07.07.08
10 uses for old domains to increase SEO Value
If you are like me, you might own more than one domain name that you can use for your websites. What you may not have known, is that Google rewards the older names that you aren’t using for your website. Over the past year, we have noticed that Google is rewarding domain names that are older with a higher Google Pagerank. This is important, because the Google Pagerank variable can be thought of as a multiplier that use used against the keywords in your website for relevance to the terms in your site.
What does all that mean? It means that your older domains could possibly come up higher in Google, and that you should consider working some of your older domain names into your marketing plan.
Some of my more tech-savvy customers have noticed this as well, and some have begun to experiment by consolidating their web site content from multiple domain names, onto the older domain names that have a higher pagerank.
Here is how it works. Google’s pagerank is on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 10. A 10 would be Yahoo or Google, while a 1 would be a brand new website. Most small websites that have a decent number of inbound links have a pagerank of 3 or so. The New York Times website has a pagerank of 7. This should give you an idea of how much the traffic jumps between each level. Our Delaware.Net website has a pagerank of 6, and we are hoping to get that to a 7 pretty soon. One of the things that helps our site is the fact that the domain name is TEN YEARS OLD. This makes the domain appear to be more trustworthy to Google, and this “domain age” is one of the factors that we believe Google is looking at. Google won’t come right out and admit this, but our research tells us that this is true.
What we have seen is that sometimes a site that has little content, and little optimization, can have a 5 or 6 page rank, which is VERY valuable in terms of SEO. An old domain that you are using as a redirect to a newer domain name could also have a higher pagerank than your main website’s URL.
The trick, obviously, is to decide how you can use your extra domain names to generate more traffic for your main website. One idea is to make the older domain your MAIN domain name. I have seen some customers do this, and I think it could be a little extreme. Your main company’s website URL should be the one that is marketed the most, and it should be the one that is printed on your signage, shirts, printed materials, etc. I don’t think you should change your whole brand to take advantage of this technique.
Here are some ideas for your older URLs:
- Make a list of all of your URLs. Take note of when they were registered, and when they expire. Rank them by age, and how appropriate the names are to your business.
- Add years to your primary domain names. We now know that Google will keep a domain from gaining a high page rank if it will expire in less than a year. If you plan to stay in business for a long period of time, add at least 5 years to your main domain name.
- Elimiate domain redirects that could cause your older domains to get blacklisted. Instead, create a small website on each domain name. I refer to these as “microsites”. You can use them to highlight different products and services with a unique set of keywords.
- Eliminate duplicate content. Don’t be tempted to past your main website content into the microsites. This will create a “blanding” effect, which will hurt all of your sites in Google.
- Create “shelf domains”. A shelf domain is a website that sits on the shelf, waiting to be used for some time in the future. So what you do is try to anticipate domains you will need in the future for products that you are working on, or services that you may offer in the future.
- Use separate domain names for products and services. There is no rule that states that all of your products and services need to reside under a single domain name. Using separate domains allows you to generate separate keywords and search phrases for each site.
- Use multiple domains for different vertical markets. If you have a vertical market that you service that is very specific, you could use one of your older domain names to target that specific market, and use search phrases in the text that are appropriate for that audience.
- Use the older domain names for email. Variations on your corporate domain that are short could be used for email addresses. While older domains might work best in Google, shorter ones will be easier to remember when used for email addresses.
- Blogs. Another use of extra domain names would be for a company or personal blog site, which could help direct more traffic to your site. Google rewards blog sites because it sees them as unique content, so you could use your older domains for a blog.
- Partner directory. Use one of your spare domains to market your customers and business partners. After linking to them, ask them to link back to your MAIN website. The inbound links will help with your Google page rank.
I hope that these tips help you to get more out of the domain names that you might be sitting on, or that you may consider letting them expire. A somewhat relevant domain name that you own that is really old just migh tbe worth holding on to.
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