Domain Names

[newriver]

Hi everybody,

I for one focus all my website marketing on search engine optimization. Recently I sat back, and looked at the state of web traffic.

Basically Google is the source of most of our business. We still do well with other SE's, but Google is the king by far. Then I started worrying, what if Google changed there algo? or something happened to the company itself for the worst.

Long story short, one idea I had was to take a hard look at ways to continue traffic even if something happened in google. One idea was to get some good domain names. I've now registered some good domain names.

What are some good ideas, and bad ideas for domain names. I don't want to be seen as a spammer with the domain names, I simply want to capture the traffic from people actually typing in the names.

I.E. Do I need to build and host a site with a no-index, no-follow tag pointing to my main site? Is it cool to simply point the domain name to my site? If it is ok to do that, what happens if a competitor submits that to a SE? etc....etc...

Who has some good advice?

[Alan Perkins]

For each of your new domain names, if you are going to point them anywhere at all, then you have two choices:

1) Point at your main site
2) Point at another site

IMO there is nothing wrong with option 1, pointing at your main site. It's very common that multiple different domain names point at one site. If search engines can't cope with that by now they have big problems. Google copes with it very well, by the way. [What might be a problem would be if you duplicated your main site on a different IP address and pointed your new domain to that IP address.]

That leaves option 2, point at another site. Presumably you would need to build this site around the function suggested by its domain name, and it would be fulfilling some function that your main site did not fulfil. I see no problem in doing that and cross-linking with your main site. [Again, don't duplicate your main site (or parts of it) on another IP address.]

That's the simple, broad-brush advice...

[newriver]

Thanks Alan, thats what I was looking for.