a Verbat company
a Verbat company
Search Engine Optimization - Multiple domain names
There are many unethical practices followed in the internet and out of these, the major share of contribution is our topic. Several factors contribute towards this alarming strategy. We shall begin by pointing out the large volume of work that would be necessary to develop, sustain and attain a high ranking for around twenty websites rather than one or a couple. Above all, we need to remember that the cost of the domain names is not just few dollars. The tedious process or legal battles one might need to fight to procure certain names is actually priceless.
The annual fee charged by Yahoo just to have a website listed is almost US $ 299. Assuming this a real scenario, the owner would have to pay to registrar for at least twenty new Web domain names. Dedicated efforts will have to be put in developing twenty such websites as many Internet search engines and directories follow the thumb rule of penalizing mirror sites. To add up the overheads each site will have to be separately hosted demanding added expenditure.
Plus a significant amount of time and effort may be weeks or months of dedication will be required, just to optimize the same twenty web sites. As a process continuation, you would then have to spend more time submitting twenty separate web sites. Then comes the link building and popularizing processes targeting each website separately. The process is not stopping here, steps to initiate few reciprocal link exchanges deal with prominent sites that are in a similar and associated sector to your area of expertise. Now you would have procured some idea of the process and as you rightly think it is fair amount of dedicated effort, time consumption and cost.
Will it sound music to you if we substitute the above and instead focus this activity on to a single website? Thinking positive, it is worth to spend valuable time and cost resulting in better chances to rank high in the search engines. The notion behind this strategy is that you could buy twenty keyword domains and focus the content of each site in a diluted manner that the ranking results will only be short lived. However, out of experience we can confidently say that such factors are not a fair contribution towards our objectives.
Webmasters and so called experts who try to implement such strategies find themselves doing twenty times the work. Rarely, they could have attained short lived results but the harvest would have been many times better if the focus of this activity was retained with a single domain. Let us now examine an example to make this clearer. You might have heard of the straight-line principle: the shortest distance from A to B is still the straight line. There could be specific questions raised in this regard for efforts versus ranking conversions. The reason is not just one. Based on the actual content placed in these domains, search engines and directories flag them as mirror sites and will refuse to list them. You will circulate the incoming links which in turn increases the link popularity across multiple domains. This process will have any one of them from ranking as high as your main domain subject to other links pointed at it.
Another reason is that your ability to cross-sell and up-sell the product that you have listed on one of your extra web sites is minimal. There are chances that you lose your prospective customer because he or she is simply not able to realize that you offer red helmets as well as yellow helmets. The general thumb rule is, larger websites tend to always outrank smaller sites. Competing with a company that has a few hundred or thousand page site compared to your keyword-rich mini-site having few ten or plus pages is always a though job. Consider sites like E-Bay , Amazon or Yahoo. They continuously are enriched with enough information to rule dozens and dozens of smaller sites or sections, yet they choose to accommodate all of these sections of content under the corresponding primary single domain name.
If you are offering multiple products or services, you need to ensure that people visiting the website is informed about it. Your chances of success should never be underestimated. The practice of hiding your content on different domains is only an attempt to falsely improve your rankings. In reality you will never achieve the rankings. By following such unethical practices you will end up in having your website getting penalized. At times, we even wonder whether some engines acquire an updated "blacklist" of websites habitual of using illegal and unethical practices. Also background checks of any such unethical activity executed in the past. There is a general and upcoming demand by the ethical professionals in the industry that if ever the so called "blacklist" exists, it should be shared and referred by other engines as well.
