Google and parked domains

[hrbs]

Tweet

A client of mine has one website (.co.uk) and 20 key-word domains parked on top and several which point to the shop part of their site.
They have had conflicting advice as to Google's treatment. One expert says that the parked domains will bring extra traffic and boost the PR, another says that Google is seeing duplicated content (and therefore he says, duplicated sites) and penalises them for it.

What is an effective way around it?
Some thoughts ...
Redirecting calls to the other domains to the main domain in the .htaccess file? (or does this give the same result as domain parking)
Having a landing page for each domain name redirecting via http to the main site?
Having a landing page for each domain with some relevant content and a "click here" to access main site?
Having a landing page for each domain with a "click here" link to access main site?
Thanks

Keith

[Brendon]

To avoid all possible problems with Google, use 301 redirects from the extra domains to the main domain. I have that from an, um, fairly authoritive source.

There are other things you can do, for different reasons, but they all carry risks of one kind or another

[Barry]

Personally unless you get type-ins from the names I would drop them all and just work with optimising the main site.

However if you want to keep them I would write a separate landing page for each one with your keywords in and a 'click here' for main site link. The single page sites wont however boost PR at all unless other people in turn are linking to them and it will be unlikely that any page will rank well in google just because there are keywords in the domain name. It used to work like that, however these days google will hardly ever use the fact that there are keywords in the domain to determine how it ranks, especially if its a new domain with little PR and not an established authority domain.

It is also possible that if you make too many 'doorways' you may get penalised by google.


Ta

[Brendon]

>> It is also possible that if you make too many 'doorways' you may get penalised by google.

The 301s avoid that

[hrbs]

Thanks guys.
Have passed info on. Their web design company deals with the hosting so I'll find out how they are pointing the additional domains.

Keith
HRBS
Small Business Specialists

[hpops]

Just to add weight to Brendon, 301's cover the doorway problem, the dupe content thing and a load of other stuff to.
Anything else is a bit bad