Why Multiple Domains Pointing to the Same Website Won't Help Your Search Rankings

I hear it all the time. "We'd like to point 57 domains to our website to help boost our search rankings." Godaddy offers domains for dirt cheap. A cup of your favorite venti triple-shot insert-favorite-flavor-here cappucino probably costs more these days. It's no wonder you may be tempted to buy up a ton of domains and point them all to your website - especially when you are looking at your site stats and trying to find ways to get your traffic numbers up. Here are the common reasons I hear for wanting this:

More domains  = more traffic
The idea goes like this: 1 website = x amount of traffic. 80 websites then, must equal 80x the traffic. This is a common misconception. Just because the domains are out there doesn't mean  you are increasing your chances of someone finding your site. You still have to promote that domain like you would your primary domain.

If I have more domains, they are more likely to get picked up by Google
Google will pick up on it alright. But probably not the way you'd like them to pick up on it. Google is clear about their policies - deliberately creating duplicate content is not cool. This ends up being (in my opinion) a form of spamming. The search engine algorithms are far too advanced to risk this - they will find you!

What other options do you have?

To start: focus on content. A website that goes stale and is never updated will usually not do as well in the rankings anyways. Make it a goal of yours to update your website 4-5x per week - even if it's just a paragraph or two. If you put the same amount of energy into updating your site as you would into brainstorming, purchasing, and pointing 100 domains to your existing websites, you should see better results anyways.

I'll cover specific instructions to improve your search engine rankings in future posts so you have detailed alternatives. For now, avoid pointing all those domains to your site. It could actually end up hurting your rankings.

One last note: There are certain instances where a few domains wouldn't actually hurt you. If you own example.com - pointing example.net there probably isn't going to be too detrimental. The search engines are smarter than penalizing you for this. The other instance is if you are using the various domains for marketing campaigns - but I would definitely encourage building out separate sites with unique content rather than pointing them all to once place.