Semalt Expertise: How Many Domain Names Do You Need?

Business owners are constantly seeking to innovate strategies to stay ahead of the competition and protect their brands. With e-commerce gaining momentum, businesses rely on these strategies now more than ever. A certain trend that is currently widely spread at the market is that website owners buy all the versions of domain names for their brands.

But how many domain names do you really need to optimize your visibility and protect your brand? The leading expert of Semalt Digital Services, Max Bell gives a prompt answer to this question.

Possessing several domain names can serve as an asset or liability. Holding several domain names as an asset allows you to protect similar domain names from the use of your competitors. In SEO context, it also allows you to possess all optimized seed keywords. While these benefits may give you an edge online, liabilities may be incurred in.

Redirecting Domains

Since all your domains will be put to use, search engines may flag them down as an attempt to Spam thus resulting to stiff penalties including an unfavorable ranking. In this case, SEO experts recommend consolidating all business domain names and associated sites into one strong website. This then harnesses the power of each domain name to form one strong domain name that's powerful enough to rank highly on all legitimate search engine without hurting the previous ranking. Consolidation just requires establishing about 300 permanent redirects from source domains to the primary domain, a task easily performed by a genuine SEO specialist or web administrator.

Low-Quality Links

All registered domain names get low quality links from time to time. Once such links are redirected, they transmit with the similar low qualities resulting in a lower index on search engines. To deal with this, make use of Majestic or Google Search Console to examine and weed out low quality links before redirecting. A text file is loaded with names of the low quality links is uploaded to the search engine to eliminate this problem.

Cost Implication

Generally speaking, the more domain names you own the more expenses you're going to incur in the form of annually renewable fees. A single domain name costs between $10-35 to run annually without factoring in the maintenance costs. Multiply this by the number of domain names your own and you will be looking at a costly figure.

Brand Protection by Multiple Domains

SEO experts posit that brand protection can be achieved without necessarily buying multiple domain names. Bear in mind that domain ownership follows strict and well defined rules. For instance, if you own a trademark for a specific domain name, you can actually contest and recover your domain if another party registers another domain that includes your trademark. There are lots of domain name attorneys and experts out there with knowledge on the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. However, this process can be frustrating and time consuming.

Take your time with SEO practices and branding. As discussed above, owning multiple domain names can be beneficial in the short term but costly in the long run. The best way to avoid mistakes is to consult with experienced SEO specialists.