I'm sure this has been done before, but here's what one of my competitors is doing and I'm wondering how/why Google isn't wising up to it: He's registered a couple dozens of my ideal keywords as .com domains and hosted them across 3 godaddy servers. The sites are all 1-page replicas of his home page, except title and meta tags, and are PR0 or no PR, and are about 2 years old. I don't put much stock into it, but http://www.seopenalty.com ranks most of these sites as "slight penalty" to "very high penalty", however even the 10 point penalty sites come up in top 3 positions on Google and have been for months. I would appreciate any feedback from the senior members here. Will I risk Google's wrath if I try a similar strategy? (assuming I do it more intelligently, e.g. make the pages all different, hosted on separate servers)
Also a couple of these sites are in position 100+, but if you search for domain.com, it comes up in the first position. Does this mean Google HAS penalized it but not completely banned it?
It sounds like Google has penalized some of the domains if they are showing up in position 100+ But Google probably won't ban the domains completely. If you search for domain.com that domain.com is going to be the most relevant website, even when it is penalized because Google believes that if someone is searching for a specific website (i.e. domain.com) even if it is a bad website, the website will show up at the 1st position because it is what the searcher most likely wants.
I PM'd you. (I'd rather not post it here and do free advertising for my competitor). If anyone else wants to know the URL, please just ask. Thx.
Thx, GSchneider. In that case, only a couple, out of a couple dozen seem to be penalized. The rest are mostly on page 1 of SERPs. So I'm wondering if this strategy would work if, like me, you have 40 keywords. Even if a couple get dropped, I could live with that.
If the sites aren't appearing in the top 10 results for the exact keyword phrase that is their domain name, then that means that his strategy is not working well. And if you aren't in the top 10 results for the keywords you are trying to rank for, you're not going to get much traffic. Its better to atleast build mini sites of 10 to 20 pages with good unique content, than to just build single pages sites. Google doesn't like single page sites at all in my experience.