stacks of domains, positive SEO?

I have a client who has brought a truck load of domains he wants me to redirect to his site.

A few of them are the same name with different top level domains (mysite.com, mysite.co.uk etc etc) but a lot of them are keyword related (mylocation-businessType.com etc etc).

I am wondering if either of the开发者_Python百科se will be negative for SEO. I am thinking the top level domain changes will be fine, and expected by google, but the keywords might be views as a bit hacky?

What are the good people of stackoverflow's view on this?

If they are redirected properly then they'll have no effect at all. The only advantage will be if the name makes sense and a user might type it in. eg. identical names with and without hyphens.

For this situation all of the other answers are correct, you won't get any benefits in Pagerank, etc. and it wouldn't be useful except to pickup direct traffic to your domain names that you are then redirecting.

How would it affect your SEO though? That's a little trickier. Two ways of looking at it:

1.) Competitors could do this to you and it'd be completely out of your control. If redirecting a bunch of domains did any real harm to rankings it'd be a great way to do negative SEO, or "Google Bowling," and could be used to take down a site's rankings. That isn't the case though, so it probably wouldn't have too much of a negative effect.

UNLESS

2.) The nameservers for your redirected domains match the nameservers for your main domain. Pointing all domains to the same set of nameservers will help show that all domains are under the control of the same webmaster.

Even if you are using different nameservers and using 301 redirects as recommended, if the server with your redirects comes back to (at least) the same Class C IP address as your main site's server, a search engine would still be able to tie you together as likely being run by the same owner.

Either of these setups can identify you as the source of the redirects and devalue the ranking ability of your main site since there is a much higher likelihood the redirects are coming from you.

winwaed is correct. If you're doing a proper 301 redirect, the other domains are only valuable if people directly type them in. They won't rank, won't get any link juice, and won't get any inbound links. If you do seed inbound links, google will treat them as if they point to the target of your 301 redirect. It's a waste of time to just directly do that for SEO purposes.

The way to use each of those domains for SEO would be to build a bit of unique content on each one, get some inbound links, and then link out to your target page. Not really worth doing unless you really spend a lot of time at it, and google still tends to penalize obvious gaming of the system like that.

They won't contribute toward ranking, however keyword domains do get some amount of advantage for those terms. So, the way to use them is to build sites on all of them and funnel traffic to the main site.

Of course, they can also be used for extra backlinks, but you really want different C class IP addresses from the servers. For that reason you might want to go with SEO hosting.

Matt Cutts from Google explained it in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

and here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a70ygsHgvMw

He also said if he was doing this, he would redirect each of sites to the target sites' different important pages. If the redirected domains had pageranks before, they will still flow pagerank (not exactly but a lower pagerank).