Dex Landing Pages!

[kbaltzell]

Hello Moz-ers!

Have a question for the community that I'd like some feedback on, here is the situation

• My client owns a local business, which has a website that we built for them last year.
• Rankings and traffic have been great, and they're doing well in a competitive market.
• This client also works with Dex Media, who manages some of the marketing for this business.
• In this effort Dex has purchased a few variations of the branded domain names, and has placed landing pages at these URL's with basic information, phone number, etc. Seems like a standard page for one of these sites.
• These sites have different phone numbers, used for tracking leads from those particular pages.

To me, these seem totally unnecessary and also as though it could be something pulling visitors away from the main website, which details all of their services, etc. It also seems like it could pretty easily confuse or frustrate potential visitors with the 4 similar domain names, each with different numbers of the same business.

I told the client that I thought this might be the case, and at the very least they should ask Dex about acquiring ownership of those extra domains containing their brand in addition to seeing if they would be able to just redirect those URLs to the main domain.

They responded by saying that Google doesn't care about any of this, citing this article:

https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/2643759?hl=en#

To me, that support link appears to not address the issue at hand, as it focuses mainly on proxy URL's being used giving the example of proxy.example.com

Can anyone weigh in here with an opinion? Is there any reason to think that these extra domains would not have a potential negative impact on client traffic/rank for the main domain?

Thanks!

Tyler

[SVmedia]

Hey Tyler, I deal with this same type of thing quite often.  and I'm with you, I wish companies like dex would leave my clients alone.  IMO you are absolutely right,  and I always recommend having 1 single domain - unless there's a darn good reason to do otherwise.

It will hurt traffic/rank to the main domain, or in a best case scenario just be absolutely pointless.  Your client's a local biz - which site will they link to from all their listings, social profiles, and all that?  Let's say someone writes an article about them in a local blog - which site should they link to?  Multiple domains for this type of business will either dilute your SEO efforts or be a waste of resources.  Not to mention be confusing for visitors and install a lack of trust like you were saying.

A website is not inherently an owned asset...you have to own the domain name, the content, etc. for it to actually be valuable to a business.  So you're definitely advising correctly

and yea, that link they sent you has nothing to do with organic search.

[kbaltzell]

Hey Colin,

Thanks for your reply, glad to know I'm not totally alone on this. The client has been pretty frustrated with Dex in general. Dex set up all of their PPC ads to link to these extraneous domains instead of the one actually owned by my client, who wasn't even aware of those extra sites until she found one by accident.

Dex and other similar websites seem desperate, saying pretty much anything to retain clients.

Thanks!

Tyler