Introducing John McKnight: for those of you that don't know or can't tell by the last name, John is my husband and his claim to fame beyond that is writing the automatically SEOing blogging platform RSS Pieces' blogs run on. I have convinced him to write some posts here that may be a bit geekier and filled with more technical explanations than my average post. So, without further ado...

First things first. One of the things that I find annoying is when people couch marketing advice as SEO advice - make no mistake, these are not the same things and they shouldn't be assumed to be. The first SEO myth I want to dispel is the theory that redirecting a bunch of keyword rich domains to your primary site that is possibly a vanity site (i.e. yourname.com) will improve the overall SEO value of your primary site. If you want the SEO value of a keyword rich domain, then use the keyword rich one as your primary domain and redirect your vanity domain to it, so you can use the vanity domain on your business cards!

Call a spade a spade: vanity and single property websites are just MARKETING DEVICES! They have no intrinsic SEO value

Let's use vanity websites for our first example. You can call them single property sites or any other thing that you may like but they are simply vanity sites and as such should be regarded as marketing devices and not SEO tools. Why? Because a vanity site has to live with the same SEO challenges as a conventional website and these include things like proper domain name selection, general SEO, solid content and the dreaded Google trustbox/sandbox. It is the trustbox that will prevent most single property sites from being truly effective from an SEO standpoint. After all, how can a site that is largely untrusted and seldom viewed for the first 3 or 4 months be of any benefit to your client? How can it help them if it can't be found with two hands and a flashlight in Google for an extended period of time? Are you willing to admit to your client that they will see no benefits at all for months on end and then eventually, maybe, you will see some results? Probably not, but if you treat single property sites as a searchable, and therefore an SEO-based product, you will be doing your client a disservice. It is better to take them for what they are which is just a domain name that is easy to remember because its name has something to do with the home and little else unless you plan on listing a house for a year or two which I am sure will go over very well with everyone you meet. It is just a marketing device and nothing else. Obviously this post is not meant to be about single property sites so refrain from making comments about them because it is not relevant to what we are here for today which is busting an SEO myth that people fall prey to and that is vanity domains that are *redirected to a primary domain.

Read also: Myth: single property websites are good for SEO

What are the 6 elements of good SEO on a website?

Let's take a look at some of the principles of SEO and see why vanity domains and redirection are not terribly helpful.

What gives a site SEO value?
1. Keyword rich domain names.
2. Keyword rich **URI's
3. Good content.
4. Good meta tags and descriptions.
5. Inbound links of value.
6. Good structure and tagging of content.

Which of these items in our admittedly abbreviated list applies to a domain that is being redirected to another domain? If you said just number one you are correct and can skip the rest of this paragraph. However, if you think the others apply you need to sit down, drink more or less coffee and read that list one more time because a redirected domain has NO content and NO pages and cannot help with items 2 through 6 at all. So, no content and no pages lead to a domain name that is filled up with a whole lot of nothing and surely cannot help people find your site. Now if you believe that the domain name alone is worthy of redirecting to a domain from an SEO standpoint then you have apparently found the illusive Holy Grail of SEO. Why? Because you would be saying that a domain name alone can carry so much weight that it can offset the obvious lack of true and meaningful content and therefore relegate quality content and structure a distant second and third.

Read also: Top 5 on-page SEO techniques

Redirected domains do not have content or pages, so they add NO SEO value to the site they are redirecting to

OK, now you have a domain name that is loaded in keywords but no content. What will people find? What will they search for? If they are looking for your domain name they will find it but it takes a lot more than that to be valuable and that is content, content, content. The biggest bait for search engines is good content and the best bait for visitors is also good content and by good content I do not mean fluff pieces about cookies or your personal rants or a daily schedule because between you, me and everyone else in the world, we don't care. Got it? We don't care. The personal content is great for friends and family but it will not attract new clients. The best you can hope for is a few rubber-neckers that stop to look at the accident you call a website. Your site is a business site and needs to be treated like a business so you need to write good and engaging content about real estate or you are wasting your time. So they are SEO-useless but does that make vanity domains really useless? Probably not. Will you get traffic from people? Possibly. Will you get traffic from search engines? Maybe. If you get 5 hits a day from one, then you can get 500 a day if you have 100 domains right? But at what price? $8 a year per domain? $35 a year per domain? Wouldn't that money be better spent on advertising? Or better yet to craft truly valuable content for your site and drive that extra traffic to your domain.

Read also: SEO tip of the week: Keyword use in domain names

Redirecting too many domains to a single place can make you look like a spam site in Google's eyes.

While you have your thinking caps on, take one more look at many domains redirecting to one domain. Who else does that? If you said spammers and porn sites you are correct Sir and if you think Google and other search engines don't notice that, then you underestimate them. One day soon, if not already, you will discover that your sites will take a big and bad hit when Google notices that you have a ton of site domains and one site because you will look like a spammer. After all, you are the company that you keep. In a nutshell. Vanity domains with redirects have little SEO value, they are marketing tools and nothing else and may bite you in the not too distant future.
* By way of background, a redirect is a little tool in the web world that can take a person from one site to another without requiring any action by your visitor. It can be accomplished in a lot of ways but the preferred method is called a 301 redirect and it is the one that Google likes and the only type of redirect that I will talk about in this post. A 301 is so amazingly simple in that you just tell the browser "Hey, I don't live here. Go to this site instead." and the browser follows your command and moves on. Something to keep in mind from this point forward is that a 301 redirect is usually sent out by itself and is not part of a webpage but is instead just a directive.
** A URI is the part after the http and after the domain name and a URL is the whole thing that you normally type so it is more correct to refer to the URI when we talk about good link structure.

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