Does the number of domains I have forwarded to my main website hurt my search engine rankings?
A friend of mine was told by his web designer that if he forwards too many of his domains (more than 4) to his main website that it can effect his ranking in search engines.
Is this really true? I have about 7 or 8 domains forwarded to my main website…Can this hurt me?
6 Responses
JoelKatz
28 Jul 2010
Tom S
28 Jul 2010
I bielive that is true. Less is more. You don’t want too many forwarded just like you don’t want too many keywords. Here is a site that will grade your site and tell you if your are doing something you shouldn’t… http://www.sitereportcard.com/ For more tips you can go to http://www.yourwebsiteassistant.com
Cazpa
28 Jul 2010
Yes this will be seen as duplicate content and also could be seen as spam, this was an old trick to gain traffic to website’s years ago but now google will either give you a low possition or not index you at all.
Paul L
28 Jul 2010
You never know exactly with search engines. Having multiple domains point to the same page will be seen as duplicate content however it doesn’t necessarily hurt your website’s ranking.
Google will ONLY rank the domain that it believes is the original domain name. All others will not show up or will only show up when you go to the last page of the search results and you click the link that says "repeat the search with the omitted results included."
However, keep this in mind "In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments … so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that’ll befall webmasters is to see the "less desired" version of a page shown in our index."
My advice to you would be to use subdomains and have those domains point to separate subdomains with unique content if you really need this. However, when getting links from third party sites, use the same domain name. That way, all the link popularity goes to a single domain instead of being separated to many domains.
dhvrm
28 Jul 2010
Yes.
brisray
28 Jul 2010
yes, it will. The sites are seen by the bots as duplicate sites and so will hurt your page ranking.
Some search engines do penalize sites that have large numbers of domains forwarded to them. It’s usually not a problem so long as you only attempt to promote *one* of those domains.
In general, there is no valid reason to link more than one domain to a web site that people would want to find with a search.