Referrals from widget domains

[highersourcesites]

Let's say you are doing seo for a company that sells  5000 widgets.

Let's call their site www.mainsite.com ...

They have already set up ( purchased ) many domains such as www.widget1.com which is one of the widgets they have on their main site. so they might have several hundred of these domains. What is the best use of these domains?

Would it be :

• Have those pages be landing pages with content and pictures and optimized with a link to their main site widget page?
• Or have that domain have a 301 redirect to go  their main site, to the particular page showing that widget for sale off their main site?

Miscellaneous sidebar question -

Since both the main site widget page and the widget domain might be in competition and might have duplicate content, what are the ramifications of not using the canonical tag, and what other considerations might there be? How much must be duplicate content before considering using the canonical tag?

[rtavs]

Hi Ed,

Great question.

I had the same dilemma when I was working with a client in the promotional merchandise industry. What I ended up doing was create a landing page on each of the satelite sites with unique content on it. The landing page was branded in exactly the same way as the main ecommerce site was branded so if the user clicked on any links it would give the appearance that they were on the same website.

As the domains on the satellite site were exact match we could happily blast a couple hundred low quality links with exact anchor text to it to get it to rank on the first page short term. As the landing page linked to the main website it actually helped the main eCommerce site rank for the same keyword.

We stopped any aggressive link building on the satellite and then concentrated on building higher quality and a little bit more trust. As this was going on we were building big trust signals back to the main website and really concentrating heavily on social and super high quality links.

It now has the main site and the satellite sites ranking on the 1st page together, with the landing page ranked above the main site.

However, I think this will be short lived. I am more a fan of building brand and domain authority, so when the time is right I will be redirecting the satellites into the main site category pages. But I want to give the domains plenty of time to age on the own before doing so.

So in summary, put original content on your exact match domain landing pages and brand it the same as the main site. Concentrate on building authority and trust to the main site and treat the landing pages as a short term strategy.

[highersourcesites]

let me try to paraphrase so i can understand your answer better, ok?

the satellite site is the perfect match widget domain page, and it is branded to look uniform to the main site for user experience visual uniformity. It has unique content, and some how has many links pointing to it ( how did you perform that feat i wonder?) - with directories or blog articles pointing to those perfect match domains?

so its right now, in the short term, a click from the perfect match domain to the main site, with anchor text coming from that, as well as the prior link going to it, but later, you will change that and just do a 301 redirect to the main site, so user experience will be only the main site, yes?

Using the 301 redirect you may lose about or around 10% as i understand it, link juice.

And important follow up question, when you mentioned building trust, how exactly is that accomplished? By having good content on the main page certainly, and perhaps all the sorts of pages that build trust - company profile, terms of service , faq pages?

Add finally, when you do the 301 redirect ultimately, you will move the content over to the landing pages you are sending them to?

thanks!

[EGOL]

they might have several hundred of these domains. What is the best use of these domains?

I would let them expire and buy beer with the savings...

Then focus all of my energy on a single domain.