Take control of your domains

Andrew says: “Get hold of your domains.

I still come across way too many businesses that have domains they’ve forgotten about, subdomains they set up and then left, or domains that the CEO bought on a whim over a weekend – and it can be quite problematic for your SEO efforts.”

What does it mean to get hold of your domains?

“Find the exhaustive list of how many domains the business owns.

There are lots of tools that can help with this but an easy -- and free one -- is Google Search Console.

With Search Console set-up at the domain level, it's straightforward. In the Settings menu, under Crawl Stats you can see all the different hosts Googlebot is crawling on your domain. It even counts www. as a subdomain of your domain, which is correct. But it'll also show you all the other subdomains it's picked up and you can explore them to check if they're redirected properly or not!

For some businesses, it’s really straightforward. You might own DavidBain.com but no other variations of it, so it’s all straightforward. However, I’ve come across businesses where they have a subdomain set up.

They’ll have ‘staging.DavidBain.com’ because that’s where they put their staging site, and they mess around with it. It’s their sandbox where they play with things, but you might find that it’s been indexed, and Google’s picked that up – or tests.DavidBain.com or something else that your developers have been messing around with in the background without telling anybody.

Google, being the voracious crawler that it is, will have found them all and it might be getting confused about which is which and which belongs to which. Having that overall view of how many domains you have, how many subdomains you have, and what is on all of them is really important.”

Who should be responsible for your domains?

“I don’t think it really matters. It shouldn’t be an individual; it should be down to an organisation.

I’ve had it in the past where one person looks after all the domains and the purchases, renewals, etc. – and then they leave and take all that information with them.

It needs to be in a centralised place where, should anybody need to, they can have a look at the domains that the business owns. Whether it’s a spreadsheet, a list, or a Post-it note stuck on the fridge, as long as there is an updated place where people can find all that information, that’s fine. I’m not precious about who owns it.”

Do you have any preference regarding using subdomains on the main domain for staging?

“I’m okay with that. It can be a convenient thing for the developers. When they’re forwarding stuff across, if they’re doing it all in the same domain, that makes their lives easier.

However, I would suggest password-protecting it. If you have stuff that you want to build and hide away, you can look at things like robots.txt and noindexing to deter robots. However, the simplest thing is often to stick a password on it. Crawlers don’t type passwords, so you instantly block them from getting into those sites.

Then you have a staging site where you can mess with things. If you’re thinking about changing the colours, changing the templates, or moving things around, you can do it on that staging subdomain. If it makes the devs’ lives easier, go for it – but please password protect it.”

Are there reasons why you shouldn’t have your domain name registered under the same provider as your web host?

“If you put all your eggs in one basket, it’s a single point of failure. If you have something as critical as your business email in the same domain, and you lose that domain, huge fundamental things are going to go wrong with your business and it’s going to cost you enormous amounts of money to fix it.

In that case, putting all those things in one basket is probably not a good idea.”

Are you better off using a different domain name address for your corporate email?

“I tend to recommend against that just because it’s confusing for the brand. If you meet somebody at an event and you say that your email address is andrew@optimisey.com, but the actual website lives on OptimiseySEO.com, you’ve given that person two things to remember. Do they remember your web address, or do they remember your email address?

If they send an email to the wrong domain, you can kind of cover that with forwarding rules or 301s. However, it’s better for brand consistency when they are the same. Branding is important, so having that single place where everybody knows that ‘optimisey.com’ is me is great. That kind of consistency can be really helpful.”

When should you buy a new domain and when should you build a project on an existing domain?

“I’m trying to avoid saying ‘it depends.’

I’ve come across this in the past when I’m working with a client who specialises in one particular area. They might be a wedding DJ and they’re doing brilliantly with wedding DJing and getting loads of business, but they want to expand into children’s birthday parties. They already have ‘andrewsagreatdj.com’ but they’re thinking of buying ‘andrewsagreatkidspartyDJ.com’ as well.

My recommendation is that it needs to be a fundamentally different business for you to think about setting up a different domain. If you’re looking for a DJ, there are certain things that you are interested in as a customer – whether they’re a wedding DJ, a birthday DJ, a kid’s DJ, or whatever it might be. Are they reliable? Have they got good testimonials? Where are they based? How much does it cost? All those things are relevant, no matter what type of DJ you’re looking for.

In that case, I’d recommend keeping it in one place. You can start using subfolders and branding out your services and things beyond that. However, if you’re building another whole domain, Google treats new domains as new domains. There won’t be any credibility behind that domain, so you’re basically starting from scratch. Whereas, if you build on top of what you’ve already got, then you’re consolidating those ranking signals and that idea of who you are and what you do.

If that DJ is thinking about expanding into carpentry, that’s a whole separate thing. There’s probably not going to be a great deal of overlap there, so you might want to buy a separate domain for that.

This is a particularly common issue for small businesses that start out in a really specialist area and then grow very quickly. Then they start to think that their original domain name doesn’t quite cover the services that they now offer.

They want to expand out. They used to be music DJs, but now they do equipment rentals and venue hire, for example. So, they plan to rebrand and move on to that new domain, and they abandon all the equity they built on the original domain and let it drop – or they just park it, and don’t redirect it. That is a real missed opportunity.

I understand that SEO is not the be-all and end-all for the branding side of the company. The marketing team might think that a big rebrand is necessary, but don’t let those domains drop. I’ve worked with a big financial company that did this kind of thing. They expanded out very quickly, they’d gone into new markets, and they changed their domains. They’d started to buy domains in South American countries where they were expanding. Then they quickly retracted back and let 7, 8, or 9 different domains that they had bought lapse.

There are nefarious people out there who will quite happily hoover up all your spare domains and do nefarious things with them. Lots of these domains have been picked up by pills, porn, and poker things. Now, they were still branded with this financial company’s branding and the name was in the URL, but they were selling things that were very much not financial products.

It wasn’t great, and it was problematic beyond SEO. It was problematic for them in terms of their brand equity. Having people associate pills, porn, and poker with that company was not what the brand and marketing team wanted.”

Should you keep all of your domains registered and forward them to your main domain, even if you’re not actively using them?

“Park them. If they’ve ever had anything on them, then you should probably be redirecting them to the nearest best match.

You don’t necessarily have to do anything with them at all. You don’t have to redirect them. As long as you own them and nobody else can do anything with them, that’s okay.

The obvious question to that is, how far should you go? Should you buy the .com, the .biz, the .co.uk, and the .org? You can go crazy with that.

My only other advice around this is that you should think about your copyright and your trademarks. If someone does pick up the .biz on your brand name, you can pursue them through other means and tell them that they probably shouldn’t be using it. It’s your copyright, so you can make them take it down.”

If you let an old domain name expire and you realise that it was a mistake, is there any way to go back?

“Sometimes you can go back. If you’ve got trademarks and copyright things set up, then you can pursue it that way. You can go through the ICANN register and try to prove that you used to own it and that you let it lapse by mistake.

If the person who has picked it up has been doing nefarious things with it and piggybacking off your credibility, then there are ways that you can get it back.

It’s extremely difficult, it’s long-winded, and it involves lawyers that can get very expensive. If you can, spend the 30 pounds to renew that domain and avoid all that hassle.”

When registering a new domain, is .com always preferable or does it depend on the country that you operate in?

“It depends on where you’re targeting as well. Using .com still gives you that air of credibility, and it rolls off the tongue.

Lots of people will assume that you have a .com domain, and that gives you flexibility. If you start with a .co.uk, then you find that you’ve got a huge audience in the US, Canada, Australia, France or wherever, then that .co.uk may count against you a little bit.

It depends on the audiences you’re targeting, and where you want to go with the business.”

Is it more important to get the .com or be able to choose the branding?

“This is another case where it really depends. From an SEO point of view, you want to get the .com and ditch your brilliant brand idea. Just choose a different name that you can get the .com for. However, it goes way beyond that.

I had a conversation recently with someone who found a .com they could get but it had a hyphen in it, so they weren’t sure whether or not they should take it. My first question was, who has the .com? If the person who owns that is your direct competitor – they do very similar things to you, sell the same stuff, and are in the same industry – then you might run into problems.

Every time you do a big marketing push, whenever somebody makes a mistake and mistypes your URL, you’re literally sending customers to your competitor. If the .com is parked by a competitor but not used, or they’re in carpentry and you’re in music, then maybe that’s not going to be so much of a problem.

However, from an SEO point of view, a nice .com rolls off the tongue very easily.”

If you couldn’t get the .com originally but it becomes available further down the line, is it worth changing the domain name?

“Again, it depends. It depends on what kind of equity you have built up and how much branding stuff you’ve got out there. If you still have posters, radio ads, TV ads, etc. with your old domain name on them, that’s going to be a problem.

I worked with a company that went through a name change and a lot of their YouTube videos were still referencing the old domain name at the end. They needed to update all those YouTube videos because they were still getting tens of thousands of views every day on those videos and, at the end of every video, they were pushing people to the old domain name. It was the old branding too, so the brand police were upset about it as well.

If you are going to go through those kinds of changes, it’s not a small undertaking. It can be a lot of work. It can be a lot of work for the development team and for SEO because it is effectively a domain migration.

You might need to rebrand all that stock you’ve got upstairs with pens and t-shirts that have all the old domain names printed on them. You’re basically going to make them useless overnight. There are lots of other things to consider beyond SEO.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop freaking out about AI. A lot of people are losing their minds about it, but it’s changing so fast that, wherever you start going with AI now, if you build your house on it, you’re building on sand.

It’s going to change a lot over the next few months. Stop freaking out about the shiny new things in AI. If you have domains that are using your brand name, but being run by pills, porn, and poker sites, that is a bigger concern.”

Andrew is Founder and SEO Consultant at Optimisey, and you can find him over at Optimisey.com.