Hello to all

I am curious if someone has many domain names pointing to one site if that messes things up for SEO in regards to search engine rankings and spiders?

For an example.

You own the site example.com

You also own the names, example.net, example-talk.com and example-talk.net

If you were to pint all of these domains to the original example.com, you get penalties and or get label as a spammer or something by the spiders?


Or does it help at to have many pointers?

Thank you

It shouldn't help or hurt. It's done all the time though. Maybe you bought the .net version of a domain because .com wasn't available. Later when it became available you buy it and point it to the .net. It keeps people from sponging off your success and captures visitors who thought you used .com all the time.

It's too common and there are good reasons to keep it from being something you'd be penalized for.

As far is it helping search engines will ultimately see your site as the final domain in the chain. So if you redirect example-talk.com to example.com from a search engine perspective all they see is example.com

If for some reason you were using example-talk.com in anchor text on other sites then the 'talk' part might help, but you don't need the domain to get it in the anchor text.

You can have as many domain names pointing to the same location as you'd like, but you should use permanent/301 redirects to tie them together. Try visiting: http://forrestcroce.com, http://landscapephoto.us, and http://valhallaphotos.com. Try them with and without www subdomains. Or, to save you the trouble, they all go to the same place, but you'll see the first url in the address bar, no matter which you come in through.

What might happen otherwise is one domain being seen as the content producer, and the others looking like mirrors at best and scrapers at worst. The first don't provide any value from a search engine perspective, so just don't show up in the results; the second makes the search engine look bad, so they take a harder stance. That's in a perfect world ... spiders crawl a page here and a page there, so they could discover one page on one domain and a different page on a different domain.

One way or another, they'll be filtered out for duplicate content, and it'll be the same as if you only had one. ( It'll take a while, by the way. ) By using redirects, you can choose which one, and combine any page rank - not that the stuff is that important overall - pages on each domain name may acquire.

It will only be a penalty risk IF you are using a network of sites as "doorway" domains.

The biggest risk with multiple hostnames pointed to one site is exactly as Forrest outlined.