Alternative domains not in Google

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May 5, 2008

A customer has just brought to my attention a problem that hadn't occured to me. It's to do with all those other domain names you own and are 301ing to the main site.

Problem:

You have www.domainname.com and it's appearing in Google searches for "www.domainname.com" like it should.

You have www.domain-name.com 301ing to www.domainname.com and it's not showing in Google searches for "www.domain-name.com" (as you would expect). Neither site is.

Domain searches

As my customer pointed out, people often find a site by typing a domain into Google. And he's right - I guess it's easier for some people to do it that way, or they don't know that the address bar is how normal people browse sites. The keyword stats on sites I manage suggest that a great many people find a site by Googing for the domain name. So if you aren't being found for your own domain name, then that's a problem. Especially if you are advertising that domain name in offline mediums.

Misspellings

The dashed version of the domain was registered mainly to catch traffic who mistakingly added the dash into the domain.

But searching for www.domain-name.com in Google brings up an empty result set - the domain is not indexed and never will be.

Solution

I have added the dashed version of the domain into the footer text of the site, so that the regular domain name will get cached with that text on it, and I expect this to solve the problem.

It will be interesting to see how many visitors come via Google searching for "www.domain-name.com".

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Comments

Michael Brandon - May 5, 2008

Very good point. Personally, I make sure that I have the website homepage optimised for those alternate phrases, but I hadn't thought through the next step of having the actual alternate domain mentioned on the index page.

Michael Brandon - May 5, 2008

Interesting - when I type timetodine.co.nz into Google, it redirects to www.time2dine.co.nz. I have certainly included the phrase "TimeToDine" on the index page with a good sales pitch around it.

Aaron Cooper - May 10, 2008

Hi Harvey,

I was just searching for info on this and got to your site. I've been dwelling on that exact topic this week as one of our clients has snatched up about a dozen domains as a past developer told them that the keywords in those domains would help with rankings. Obviously bad advice, but it did make me wonder about the exact scenario you describe.

I'd be interested to hear the result of your test

Harvey - May 10, 2008

Now that it's been cached again, the site is now showing up for queries on the dashed domain, which wasn't happening before.

Interestingly enough, the page is now chock full of Adsense too, which Google wasn't showing previously when there were no results.

The Domain I'm referring to is www.psoriasisclinic.co.nz and the dashed version as well.

Harvey - May 10, 2008

This scenario shouldn't be a big issue for most people - depending what you bought the second domain name for. If it's just to prevent someone else grabbing the name, then you probably don't need to go to these lengths.

In this particular case, there's a good chance the client will use the dashed domain in printed media if it makes it more readable, meaning there's a good chance people will type the domain into a Google query.

Lynny Bishop - Jun 8, 2008

Hi Harvey

I have a client that brought several country specific domain names so they could get into country specific search engines, like google.co.nz or google.co.uk or whatever. I told this client to park these domain names over the .com version. I could never work out why these domain names then vanished from the searches in google altogether, becuase they were there and ranking quite well, but he also changed his host at the same time, This client perfers to work with his own control panel himself, so I can't get in and take a look at what is wrong, and can't get him to understand why it's important for local search engines to use these domain names. So thank you for this post, although the solution is different to your one, it may have given me the heads up on what maybe wrong.
Cheers Lynny