Last night I was having a conversation with a friend who is having a complete redesign of her small business’s web presence. She couldn’t stop gushing about the services being provided to her, so as a person who offers many of the same services I set out to find exactly what it was they were doing  and what kind of price tag was associated. I have to say, everything they are doing is great and the price tag is just right, but I was shocked to hear their “SEO†practices.
“And they will buy a bunch of domains for you and redirect each one to your website!â€
Excuse me? Mass purchasing domains is what they call “SEO Services� Ok, I guess I can see where someone along the way decided this was logical. If I search for Jim’s Auto Body it only makes sense that jimsautobody.com would appear in one of the first results. However, this is not the case, experiment to follow.
There are many reasons why this practice is not something that can be called an SEO service. Today we are going to focus on the main reason why this practice is bogus.
Number one reason: Google reads the content on your website. Google’s crawlers are regularly indexing content and taking in information from the following places:
- URL and linking structure
- Meta Tags
- Website Navigation
- Images
- And of course the actual content
A domain alone does not equal a webpage or website. Simply owning a domain without any information for Google to index means absolutely no presence in any search result whatsoever.
For example, I own the domain http://typeandstyleshop.com and have not yet built a site to go with this domain.
As you can see in the image, when I directly insert my URL into my browser, a page created by my hosting service is what appears. If I search for “Type and Style†this is what I find.
These search results are not promising. Now if I search for “Type and Style Shop†you will notice not a single URL in these 1st page results has the words, “typeâ€, “styleâ€, or “shop†(except for the ads of course).
Now for the ultimate test, I’m going to search for the whole domain “typeandstyleshop.comâ€.
 Again, as you can see simply owning a domain does not equal results. Not only did my domain not show up, Google actually changed what I was searching for.
What about the redirect? Well, even if you redirect one domain to another you own with a website attached to it, the domain with the website will be indexed, rendering the redirected domain useless. Plain and simple.
This begs the question; what SEO services are you being offered? Make sure your marketing company is actually adding value and not wasting your money.
