Site Check – Web Site Advice

Get healthy advice on how to improve your web site and make money with it
Topics covered: Creation, Optimization, Marketing, Maintenance, Hosting, Tuning

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If your domain name is not easy to remember, then many people will have problems to memorize your web site address. Therefore it’s recommended that you register more domain names with different spellings of your site name or trademarks. All those additional domains can be directed to your original web site which shows your visitors that you really thought about their user experience.

The shorter the domain name, the easier it is to remember and will also reduce the risk of typos on the user’s end.

Attention! There is a little problem with using too many domain names for the same content. You might end up getting blocked or penalized on some search engines because you duplicate the content and you seem to be spamming the search engine.

If you’d like to provide a user friendly experience and still abide to the search engines, then you might want to add your domain aliases on a different virtual host and redirect to the main site. Make sure to use the “no-follow” meta tag on those redirect pages.

Using just a few domain aliases seems to be fine with most search engines, tough.

Also make sure that you provide alternative spellings for umlauts, diacritics, hyphens and other special symbols.

A few years ago, I registered the domain name “altavisita.com” and linked it to “altavista.com”. I’m typing very quickly on my keyboard and at the time, my fingers always wanted to type “altavisita” instead of “altavista”. As I was lazy, I decided that it would be easier to register the alternative spelling instead of training my fingers to the correct spelling.

Nowadays, I know how to spell Altavista correctly, i.e. Google 😉
(so we let the other domain name expire…)

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