I'm a newbie here. So if the question has been answered elsewhere, please kindly direct me to the right place.

We registered a dozen domain names to protect our brand, like www.abc.com, www.abcstore.com, www.abcshop.com, etc. Should we activate all the urls and point them to the same page? Is this considered spam by Google? Or should we redirect the other urls to www.abc.com? Or rather just keep www.abc.com and leave the other domain names alone?

Thank you in advance for shedding lights.
Loup

Welcome to SEW Forums Loup!

I think it would be best for you to just keep www.abc.com and have all the other domains be pointed to it via a 301 permanent redirect if they have any link presence on the web already and can not be corrected. Otherwise, just have these domains be forwarded to www.abc.com at the registrar level. There is no need to duplicate the work for each, as long as the user is correctly landing on www.abc.com.

The other important element is, that when building your link popularity campaigns afterwards, you want to focus on one domain only. Otherwise, you will create a nightmare that will take you forever to fix.

Thanks for the prompt response, Nacho.
If we leave all the urls active but pointing to the same pages, does Google consider them all mirror sites and hence spam?

Same template, same content, same hosting company, same ip block, but different domains . . . you bet, that could definetly trigger the "duplicate site penalty".

Keep it simple, all efforts to just one domain, and you will win.

Good luck! :)

OK, let's do some suppositional figuring here.

What if there's only one domain - a "general" one, that should legitimately be promoted because there's actually one company involved, but there are a couple of additional domain names the party has that are product specific and include keywords? Should those get regurgitated content put on them, conduct independent link development campaigns and be promoted independently, be dumped altogether (which clients will not be happy with), or should each of the product-specific domain names be "pointed" to a directory or subdomain on the main, broader based site?

Oh, this is a very relevant business issue, and how! Mom 'n Pop read a couple of articles out there on the web someplace that tell them that keywords in domain names "help with rankings", they buy themselves a bunch and "point" them to their homepage with 302's, and wait with bated breath for the search engine rankings and traffic to start pouring in and make them rich.

This whole "extra domain" and redirection thing is giving me brain cramp. Is it or is it not even close to a reasonable choice to take "keyword domains" and point them to applicable /directoies/ on a site?

Maybe someone can help me out here; I've been unable to figure out what it is they're hoping to accomplish with this pointing routine.

Added:

Sorry Loup, please don't take this as referring to yourself because it certainly isn't; you seem to have a perfectly letigimate reason, which is to protect your domain and branding. But there are so many people out there getting themselves into problems, it's worth looking into further and trying to establish some kind of baseline if at all possible.

Marcia, you made a very interesting point. In our case, all the domains we have registered contain our brand name and related keywords. Evidently we're going to focus on one of them. Even if we want to activate some other domains, some contents are bound to be similar though the products are different. For the rest of the domains that we'll never really develop any contents, won't it be a waste of resources?

For the rest of the domains that we'll never really develop any contents, won't it be a waste of resources?

I think your forgetting what you originally state.

We registered a dozen domain names to protect our brand, like www.abc.com, www.abcstore.com, www.abcshop.com, etc.

You didn't register them to make them a resource, you registered them for the sole purpose to stop others registering them. Work on the one domain, redirect all the others to that domain for the sole purposes of having them in your possesion and if by chance anyone types that domain in, they will be redirected to the main one.

I see no problem...

Don't lose sight of your original intent, as it was the right one. Build one, redirect the rest. Simple!

Thanks for all your help. We built one main site (with other urls in other languages) and redirect the domains we registered accordingly. Hope this will help Googlebot and our site.