Domain Names, SEO and Your Company Profile on the Web

Ever wondered why Google returns a particular domain, even though you might have several others? Do you find anything about domain behaviour confusing? If so, read on! This post will deliver the domains for business 101 SEO survival guide enabling you to predict how Google will behave in almost any situation.

Choosing the Right Domain for First Impressions

Just like the old saying, that ‘people will often judge a book by its cover’, your potential visitors will be vaguely aware of your domain as they hover over your link in the search results. Having a relevant name which includes the searcher’s keywords will not only improve your click-through rate, but will also give Google a good reason for ranking you higher for searches that involve those keywords.

An Aged Domain Is Like a Well Matured Wine

In the same way that well-established and successful businesses build up good will, aged domains will generally perform better in Google. Younger domains will be regarded with more uncertainty and risk, often experiencing a ‘sandboxing’ period where Google awaits your visitors’ reaction before allowing your domain to rank higher up for more competitive search terms.  As a result, companies like Sedo Parking have made a business from buying domains and ‘squatting’ (or ‘parking’) them, adding back-links and building up a traffic history, to sell back to the public for an inflated price at auction. We can question the ethics of buying a domain to simply deprive someone else of the pleasure, but domain appraisal tools are now featured in some hosting control panels, making your domain name itself a central part of SEO and a key feature of your company name on the Web. Rather than pay extortionate prices at auction for a second-hand domain, I firmly believe a couple of very good quality back-links or some rapid blog posting is often enough to roll your domain out of the sandbox in a matter of days, rather than months.

Multiple Domains with Fragmented Personality Disorders

It’s amazing how often people are simply unaware that keeping multiple domains with the same text will cause them to miss out! Google will remove duplicates from its search results, to provide the searcher with an exciting variety and ensure it never returns the same result twice. The problem caused for your SEO is that all of your domains will have a separate history in Google and all (except the listed one!) will be going to waste. Lets suppose you own domain-name-consultants.co.uk and domain-name-consultants.com, both displaying the same site, you are losing out! By setting one of them to give a 301 redirect to the other, you squeeze any goodness either profile has built up and combine them into a single, solid identity. You can also use this trick to ‘flip’ which domain you wish to be listed. If you have changed your mind and would like domain-name-consultants.com to be listed, simply set domain-name-consultants.co.uk to 301 redirect to domain-name-consultants.com and Google will very quickly begin recommending the .com in the search results. Nothing about your listings will be lost in the transfer (provided the text content has not changed) and you should witness a straight swap of one domain for another.

Alternatively, you could simply ensure that unique content is given out from each domain, and grab yourself two sets of listings! Beware though, the closer the text of a site is to matching another, the further Google will move it down the search listings to preserve the quality of search. Be sure there is not one single sentence that is the same!

Google’s Geographical Bias for Domains

Google is quite flexible. It understands that fredscoolsite.com may be a smash hit in Timbuktu, but that it might provide little of interest to UK residents. Over time, Google will adjust it’s listings in each world region according to your traffic behaviour. In the early days though, it helps to buy the most appropriate domain for your target audience. Suppose you have a UK targeted site, your domain will perform better in the early days if you buy a .co.uk domain. Equally, for the best performance in the U.S. you could buy a .com domain. Google will also base much of it’s decision on language content which will play a key role in Google’s decision on how to geographically bias your position.

How to Escape a Blacklisted Domain and Keep Your Profile

Domains that are being penalised or are blacklisted by Google can take some sleuthing to identify. Often there are only subtle signs, such as the domain being outranked for searches for the domain name itself. Or it might be that Google is simply not listing you at all. Another good test is to copy and paste a block of text (preferably a few sentences) into the Google search bar, and you should be looking at your domain as the number one result. If not, we know there is a problem!

Even if you find your domain is blacklisted, don’t panic! You can simply set up a 301 redirect to an alternate domain. Believe it or not, Google will keep most of the ‘goodness’ from your profile, will acknowledge all of the good back-links you still have, but will leave behind the penalty in the move.

Hopefully this brief guide will give you a useful insight into some of the more common issues on the Web.  Whatever situation you find yourself in you should now be prepared and equipped to deal with almost any eventuality that could befall your online presence.