I have a client that wants to create a new domain name. They have been thinking for days what the domain will be. The domain is a similar structure to www.24money.com (This looks like twenty four money instead of two four money.) They want www.two4money.com(this looks good, but its not very practical. and I'm recommending that they do not do this. And so they want to do www.twofourmoney.com -My concern is that they will have to have many redirects to make up for the variations of the site and I don't want this to affect SEO performance. I am hoping that someone can shed some light on this topic and give me some ideas or pointers. Thanks
I can't speak about the SEO effects of forwarding multiple domains to a single site, since that is not my area of expertise. But your client would definitely need to register all variants of this name in order to protect their brand and to prevent losing traffic due to variant spellings. If they have a domain branding budget -- as every business owner starting a site should -- then feel free to PM me for other domain suggestions.
Since the domains would be so similar it makes sense for them to be redirected. Generally doing things that makes sense and is helpful to the end user will not have a negative effect on SEO. If you were redirecting obscure and unrelated domains it could hurt with SEO but variations of the same name will be fine. Google and Amazon both redirect variations of their domain names as do a ton of other websites.
So only similar-sounding domain names should be redirected to a website? That information could have saved companies millions of dollars, if only they knew! Type in Book.com or Loans.com or Game.com, and you'll be directed to BarnesAndNoble.com or BankOfAmerica.com or Hasbro.com (respectively). The same is true of countless other premium domain names. These are some of the most established and successful corporations in the world. And I doubt they would pay millions for these domain names and forward them to their primary website if doing so caused them an SEO disadvantage.
Thank you ImageAuthors for elaborating on my point. If the domain you are redirecting is related to the service you are offering it makes perfect sense to redirect it, just like in all of the examples you gave.
From an SEO perspective if you do the redirects using a server-side 301 redirect Google will pass along credit/PageRank for the link even if a site links to the incorrect domain. Google Support Page on 301 redirects: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633
if they have money paying for registration and renewal of all possible digit vs word combination domains, sure why not as long as you use 301 redirect it won't hurt SEO a bit