Last updated on March 31st, 2016 at 12:59 pm
Recently I have spoken to several clients and prospective clients who all seem to have had the same idea. If I explain the most recent conversation with a client (any domains mentioned in the conversation below are made up) you might see what the problem is, if you don’t I’ll explain later.
Client – “I have just brought two new domains that I want to feature in the search engines.”
Me – “Ok… what are the domains and what do you want them to feature for?”
Client – “I’ve brought www.widgetmanufacturersuk.co.uk and www.widgetmanufacturersuk.com. I want to be found for UK widget manufacturers.”
Me – “Hmm… what content are you planning on putting onto the two new websites?”
Client – “Two new websites? All I want is for the domains to come up in the search engines.”
Me – “So what do you want to say on the pages of these domains?” (Asking the previous question in a different way in case I had not been understood).
Client – “I don’t want any content – I’ve read that if I have a domain that matches the search then I will come up at the top of the search results.”
Me – “But what do you want to happen if the visitors go to your domain, assuming that they find it?”
Client – “Oh… Umm… I guess they need to see the same things that my main website says… “
At this point I had to explain that just because the domain contained the same characters as the phrase that the person was searching for it :-
This ended up with the client saying “Oh, maybe I wasted my money then.” at which point I suggested that he could build a couple of small sites that both contained unique content and said in effect “for more information please visit our main site” or that he could just redirect to the main site and leave the domains to capture anyone that happened to type in www.widgetmanufacturersuk.co.uk into the browser address bar (which was better than a holding page that their domain registration agent had put up that advertised online dating and how to get rich online). He decided that he would set up the forwarding and a few minutes later I got an email saying that he had done this – however when I checked he had used an option on the registration agents site to put the main site into a frame on the new domain. At this point I suggested that he waited until I could send him the exact instructions to redirect the new domains to the main (real) domain using the correct 301 redirect code.
This whole episode followed on from an online discussion that I had had a few days earlier on a business forum where I was told that all anyone needed to feature on the first page of the search engines was to have a domain that matched the search – the example I was given was www.shoeshopinreading.co.uk for a shoe shop in Reading (do “shoes hop in Reading” or should that be “shoe shop in Reading” by the way?). It seems that the person that told me this was under the impression that every time he looked for a service or product that the first page contained a domain that matched the search he was carrying out and that this backed up something that he had read online. It was fairly easy to find several examples where this was not the case and I tried to explain that the domain (or even the URL) might be a factor in the search engines but that it was believed that Google had over 200 such factors and that SEO was not that easy.
And finally…
Just because you read something online you need to carry out your own research, this is something that was drummed into me years ago and it holds true in SEO just as much as it does in many other fields. If you read that “so and so” is a fact in SEO and that it will get you to the top of the search engine results ask yourself if there is any evidence that you have seen that disproves the “fact”. Often you will find that that is the case (although not always – sometimes the facts that you are given are based on the truth).