More SEO Tips for Domain Management
If you work in online marketing for a medium to large company - and you joined the company sometime after, say, 1996, here's a quick quiz: Do you know how many domains your company owns? If you're directly involved in your company's current domain strategy sessions, you might, but my guess is that you don't.
Many of our client contacts have no idea how many domains their companies own, and what's worse, frequent inquiries across their organization often lead nowhere. If you fit the profile of someone who should know more about your company's domains but doesn't, it certainly doesn't mean you're doing your job poorly. Keep in mind that securing domains for business purposes (such as copyright protection and basic phonetic variance) predates search engine optimization - not to mention search engines - by several years. The web dev mercenaries who built your site and went on a dot-com shopping spree in 1994 are long gone, and bills from the registrar come sporadically, representing a gradual increase in domain ownership.
If you're curious about whether you have multiple domains diluting your search engine presense, a fast diagnostic is to search for a specific string of text that should appear only on your site. Copy about 7-10 consecutive words from a page on your site, then search for that exact string - in quotation marks - at various engines. Traditionally, this has been a great way to find sites that steal your content. But it's also equally effective at detecting your crimes against yourself - and your SE visibility potential.
Despite a glamorous Hollywood visual metaphor, Googlebot and duplicate sites aren't a good mix.
I talked with a business owner this week who had a decent idea how many domains he owned, but he had no idea that having each one mirror his "main" site was a bad idea. Google had partially indexed about nine different domains. Yahoo knows about two. MSN knows about one. All engines show at least two variations of canonical problems, including home page (index.asp vs. root) and subdomain (www vs. non-www) duplicate indexing. This is always one of the very first things we look for when we're starting a comprehensive site evaluation, and very, very few companies have all their domains wrangled correctly, down to the last 301. So the lessons bear repreating: Give the engines what they want, but give it to them only once, or else you risk looking suspicious - even if you're old-school innocent.
(Note: Last December, I touched on a few points of search engine-friendly domain management, including wildcard subdomains and relative vs. absolute links in a nav scheme.)