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A while ago a business manager I work with purchased 30 exact match domains, willing to use them for "SEO purposes". I actually poked around for ideas here too. At the end I decided I can't use them at all and got them redirected. The advice I got here was to focus my effort on the main site. What I plan to use them for at this point is AdWords. I will try to boost the CTR. If that does nto work, I'm 301 tem to the main site again.

My plan is to grab the domains, put a canonical link element on the whole domain, since it will duplicate the main site. Since AdWords URLs tend to get pasted into forum threads, blog post and social networks, I'm kind of hoping for a collateral effect in terms of backlinks.

Even if you have your sites reincluded, there is no guarantee that they won't go down again pretty soon. This seems a short term strategy anyway. Get the good URLs redirected to you main site and focus your effort there.

With a couple of hundred pages it does not seem realistic of me to suggest this. If you have a product which you are eager to push up, then get links for it. Get links for your home page and security bond section. It is feasible and it will have possitive effect down the road.

I work with a site with 15000 pages with similar content, close to the approach of suretegrity.com. The main part of the content is the same, but with a variable. I actually use 4+ variables. Most of my english pages are still in the index little of the have any page rank at all, but they rank. I got no rank for them in 2 years time, so I wouldn't hold my breath for PR on those if I were you :).

Well, you site is still quite young. You got a PR1 on the homepage, which is not enough to pass any pagerank to your product page. If you have a couple of decent links to the product page you should see the difference with the next pagerank update. It takes time (and backlinks). I would not worry at all about the PageRank of this page. It seems it is ranking very well for this niche query.

The first thing I would do is login to my webmaster tools account and submit a reconsideration request. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?pli=1 this goes a long way with Google. Just explain everything as it happened and confirm that the problem got fixed.

I hope that helps!

Hi Ryan,

Your question is quite interesting. I, myself, went through the article one more time. I have no facts to back up the following, but I hope that it will contribute. FIrst I would go and validate them on webmaster tools. If they are inteded to hit a certain market, I will select that geographical location. Also, I think you have litte to worry about. I imagine that google won't pass certain trust to subdomains, depending on the site. If the number of subdomains is considerable, I would say that they have pretty slim chances of getting some push from the main site. Take for example free webhosting services. They could rank and have decent page rank, if people show interest to the particular subdomain, but is highly unlikely taht to be caused by the authority of the main site.

I haven't seen free hosting subdomain rank well for a long time now. On the other hand you have student and academic accounts on university sites. They all go with subfolders and rank pretty well for highly specific topics. If I have to give a short answer, I would say that is the type of site that makes the difference for google. If your site is considers a casual business website and you are developing a new market then you might not have a problem. If you use sudbomains for specifying product, then you might be ok again.

Google use subdomain for all their major products. For Google pages they used a separate domain. They now redirects to a subdomain sites.google.com. However, they will never give subdomains for personal use. There might be something to that. They do a 301 redirect from a subdomain on googlepages.com to sites.google.com/site/. So what they offer is a 301 redirect to a sub-sub folder, located on a subdomain on Google.

I've worked with a guy who was absolutely sure his site will do great if he purchased enough links. The month he decided to get rid of the service he do 9 links for 1800$. It turned out he paid that amount on a monthly basis for over 6 months. I went back though the email reports he got from the company. Every now and then there seemed to be a couple fo good links and a couple of nofollowed one, just to add color to it. The really bad part was the amount of links he got from blogs made up from content sharing articles, already housing 100+ links to external site. Just another good example that is always a good idea to stay clear of such services.

Yes, I can't say I saw dramatic changes in the rankings after I got the internal links beneath the "esoteric" 100.

I've worked for a website with 100+ internal links on most of its pages. In 4 years, the bot never got confused.

At one point it looked ridiculous. After the owners refused to remove the footer links and other duplicate ones I went ahead with nofollow attribute on the links I consider to have close to no value for users and search engines.

We impelemnted nofollow by marking all internal links with a unique ID. E.g if a link to the live chat form the footer of the site got ID #4112 on the home page, it had the same ID through the rest of the pages. I then got all the ID I want to have the attribute and gave them back to the developers. This approach had one great advantage - it minimized the chance of human error to only me restricting the wrong link. Nothing was lost in translation.

First I will start with the most annoying and obvious answer - try to get as many backlinks as possible, most of them from sites which are firmly associated with the UK market.

You can also try providing the UK content under a subdomain, or even better - a /folder on your site. Then you will be able to associate it with the relevant market on Google Webmaster Tools. If you go with a subdomain, that might be better if you submit your site in local listings. This post by Rand Fishkin on ranking in Google Local if found useful for ideas about local listings.

Regards,

Svet

This seems to be no problem for other directories. Take, just for example, dmoz.org. It is perfectly fine with all those links.

With 302 redirects, Google first sees the old URL and then moves one to the new one. The bot will always first go the the old page, since 302 means temporary redirect. If you, by any chance, decide to go back to the old URL, Google needs to be kept in the loop and that is why it always checks the old page for the redirect.

In fact, in the results you should see your old URL with the new content indexed. Is that the case? I'm also not quite sure if 302 will pass PageRank. I would say - switch to 301.

I need to ask this. If it is of no value for visitors and you are considering noindex to remove it, why is the content there in the first place.  If it is of interest to a very limited number of users I would keep it. If it is for machines only, I would get rid of it.

Noindex will make google drop the content, but users will still be able to see it. And if it is of no value to them, they would simply navigate away from it or your site.

Thanks Ryan! The folder structure is what saved the site when one of our bigger sites went for local domains. THey were poorly maintained and in 6 months time they went under. What I will do is try the local domains on AdWords. I will use the canonical link element to try and pass any possible links the local sites might gather.

The flag idea is great. We will refresh the design soon and we will have them in mind.

In a way I will use AdWords to try and gather some natural links. At one point I might test the new domains on their own, once the have enoigh links.

Stephen, I'm afraid I can't use the redirect in this case. That is, if I don't want to be lynched by a mob of angry web developers. However, your idea makes sense. I will give it a go on a smaller site and see what happens there.

Thanks guys!

I'm wondering what would be the best approach for further expanding the online presence of the business I work for. Let me start off with the resources at my disposal.

We own visafirst.com and run the business for 7 years. All that time we had the domain online. There was a penalty back in 2005, I think (for hidden text). I've been dealing with the domain since 2007.

In the last few years we got translations in French, German, Italian, some pages in Japanese, and recently we got it translated in Spanish. The translations don't hold all the products the English version has. We translate only products which we can offer to the targeted audience. So far, I use language folders /en/, /fr/, /de/ etc. I have the settings in Google's Webmaster Tools set to the most appropriate country (the one we want to attract customers from). We own a lot of local domains .co.uk, .ie, .fr .de, .es, .jp, etc. Currently we either use them for small projects, like AdWords (to improve CTR) or have them point to the .com version with canonical.

I like nothing more than the idea of having the local domains appear in local search results, without that inflicting damage on the .com version. If I decide to go with the local domains and redirect (probably I will use canonical to avoid the redirect mess) the existing portions of the site to their relevant local domain - visafirst.com/fr/ to point to visafirst.fr etc., I'm afraid that I would take too much away from the domain in terms of content and backlinks.

So, I'm faced with the following question - Should I risk it with the local domains where we have physical presence, or should I continue using the flagship domain.

Also, would local domains improve the CTR a lot? I will test that with AdWords in the days to come, however it would be nice to know if someone has faced this before.

Thank You,

Svet Stefanov

I've been meaning to try out the eTag entity for a while now. They seem like a great way to notify the bot when to and when not to fetch your content. Fruthermore, it is impliad that proxy servers can make use of them and help your site load faster by not fetching a newer copy if one is not available.

This is not something that is easy to test on a small site and implementation on bigger sites is in my case a one way road and a few weeks in hell with the developers on staff.

• Will eTags take some load off the a site with a lot of traffic and dynamically generated content?
• Is this a good practice, as far as search engines are concerned?

I was agains purchasing that many domains simply to have some content on them. I'm now trying to make the best of it. We have a few good graphic designers on staff, so I think of going with the infographics. Then again, the infographics might do better on the main site.

Not a bad idea. We used to work with a few Filipino guys. I might be able to get a guy to do it in my home country for a little more than what you mentioned. Nothing too fancy, just an article every now and then. I try to steer away from that option. I guess I will need to take some time and come up with and idea where it is easy to maintaing the sites and give some useful information.

I was thinking about putting some infographics on them. Each will cover the theme related to the domain name. It can turn out ok. Don't you think so?

About an year, the business I work for purchased 20+ domains: sendmoneyfromcanada.com sendmoneyfromaustralia.com sendmoneyfromtheuk.com sendmoneyfromireland.com The list goes on, but you can get the main idea. They thought that the domains can be useful to aid http://www.transfermate.com/ . I can set up a few micro sites on them, but from that point there will be no one to maintain them. And I'm, honestly, not too happy with hosting multiple sites on one IP and having them all link to the flagship. It is spammy and it does not bring any value to end users. I might be missing something, so my question is - Can I use these domains to boost my rankings, while avoiding any shady/spammy techniques? P.S. I had this Idea of auctioning the domains in order to cover for the domain registration fees.