Many small business have invested in a number of domain names.  As well as their own business name perhaps they also have a domain describing their product or the market they are in.  Not to mention the .com, .net, .fr, .co.uk, .es and various other versions of it. 

Often these domains will all be set up to point to the same web space, using the web forwarding options of the domain registrar. 

The problem with this approach is that Google penalises duplicate content on a website.  So if you are not careful all your domains could end up being penalised.  And if you are careful and redirect all the less important domains to the main domain using a permanent redirect ( or 301 redirect) then they will subsequently be ignored by the search engines (since they have been permanently redirected they are assumed to be no longer relevant). 

Our normal recommendation is to have one domain and focus your marketing budget on promoting that domain.  If you have inherited several domains then we would advise you to redirect all of them, using a permanent redirect, to your chosen main domain and again focus your marketing budget on that site.    

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.