Advice on URL Redirects

[PurpleWeb]

Hi

I am looking at building a site for a client who has two stores. The site will have two very useful location pages.

I have bought three domain names

1 - in the name of the business
2 - the franchisename-location1
3 - the franchisename-location2

My original plan was to redirect the franchisename-location1 to nameofbusiness/location1 and the same for location 2

I hope that makes sense.

My question is which url should i concentrate on link building for. I was going to target the franchisename-location but as this is being redirected will this work

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Regards

 

[James Watt]

This is a bad idea. I've seen a redirect URL on a GMB profile lead to a soft suspension before. You could use the 'real' URL on Google and your redirect URL everywhere else I guess, but it's best to have that information match. Plus, you should be building link equity for your real site, not spreading it around other domains you're not intending to ever actually use. In theory, redirects pass 100% of the link value along now, but this is still pretty far off from best practices.

There are theories that exact match domains can still have a positive impact on ranking (I suspect it does, though much less than it used to) but I can't imagine using an exact match redirect domain would give you any of those benefits. I haven't seen anyone explicitly test this, but my money's on no.

I think the real truth: the only reason you'd want to keep those two domains, is to prevent someone else from getting them, or if they previously had been used with a real site and had acquired some authority and history that you didn't want to lose. In your case, they don't really have much value.

 

[djbaxter]

Totally agree with James Watt ^^^