You have registered your business domain and managed to secure a real short and catchy '.com' domain name. It's optimized with your major keyword and describes your company business to perfection....Congratulations!
You have built your website and optimized for the search engines. Your site contains plenty of good, original content and you have achieved some real useful back-links from very popular related sites. In fact you are starting to make some real headway in the search engines for searches on your major keyword.....Great you are on your way!
Then, you think..."Wait a minute, what about the 'net, org, biz, info' etc. Shouldn't I register these domains also before someone else does? And what about the misspellings and other popular keyword domains that are related to the theme of my website?
You know what, I'm going to register these too. I mean, after all, domains are pretty cheap and for sure all these domains MUST bring even more targeted traffic to my site!"
So you go ahead and register ALL versions of your domain and also a few other domains which include variations of your main keyword. You go ahead and park them all on your main hosting account, each domain serving the content of your main website.
Then what happens? You sit back and enjoy the extra traffic your other domain aquisitions have brought, right?.
Wrong! In fact, panic sets in. Your rankings start to drop dramatically. You can't find your site anywhere in ANY major search engine! Your site has literally dropped like a stone.
What happended? Where did you go wrong?
Well, the answer is duplicate content and the solution is the magic and very simple 301.
Huh?
Yep. By registering a bundle of domain names and parking them on your main domain you have created a group of webistes with EXACTLY the same web content It's called duplicate content and in the eyes of all major search engines it is just plain "BAD" and for sure your site WILL be penalized.
So does that mean you need to create different websites for each of the domains that you purchased? Well, you could if you wanted but that would be a lot of hard work.
The solution is a simple 301 direct. Using a 301 direct on each of your domain names you are able to redirect the domain to you main website address and will not be penalized by the search engines. In fact they like the good old 301. It will actually IMPROVE your ranking.
So remember, registering multiple domains is an excellent strategy for driving extra traffic to your site BUT just be sure to use the 301 redirect command on each otherwise you will be penalizing yourself!
