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Article by Sam Martin, PE, CVS, President of OfficeOnWeb, Technologies. 7/1/2001

This was a part of a response to a query through an International news service.

Question:
" One school says it is 'a good thing' to have several domains point at the one site: the other school says it is 'index spamming.' Which is it>Toll free is available for clients only (call for number) - Peter Benson,

Answer:
In terms of a search engines, you should only register one domain per actual original content physical site. Search engines are concerned about spamming their index. They want good valid content to be shown for a specified search. Thus they only want one domain per identical site. This applies to a "parked" domain or another physical domain with exactly the same content. Failure to meet this criteria can get your site thrown off the specified index.

Doorway sites are different domains that have slightly, or ideally, significantly different content. The arrangement of content is designed to better satisfy, and gain higher ratings, on specific search engines. Ideally, to avoid search engines thinking you are spamming them, the sites need to resolve to different IP addresses. Your provider can put your site on a different IP than your other site if you request it. The doorway concept is to generate higher traffic for the overall project involved. If the content is identical or too close to another site, it may be flagged as a spamming domain and will be removed from the index of the search engine involved. Doorway's are a large subject for which I will not go into further in this post.

Several domains are often parked to the same site for many good reasons. Usually, only one of these are registered with the search engine. Major reasons for multiple parked domains include (and we advise these should occur):

1. You may want to have common misspellings parked to the same site so that you do not lose traffic due to user errors.

2. If the technique or process you are using has many different names, people will often just type those in to find it. Obtaining all names will assure that people find your specific service or product.

3. If you are advertising in print media, it is helpful to use different parked domain names in the ad campaign. This allows you to track the effectiveness of a specific advertising campaign. (This presumes you have referrer logs such as ours so you can track the results.)

4. You want to protect your identity or trademark. Purchasing the various different identities that relate to your products or trademarks and parking them to your master web site name protects your company from identity theft and potential client confusion.

5. You want to test a name for it marketability. Parking the domain to a site that has proven itself as profitable allows you to examine if the new name has good marketing appeal. If you find everyone is making the same error in name, why not change the name or at least have that name point to the correct location so that sales can be generated from the misconception.

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Did you know that in 1998 more than 95% of OfficeOnWeb's new customers made a profit from their web site within their first year of operation? This compares to less than 20% industry wide ever even breaking even. Further, over half of new publicly traded dot com businesses failed in 2000. This compares to less than 1% of OfficeOnWeb customers abandoning their effort. Sad, but it is true. Why? Our professional and directed expertise. This industry average for people leaving their current web service provider is 4% per month! That's nearly 50% over a year! Ours is less than 1% per year. That is because we endeavor to make our clients money and don't just offer a "pat solution" that we know has a low probability of ever making our client a profit. Some of the features that make up the level of success that our clients enjoy are:

 Five redundant backbone connections

 99.999% up time on UNIX servers

 Redundant OC-3 connect to all five backbones

 Full data center services

RAID 5 system with weekly backup of critical systems

 True Web Developer Services

 Large support site for clients and visitors

 Four level or higherencryption on all e-commerce solutions designed by Office On Web (this is the government standard required if Government people are to use a site)

 We NEVER host a commercial site on an access server (that is really bad, but common in dial up providers)

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