What To Do With Multiple Real Estate Domains

by Chris

multiple-domain-namesOn a day to day basis real estate professionals are buying multiple secondary domain names for their real estate websites. However, once purchased, most domain owners do not take full advantage of what these domains can provide. This article is intended to show the best practices for taking full advantage of your secondary domain names.

Can’t I just forward all of my domains to my homepage?

Not too long ago website owners and even search marketing professionals were buying a ton of domain names and simply pointing them back to one destination. They would then submit these domain names to the search engines in hopes of having all of their domain names indexed and ranked, in the hopes of creating a mass populated search results page of their domain names. Over time the search engines picked up on this, and realized that some people may not have the most relevant content; rather they just have a ton of domain names pointing back to the same content. Search engines fixed this by not allowing those multiple domain names to be seen at any significant position, and in some cases not allowing for the primary domain name to be as successful as it possibly could be within the results.

What should I do with all of these domain names I own?

The most ideal scenario for using multiple domain names is to have a website on each one of the domains that you own. Each website should be at least 2-3 pages and, like any other site you want to get ranked, they each should have a lot of really resourceful, unique content. By creating this portfolio of specific websites targeting certain aspects of your business or areas that you farm, your websites and their domains will receive much more value and recognition from the search engines than forwarding all of your domains to one site ever could.

What if I don’t have the time, money or technical knowledge to create more websites?

Unfortunately, not everyone has the ability to create a website for every domain name that they own. So, one useful technique is to take your great real estate domain names and direct them to specific internal pages of content that are relevant to that actual domain name.

Example:

Primary Domain: RealEstate.com

Secondary Domains: Homes.com, Condos.com, Realtor.com

The ideal setup for this website is to have your primary domain, in this case RealEstate.com, be your homepage, consisting of relevant content regarding Real Estate and what the rest of the site will hold. From here you want to point your Homes.com secondary domain to an internal page of RealEstate.com that focuses specifically on Homes in Real Estate. The same works for Condos.com and Realtor.com, they should be pointed to individual pages within RealEstate.com that focus specifically on Condos and Realtors.

You want to make sure that you are permanently 301 re-directing Homes.com and all other secondary domain names to their unique page on RealEstate.com.

Although a website with a clean structure and well defined hierarchy is recommended, using this domain forwarding strategy for your site with your multiple domains can be beneficial for your visitors and your marketing campaigns.

You can now also use these individual domain names within specific marketing campaigns. If you have a new condo for sale you can include your Condo related domain name in your marketing efforts. This will allow people that receive your information to be directed to exactly what they are looking for rather than a location that might not be very unique or specific to their request.

Remember that you always want to maintain a clear, consistent brand for your business. If doing any of the above goes against that or dilutes your brand in any way than we do not recommend doing it. The recommendations above or for those who happened to have picked up some great domain names and need to do something useful with them now to maximize their potential.

If you have a massive list of domain names and are still not quite sure which might be beneficial for your real estate marketing, then please feel free to email us and we will help you take advantage of what you have. You can also refer to our previous post on Great Real Estate Domains to get a better idea of what constitutes a good domain name.

Tagged as: 301 redirects, 302 redirects, domain forwarding, domain redirecting, domain redirects, managing domain names, multiple domains, real estate domains

  • Kevin

    Hello,

    My issue is I service an area that has about 10 cities that we do business in (equal amount of business in each city). My web development company has told me I need to get specific, they do not think targeting those 10 cities as a whole by referencing the county is specific enough.

    My specific question arose when I began setting up my blog with the intention/purpose of the blog being to drive traffic to my site. What is the best way to set up my blog with intention being to drive traffic to my site by targeting these 10 cities.

    1st: From my website we were going to have a navigation button that says “access blog” and the blog would work as a part of my website (i.e. http://www.woltercorp.com/blog. After some research and advice I have come to the conclusion that instead of the way I mentioned above I should actually have a completely different domain name for my blog such as http://www.CityNameRealEstateBlog.com. When someone clicks on the navigation button on my site it would just take them to this domain name where my blog is.

    Do you agree this is the best approach with the intent and purpose of the blog being to drive business to my website?

    2. Now my second dilemma is the fact that I service these 10 cities but I am being told that using a domain name for my blog such as CountyNameRealEstateBlog.com is to broad and I need to get specific such as CityNameRealEstateBlog.Com. If I do this I will have 10 domains, one for each city. If I go this direction can I have each domain name(CityNameRealEstateBlog.Com) URL Forwarded and MASKED to one specific domain name where my blog is?

    Will this approach be efficient with the search engines? Will I be benefiting from my domain name being specific to each city or will the search engines see what I am doing and give me a negative or lower rating? Is this a good approach?

    Thank you,

    Kevin

  • vinnylabarbera

    We recently received the following question about domain names. Instead of replying privately we thought it would be beneficial to post our response here so that everyone can take advantage of the information.

    Inquiry: “I own about 100 real estate domains and would love some advice on how to market / use them. I was thinking about renting some, etc.”

    Response: First of, congrats for locking up so many domains. We are guessing / hoping that you have some really good ones (i.e. contain valuable keywords, are short and memorable and are mainly .com). We'd be more than happy to look over your list for you and tell which are likely to be the most valuable.

    Moving on to your inquiry…what to do with all of these domains. Best case scenario (if money and time permits) is to setup a website on each domain name. Each website should be as relevant as possible to the domain itself and it should, like any other site you want ranked, contain lots of quality, unique and relevant content (text, photos, videos, etc). The idea here is to get each of these sites to rank well individually so that you can build a powerful portfolio of web properties that can be leveraged in many different ways (i.e. link building, ad revenue, lead capture, etc).

    If you do not have the time or money to build a quality website on each domain, then your second best option is to cherry pick your best domains and use them for branding. What I mean by this is to use a really good domain and forward it to a relevant page on your existing website. For example, if you own http://www.featuredproperties.com then it would be helpful (for branding only) to forward this domain to your Featured Properties section on your current website.

    NOTE: Setting up multiple forwards like this WILL NOT help your rankings. We actually don't recommend that you do more than about 10-15 of these as it starts to become overkill.

    So, there you go…some useful tips to put your domains to work for you. Good luck with whichever option you choose. As always, if you need some advice then let us know how we can help.

    Thanks for reading!

  • http://searchengineland.com/author/drew-hubbard/ Drew Hubbard

    @Vinny: I'm glad that you pointed out that there is no inherent SEO value in 301 redirecting domains. But there actually *is* some SEO value to be gained in a roundabout way. Most back links (over 90% for most sites) are of the copy/paste variety, which means that if your website's domain is http://www.site.com, most anchor texts for your back links will read “www.site.com.” But if you use keyword-rich, 301'd domains in your marketing efforts, many of those copy/paste back links will contain relevant keywords. For example, if my main site is http://www.site.com, but I use the domain http://www.awesomeproperties.com in marketing efforts, and that domain 301 redirects to my properties section hub page, I'll end up with the keywords “awesome properties” in the anchor text of most back links to that section.

  • vinnylabarbera

    Thanks Drew, I actually didn't say there is no value in 301 redirects. I said there is no value in tons of domain forwards, which there isn't. I completely agree with everything else and I think everyone can get some great use out of your feedback.

  • http://www.searchallfortmyershomes.com/ Liam Hart

    These are really helpful tips for multiple domain owners. Yeah, I agree that one way to use your multiple domains is to redirect it to your major website or an internal webpage that is most significant for your marketing strategies. Domains are important for online real estate marketers and managing them, no matter how many they are, is very crucial, so you will not put it to waste.

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