What Do I Do With All These Domains?

Q: What do I do with all these domains? I bought them and have no idea if I should keep them, let them expire or what.

A: Everyone has them. More domains than you know what to do with. You started out with good intentions, but it wasn’t enough for you to just buy awesome.com – you have to get the .org, .edu, .co and more.

But you couldn’t stop there: You also had to buy theawesome.com, awsome.com, beawesome.com, awsum.com – and it kept going. Next thing you know, your business owns dozens of URLs.

From an SEO perspective, what should you do with them all? Here’s a quick domain checklist.

Is it a misspelling? Could someone mistakenly type this is? Then redirect it , and make it easy on your users and capture potentially missed traffic.

Has there ever been content on that domain? Was it ever live? If the answer is yes, redirect it to the most relevant section of your site. You want to capture and authority gained while it was live, and if someone linked to it, there is equity to be gained as well. If you don’t have a relevant section, don’t redirect it; Google doesn’t like that.

Could this domain cause confusion? Then redirect it to yours. For example, if you’re Bill’s Bike Shop but your site is billsbike.com, redirect billsbikeshop.com billsbikes.com, or anything else that you think users might type in based on the name of your store, capture that traffic.

Does it have a keyword in it? Be careful with this one. As tempting as it is to buy exact match domains and redirect them to your site, avoid this. It’s spammy and has no SEO value.

Is your brand name in it? A lot of people buy domains like brandnamesucks.com or ihatebrandname.com to prevent other from putting up that site and protect other branded sites. Buy them if you can afford it, but just let them sit there parked.

Hope this helps you sift through the potentially thousands of domains you own, but just know this can be a long process will very little benefit other than catching someone’s typos or confusion (who would probably find your site anyway). If a site is live, has links to it and you want to redirect it, then do so—but that’s a whole different can of worms.

How many domains do you own? Winner gets free sausage and peppers! (Not really.)

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