair, etc. domains are quite far from competition with .com, .net, and .org.

[GlobeRunner]

The new gTLD domain names are, in fact, treated exactly the same as any other TLD such as .COM, .NET, and .ORG by Google. They even wrote a blog post about it. However, we have been seeing very good results when it comes to using keyword rich new gTLD domain names.

[kirupa]

Thanks for sharing your experience! I'll look for the blog post on this topic for sure.