Should I put a landing page on my secondary websites or redirect to my main page

Question

(Object Name changed below to keep things simple)

Let's say my company sells badges and buttons. Our main website is badges-and-buttons.co.uk.

We also have a lot of other sites that we have registered that have variations on the name:

• badges-uk.co.uk
• badge-button.co.uk
• namebadge.co.uk
• ukbuttons.co.uk
• etc.

I have been told that just redirecting these sites to our main page could have a detrimental affect on our Google Search ranking as Google will see duplicate content.

So should I redirect them, or have a single landing page with a link to the main site, or just keep a blank page.

Answer 1

Redirecting won't have a detrimental affect, hosting the same content under multiple domains MAY have a detrimental affect as it will be seen as duplicate content.

The best thing to do is to run a 301 redirect from the additional domains to your primary domain badges-and-buttons.co.uk.

You should be able to find examples on how this can be done for the programming language you are using.

Edit:

I say MAY as according to Matt Cutts at Google, duplicate content tends only to be harmful if that content is spammy. Personally I wouldn't risk it.

Answer 2

The only way that it would hurt to redirect those domains to your site would be if is some of those domains were previously registered and have baggage that comes along with them. Generally, if you registered those domains from a domain registrar, they won't have that problem: they are likely to be "fresh" and never used. There would only be a problem if you bought them from somebody, or at an auction.

Check their history to see if they were ever used to spam. You can use:

• The Internet Achive's Wayback machine -- See if they ever had a site published on them that had spammy content.
• Google Webmaster Tools -- Add and verify each site to check for messages from Google.
• MX Tools email black list check -- To make sure the domains were never used to send spam email.

Answer 3

If these domains are new (never registered), there is no reason on which it's risky to 301 redirect all these domains to your main page (on the main site). Duplicate content concerns texts on websites. There is no duplicate content issues on domain names (=URLs).

You can thus 301 redirect all these domains to your main page if you want to.