I am trying to find 10 or so domains to build up for a few years to 301 redirect to a main site.

ie one real estate investing, one city focused site, one buying site...

all of these sites eventually point to their prospective inner pages.

Anyways, what is an ideal for a city domain.. Obviously city.com or citystate.com would be ideal, but they are usually taken.

second best?

I use .info and .net domains a lot - you may want to try those.

I am a little fuzzy on your concept though - how do you mean "to build up for a few years to 301 redirect to a main site"? Are you aware that when you 301 redirect these domains they disappear from the search engines?

There is no "building up" required. The only way such domains are of any benefit is if you advertise them and generate traffic through your advertising. They have no search engine benefit - so domain selection can be expanded - and spending years "building up" the domains has minimal benefit except for any links to the domains that you are able to attract would transfer to the target of the redirection. Most links you would be able to attract would end up being removed after the redirection was discovered - so the link transference idea may be a lot of work over a long time period for a little short term benefit.

What if you have a website focused on real estate investing.. build it up (content, links, etc).. and then once you launch your main site 301 redirect that to your investment division page of your main real estate company's website?

That wouldn't work?

what about this domain

citysource.com

Seems like an easy one to make a catch line : your number one source for information about city

When you "launch" the 301 redirect, the redirected domain and content disappears from the search engines. The investment division page of your main site takes its place. This page may over a short period of time actually rise in rank higher than where the redirected domain used to rank because any reciprocal links on that domain have now become one way links.

That does not last however. Over time your link partners discover the domain is now redirected and many will remove their links which causes the investment division page of your main site to lose its rank.

It ends up being a lot of work for very little long term gain.

You can save yourself a lot of work and end up with the same or better long term result by putting all of this new content on your main site in the first place.

Good points, and something to consider.

What if most of the links that I am building are forum signatures, blog posts, etc.. that I control anyways.

Read my content.. click on my site kind of things. Would those still help?

I might leave an investment site anyways thought just to capture those leads and tell them about my main company later.

Thanks for the advice though

Yes, links that you control would continue to be of benefit

Why would you build up all these websites and then kill them? Just leave them up and they will fill in niches that you didn't even knew existed. I have 15 real estate websites and they show up all over the place for terms I never imagined.

Hmm.. also noted. I might make a site focused on the city and see if that can grab some leads as well

Although your strategy would work (in theory) because 301 redirects pass PR to the receiving site, it's an awfully expensive and time consuming way to go.

You'd be better off building a bunch of squidoo lenses, hubpages & wordpress blogs that are essentially "traffic pumpers" and "PR pumpers" for your primary site. Even though those are all free options, you'd still need to implement a linking strategy if you wanted any of them to rank.

Or... you could just build a larger authority site and focus all of your link building efforts on that site.

Assuming you have the ability to get all the sites ranking well, Bigtoe is spot on.

You'd end up having multiple sites filling up lots of searches.


However, if you've never done anything regarding this type of effort before, you might consider: crawling, walking, then running.

10 sites, in a competitive market, will take a lot of effort, time and patience to get all of them ranking well.

i have heard of people redirecting domain names in-order to track print marketing efforts.

I agree with joel - if you are just looking to create sites for linking purposes use some of the free blogging tools

I would put up 5 to 10 pages on each domain - have some links go to them and let them age in google while you wait for time to build them

I decided to scale it down a bit.. I started a main domain, investing, city, and only a few others.. Some have some page rank now... and will posts some blog entries and let them age.

Thanks for the advice

Overall i think it's still a good idea... let the sites grow, then help each other. I would not kill them, but instead grow them all into good sites then link them together with advertising and cross-linking?

Just a word of caution - From my own experience, Google will drop sites completely from the index that they discover are linked together - and use the same adsense account. The advertising account allows them to identify the sites as being related.

thanks for the tip, I would not be putting adsense on any of the sites, or cross-linking for that matter