Author: Nancy McCord

It used to be a very smart search engine tactic to buy a whole bunch of domains and point them, using domain forwarding to your main hosted website. Another big tactic was to take multiple domains and domain mask them so that it appeared that your main website had many different domain names with the new domain even showing in the URL.

In today’s world, we simply do not recommend this tactic anymore due to Google’s duplicate content penalty. It is best to select one domain name as your main domain and to host your website there. We do not recommend domain masking as this can confuse search engines and end up penalizing your site instead of helping it by fooling search engines into thinking that another site has duplicated your content.

If you have multiple domains, you can point them,  however, now GoDaddy, as an example, doesn’t even allow you to forward domains. You will have to select a 301 or 302 error code (that is temporarily moved or permanent moved) if you really must consider domain forwarding. The days however of buying up every domain with your keywords in it is long gone.

How about spin off websites? Do those work? Here we are talking about a domain that you own, that matches a key service. Should you build a keyword dense site on that topic only, and if you do will you get increased traffic? I am testing this procedure right now and it is not looking good. But this is a new blog post as the topic is interesting.  Come back next Thursday for that information and whether this is a workable strategy for your business.