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>> Today's question comes from Land Lubber in Colorado. Land Lubber asked a lot of questions;
some of them really interesting, some of them not as interesting, but I thought this one
was good. "What's your take on addon domains"? Does Google penalize someone for having one
or more addon domains on their main website or if they're self-hosting, e.g., If you saw
2, 5, or 10 websites all coming from the same IP addresses, would that be bad?" Well, first
off, let's talk about what addon domains are because a lot of people haven't head that
term before. Suppose I have the site, mattcutts.com. An addon domain might be something that your
web host would offer you where it's basically related, maybe it's, you know, all part of
the package deal where you can get mat-cuts.com. And typically, an addon domain might have
a connotation of being a separate site. So let's talk through this a little bit. Suppose
you have, for example, I have mattcuts.com. Maybe I also want to register a matt-cuts.com.
My personal advice would be rather than developing those as separate sites, I would actually
make matt-cuts.com to redirect to mattcuts.com. And the reason is that when you've got things
that are really, really close, maybe only a hyphen is different or maybe mattcuts.net.
A lot of people expect that to really be the same site. So if you're doing an addon domain
where you're registering multiple domains, my advice would be twofold. Either first,
register domains that are really different, so they have different branding, different
domain name, you can tell at a glance that they're really different, and then develop
them as truly independent sites, you know, all sorts of different templates and layout,
functionally, that sort of thing. Or, the other direction you can do is you can go ahead
and buy the typos or the common aliases or the other things that you think someone might
type when they're trying to type your domain name and make that do a 301 redirect to your
website. So, this goes a little bit towards the idea of, you know, how many sites can
I have before I start to look a little bit unusual or artificial, or something like that?
And certainly, we've seen plenty of sites where they may have two or three different
domain names. Maybe one is targeted to men's clothing, one is targeted to women's clothing;
one is related to children's clothing. You can have those and have those linked and have
them still be separate and have them be branded a little bit differently and not have that
seem too artificial. But think about what if a competitor was looking at your website
and they saw a whole ton of links down in the footer, down at the bottom and it really
was not that much differentiation between them. Same template, same branding, it was
just nothing but keyword stuff domain names. That can look a little bit worse. So whenever
the question comes in about addon domains, I would interpret that in a couple of ways.
First, I'd say either make the domain names quite separate and develop them. And then
as long as you have a very small set of domains, that can still make sense to cross-link them.
Or, make sure that all the typos, hyphenated, different utilities, all that sort of stuff,
just do a 301 redirect. For example, Google sometimes gets, you know, pornGoogle, or,
you know, we go through domain registration where we go through arbitration and get domain
names that people registered with Google in them, and Google will take those and just
do a 301 redirect. So that's kind of a very comprehensive answer to your question. And
that if you want to do domain names as sort of a package deal, I would either make them
a little bit separate and develop them separately or, if they're very similar, go ahead and
do a 301 redirect. Both can make sense. The one thing that I would avoid is making a ton
of sites where they're all auto-generated and they all look just a little bit spammy
because you're not really putting any time or love or attention into individually developing
those domains.