Today's question comes from Landlubber in Colorado.
Landlubber asked a lot of questions.
Some of them really interesting, some of them not as interesting, but I thought this one was good.
What's your take on add on domains?
Does Google penalize someone for having one or more add on domain domains on their main website or if they're self hosting?
Example, given, if you saw two, five or ten websites all coming from the same IP address, would that be bad?
Well, first off, let's talk about what add on domains are because a lot of people haven't heard that term before.
Suppose I have the site mattcuts. Com. An add on domain might be something that your web host would offer you where it's basically related.
Maybe it's all part of a package deal where you can get matcuts.
Com and typically an add on domain might have the connotation of being a separate site.
So let's talk through this a little bit.
Suppose you have, for example, I have mattcuts.
Com. Maybe I also want to register matcuts.
Com. My personal advice would be rather than developing those as separate sites, I would actually make Matcuts dot.
Com do a redirect to mattcuts. Com.
And the reason is that when you've got things that are really, really close, maybe only a hyphen is different.
Or maybe mattcuts. Net. A lot of people expect that to really be the same site.
So if you're doing an addon domain where you are registering multiple domains, my advice would be twofold either.
First register domains that are really different, so they have different branding, different domain name.
You can tell at a glance that they're really different and then develop them as truly independent sites, all sorts of different templates and layout functionality, that sort of
thing or the other direction you can do is you can go ahead and buy the typos or the common aliases or the other things that you think someone might type when they're trying to type your domain name and make that do a three to one redirect to your website.
So this goes a little bit towards the idea of how many sites can I have before I start to look a little bit unusual or artificial or something like that.
And certainly we've seen plenty of sites where they might have two or three different domain names.
Maybe one is targeted to men's clothing, one is targeted to women's clothing, one is related to children's clothing.
You can have those and have those link and have them stillbe separate and have them be branded a little bit differently and not have that seem too artificial.
But think about what if a competitor was looking at your website and they saw a whole ton of links down in the footer, down at the bottom.
And it really was not that much differentiation between them.
Same template, same branding.
It was just nothing but keyword stuffed domain names thatcan look a little bit worse so whenever the question comesin about add on domains, I would interpret that in a couple of ways.
First, I'd say either make the domain names quite separate and develop them, and then as long as you have a very small set of domains, it can still make sense to cross link them,or make sure that all the typos hyphenated different TLDs all that sort of stuff, just do a three on one redirect.
For example, Google sometimes gets porn Google, or we go through domain registration where we go through arbitration and get domain names that people registered with Google in them, and Google will take those and just do a three and one redirect.
So that's kind of a very comprehensive answer to your question in that if you want to do domain names as sort of a package deal, I would either make them a little bit separate and develop them separately, or if they're very similar, go aheadand do a 301 redirect, both can make sense.
The one thing that I would avoid is making a ton of sites where they're all autogenerated and they all look just a little bit at spammy because you're not really putting any time or love or attention into individually developing those domains