I am curious to hear your thoughts on which of these methods will provide the most benefit to an SEO campaign. Here is my scenario: I was given a domain name related to one of my current projects and rather than let it sit and rot, I thought I might try to get a bit of value out of it. Idea #1 My initial idea was to simply 301 the new domain to a sub-section on my money site and then build a few backlinks to the new domain for indexing and added value. A technique I have seen done thousands of times on thousands of different websites. Idea #2 However, some say I would get more SEO benefit from this domain by turning it into a simple landing page that in turn links to my money site. Then building a few backlinks to the new domain for indexing and added value. What are your thoughts on which method would be most beneficial? My Edit ::: I should mention that either way the domain will be hosted on different servers and the whois has been blocked for privacy so google should view this domain as one under another persons ownership.
If you 301 redirect newdomain.com to moneydomain.com, unless newdomain.com already has backlinks it will be of zero SEO value. The only "value" in 301 redirecting is to transfer credit to the target domain for inbound links (and the link text associated with those inbound links) to the redirected domain. It should be noted that at Google, such a 301 redirect will also cause the redirected URL(s) to be removed from their index. So the fact that the newdomain.com might have some keywords that you want to rank for in URL is meaningless because the newdomain.com URL(s) no longer exists in their index... If you 301 redirect newdomain.com to moneydomain.com AND newdomain.com doesn't currently have any inbound links BUT you then go build some inbound links to newdomain.com, you will get no more benefit than if you built those links directly to moneydomain.com. In fact, you may get LESS benefit from linking to newdomain.com than if you had linked directly to moneydomain.com because some SEOs believe that with each hop due to a 301 redirect, you lose a small percentage of link juice/page rank that would normally be passed. This is one reason why SEOs recommend that you avoid stacked redirects like URLA -> 301 -> URLB -> 301 ->URLC. The only real value in having newdomain.com is if you build out content there that is relevant to moneydomain.com, and you then link from newdomain.com over to moneydomain.com. Even then, it's only going to make a noticeable difference if you do link development and generate unique fresh content for new domain which means distracting your focus from moneydomain.com. I would suggest that unless the newdomain.com is an EXACT match for some keyword phrase that you want to easily rank for (i.e. you want to rank for "newdomain" in this example) that you are typically better off sticking to your one moneydomain.com site. Time/money/effort spent developing the newdomain.com second site can usually bring more ROI if it were spent instead on moneydomain.com. PS: Hosting these 2 sites on the same IP would NOT adversely affect rankings... Maybe if you had 50, 100s, or thousands of sites that you were interlinking all on the same IP it would. But not for a handful of sites (especially just 2). Also private registration might hide the fact that you own both sites from the public, but it will NOT hide that fact from Google. Google is a registrar and has access to all of the information that is hidden by private registration.
Canonical - That is probably the most descriptive and well thought out reply I have ever received on Digital Point so thank you for your excellent contribution. You confirmed a few suspicions that I have had and given me some additional things to think about. The new domain is an exact match for a term my money site already ranks for, which is why I thought I might make use of this domain. Guess I have a bit of thinking to do and decide whether or not I want to build this domain out or just hang on to it for the time being. Thanks again and added to your rep. for the response
If it's an exact match for the term you already rank well for on your money site, then I would build it up and see if you can get it to rank well also. After all, there's nothing like dominating your competition with 2 out of the top 10 positions.