New post on the InspectorPages blog: Choosing a Domain Name

[Bob Elliott]

Originally Posted by inxil

Domains are cheap. I have over 100 personal domain names in my Go Daddy account. At $7.50/year (with our discount—see the link) you should own AT LEAST two domains. Whenever I have a new idea, the first thing I do is buy a few domains. You never know when they'll come in handy.

That said, unless you're ready to maintain multiple websites (and that means keep them up to date and add new content from time to time), I would recommend having only ONE website and use your best domain as your primary. The search industry has disincentived the old practice of maintaining multiple websites, and the trend is that they'll continue along that path. That's not the say that there aren't effective ways to use multiple sites with multiple targeted domains—it's just difficult and usually less valuable than spending that time on your main site.

I dis agree

Type in Chicago home inspection on Google.
Now type in Chicago home inspection on Google and look only at organic .

Two different sites at different key words.

A few others on close pages but under condo how many times did you see my name under different URL's on the first page?

[Chris Morrell]

Bob,

I see you as the top organic result, but I don't see you in the local results (maybe I'm missing it—what's the domain?).

And I'm not saying that it's not possible, I'm just saying that it's becoming less and less effective. Plenty of folks are successfully ranking multiple sites, but I think in today's search climate, a brand new inspector will get a higher ROI focusing on one site than on several. Once your main domain is ranked in the top 3 you could consider working on a second domain, but I don't think it makes sense until then.

[Christopher Currins]

Originally Posted by belliott

I dis agree

Type in Chicago home inspection on Google.
Now type in Chicago home inspection on Google and look only at organic .

Two different sites at different key words.

A few others on close pages but under condo how many times did you see my name under different URL's on the first page?

Same key phrase Bob.


Chicago home inspection. Chicago home inspector. The same site of yours on page one.

[Bob Elliott]

Originally Posted by ccurrins

Same key phrase Bob.


Chicago home inspection. Chicago home inspector. The same site of yours on page one.

Yes chicagoland is near top right now and Chris is right about changes which is exactly why i dis agree with him.
Sometimes my Elliott site is above it so by having more url's you are CYA.
One goes down and the other goes up and soooo they dance.LOL

However I must admit he may be right for new sites as it takes years to get in the game that way.Right now Local is hot but I would not judge much based on those results as they are still dancing.

[Chris Morrell]

Originally Posted by belliott

One goes down and the other goes up and soooo they dance.

This is one of the reasons that I recommend only having one site. Your situation may be different (particularly because you're at/near the top), but let's talk link juice for a minute. Here's a scenario:

Joe Inspector decides to build two sites: cityainspector.com and citybinspector.com. Both sites get 10 links in common (regional and non-locational links) and each gets 10 city-specific links (so cityainspector.com gets 10 links from sites that are dedicated to City A, etc). Each site has 20 links in total, and they both rank 8th on Google searches for their respective cities.

So if we make up some numbers:

• When someone searches for "City A Inspector", Google gives cityainspector.com 60 points: 20 for the regional, and 40 for the city-specific links (I'm just making these numbers up—no one knows exactly how much weight is given to things, but generally, local links have more value than general links, and these numbers make it easy for my examples). So 60 points is just enough to get to position 8 on Google.
• "City B Inspector" produces the same results for citybinspector.com.

Now, imagine instead that Joe Inspector recognized that he will probably get 65% of his work from City A, about 25% from City B, and the rest from the other smaller towns nearby. In this case he decides to set up one site: cityainspector.com and create a special landing page for City B: cityainspector.com/city-b-inspections. Let's run the same numbers:

• cityainspector.com still gets 20 links from the same sources, and cityainspector.com/city-b-inspections gets the same 20 links that citybinspector.com got before.
• So now when someone searches for "City A Inspector", cityainspector.com Google gives it ~70 points: 20 for the regional, 40 for the city-specific links, 2-3 for the regional links going to cityainspector.com/city-b-inspections (they won't provide as much value because they also link to the main site), and 5-6 for the local links the are specific to cityainspector.com/city-b-inspections (those links are only worth 10 points now because the search term is "City A Inspector", not "City B Inspector", and because those links are to a sub-page of the site, not all 10 points transfer to the primary domain, only 50-60% of them do). Let's say 70 points is enough to get to position 6 on Google—we just moved up two rankings!
• Next, we'll look at cityainspector.com/city-b-inspections. Again, it gets the same base 60 point ranking from before, but also get 3–4 additional points because the root domain (cityainspector.com) has 10 additional links to it, and is passing some of that link juice on to its sub-pages. So say it gets ~64 total points… that's 4 more than it was getting before.

Obviously this is pretty technical, and also entirely fabricated. There are a ton of factors in ranking, and I only picked one, but I think it demonstrates my point. You certainly can successfully manage multiple sites at multiple domains, but in most cases you're probably doing yourself a disservice unless you really know what you're doing.

[Nick Gromicko]

For those who have trouble understanding what Chris is saying, watch what Mr. Spock does at 3 minutes into this scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCjjrb7ElXw

Spock gets noticed by directing (I mean burning) all his link juice (I mean fuel) so that they get noticed.

[Dominic J. Maricic]

Totally Illogical!

[Bob Elliott]

"Make it so!"

[ROBERT V. YOUNG]

Originally Posted by gromicko

For those who have trouble understanding what Chris is saying, watch what Mr. Spock does at 3 minutes into this scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCjjrb7ElXw

Spock gets noticed by directing (I mean burning) all his link juice (I mean fuel) so that they get noticed.

Its been removed Nick.