Traffic Building

It’s tempting to save a few dollars when you’re registering a .com domain name and not register the .net, .org, .biz, and .info versions of the name as well. After all, you’re not going to put any content there right?

First, the main issue is not what content you might put there but what content a competitor may put there once your site becomes popular.

Imagine you spend a year creating useful and relevant content for your industry and branding a particular .com domain name only to have a competitor register the .net and .org versions of the name and redirect them to their site. It may not hurt your search rankings as visitors almost universally go to the .com version by default, but it will certainly dilute the value of that branded domain name and, at best, confuse some potential customers about who they’re actually dealing with when they think of your brand.

In addition to preventing potential poachers, these secondary domain names can be useful for publishing other content that doesn’t fit on your .com domain. If your .com domain is focused on bringing in new business, you may not want to dilute that message with company news or pages of information that only applies to existing customers. Use one of those secondary domains as your support site, one as your blog site, and one as a strictly informational site for potential customers. That way, you can focus one message for one target audience and not worry about trying to address all issues for all people on one domain.

Another benefit to multiple domain names is that it’s difficult to get inbound links to a strictly commercial site. If you want to earn backlinks, it’s much easier to get them for a strictly informational or blog site than it is for a strictly commercial site. Use one of your secondary domains to answer questions, provide information, or otherwise act as an industry resource. That domain will earn backlinks and you can easily provide appropriate links to your main commercial domain from it.