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We bought a few search friendly domain names for the CPA site that I manage. Each of the domains we bought has the name of a nearby city and the word cpa in front of, or behind the city name.

The plan is to create a landing page for each of these domains with useful information about business filings, ect. specific to that city, as well as directions to our office from that city.

The question is how to best utilize these new domains:

  • Should each domain be set to a 301 redirect to mainsite.com/city ?
  • Should each domain be it's own single page mini-site that links to mainsite.com ?
  • What other options are there and what are the pros/cons?

Remember the goal is to be more relevant in searches that use a nearby city name in their search for CPA/accounting services.

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Should each domain be set to a 301 redirect to mainsite.com/city ?

This won't accomplish anything other then possibly making it easier for users to find the page because the domain name is shorter or easier to remember. But as far as SEO goes having the keyword rich domain won't matter since you'll be doing a 301 redirect anyway which essentially is telling the search engines the page has moved and to associate any links to the new page and to remove that domain from the search results, thus it is never found that way.

Should each domain be it's own single page mini-site that links to mainsite.com ?

See my answer here.

What other options are there and what are the pros/cons?

Make the URLs on your main site search engine friendly and interlink your pages liberally (have links to nearby cities on each page, links to most commonly viewed cities, etc).

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  • What about a parked domain that keeps the URL citycpa.com, but is also a part of the mainsite.com under mainsite.com/city? Would that be considered duplicate content by search engines?
    – Ben
    Feb 15, 2011 at 18:36
  • If you can pull the same content up using two different URLs then it is duplicate content.
    – John Conde ♦
    Feb 15, 2011 at 18:38

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