A Separate Domain for Every Service

Four domains, four small sites

A scaffolding rental company owns its main domain and three more: one for swing stages, one for site fencing, one for shoring. Each extra domain has a small site of its own, three or four pages long.

They were built at different times, two of them by people who no longer work with the company. One still shows a phone number that changed years ago.

The main site covers all the same services, more briefly, because the effort went into the others.

The idea behind them was reasonable when it was formed. It has not aged well.

Where the idea came from

For a while, a domain containing the words people searched for gave a site a noticeable advantage in Google's results. Businesses bought domains for every service and every town.

Google reduced that advantage years ago for sites without much to offer. Today the name of a domain counts for little beside what the site says and how well other sites regard it.

A keyword domain keeps one modest benefit: people who see it in a search result can tell what it is about. A clear page title on the main site does the same job.

What splitting costs

• Links from other sites spread across four addresses instead of one.
• Reviews and reputation, which attach to a business, not a domain.
• Content thinned across sites, or copied between them.
• Maintenance: four sets of updates, certificates and renewals.
• Analytics split four ways, so nobody sees the whole picture.
• Trust, when a visitor cannot tell which site is the real business.

The first matters most for search. Links from a supplier, a local paper or an association are evidence that a site is worth showing. Spread across four domains, each site gets a little of that evidence, and none gets enough.

One listing, one business

Google My Business allows one listing per business at a location, not one per service. That listing links to one website, and the reviews customers leave build up on it.

The service sites cannot have listings of their own, and creating extra listings for them breaks Google's guidelines.

So the place where most local customers first meet the business, the listing with its reviews and map, points to the main site. That is the site that deserves the effort.

Copied text across the sites

Small service sites are often filled with text taken from the main site, or the other way round.

When the same text appears on several sites, Google generally picks one version to show and leaves the others out of the results. The sites end up competing with each other for the same searches.

Rewriting everything separately for each site avoids that, at the cost of doubling the writing for no extra benefit to anybody reading.

A worked example

The scaffolding company's three extra sites had been built over eight years.

The fencing site came from one summer's campaign, the swing stage site copied most of its text from the main site, and each had collected a handful of links.

The main site's service pages were a paragraph each, because the detail had gone elsewhere.

The company rebuilt those service pages on the main site, one per kind of equipment, covering what it is used for, how rental and set-up work, permits where they apply, and photographs of real jobs.

Each extra domain was then redirected to its matching page, and each of its old pages to the closest equivalent. The domains stay registered, so the trucks and site signs that show them still lead somewhere sensible.

When a separate domain makes sense

A genuinely separate business or brand, with different customers and its own reputation, can earn its own site. A commercial division trading under another name is one example.

So can part of a business that may one day be sold on its own, since a separate site and domain are simpler to hand over.

A short, memorable domain used on radio, a truck or a printed campaign is fine too, as long as it redirects to a specific page on the main site rather than hosting a site of its own.

Pointing the extras properly

The right method is a permanent redirect, known as a 301, which tells browsers and search engines the content has moved for good and carries over most of what the old address earned.

Redirect each domain to its matching page, not the home page, and each old page to its nearest equivalent.

Do not use masked forwarding, where the main site appears inside a frame under the other address, and do not leave a parked page or a duplicate copy behind.

Give the extra domains certificates too. Somebody typing the secure version of an extra domain gets a security warning before any redirect happens if the domain has no certificate, and free certificates make that easy to avoid.

Check email before changing anything. If anybody uses an address at one of the extra domains, its mail settings have to keep working once the website part redirects.

And keep every extra domain registered. One that lapses can be bought by somebody else, along with the links and the printed material still pointing at it.

The counter-case

An established separate site with its own following and its own links may be worth leaving alone for now, then merging later with careful redirects, rather than folding in during a busy season.

Nor does merging help by itself. Folding four thin sites into one only works if the pages on the main site are written properly; a redirect to a single paragraph is still a redirect to a single paragraph.

A separate brand, a division being prepared for sale, or a domain used only in print are reasons to keep a domain apart. They are not reasons to build a small site on every one.

One main site, with every extra domain redirected page by page to where its content now lives.

The order to do it in

1. List every domain the business owns.
2. Note what each one currently shows.
3. Build the matching page on the main site.
4. Redirect each domain to its matching page.
5. Add certificates to the redirecting domains.
6. Move every renewal onto one account.
7. Turn on automatic renewal for all of them.

Step four is where the old sites' value is kept or lost. A redirect to the matching page passes on what each site earned; a redirect to the home page, or none at all, mostly throws it away.

Keeping those extra domains from lapsing is covered in the domain renewal on an old credit card.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.