multiple domain names & redirects

[coastal]

What are the pros and cons to using multiple domain names for the same website?

I was thinking for advertising it would be a good way to track responses to a certain ad campaign

Do search engines actually look at the words in a domain name when deciding what to display? detroit-real-estate .com detroitrealestate. com or would bobthebroker .com have just as good a chance as being #1 for detroit real estate?

Buy up the good ones so that your competitors can not?

maybe the domain name you are currently using is not very catchy and people forget it or can't spell it?

I was told the godaddy redirects are not very seo friendly. Is there a way to make them friendly or another way to do it that works any better?

[Spanishproperty]

I always have a different site for every domain unless we own the .com .net .org etc of the same domain then and only then I would have redirects.

Otherwise there is no point in having different domains, you have different domains for the reason of having more of a chance in the search engines and that is it. You cant do the SEO on redirects, and if they are all pointing to one domain they are useless.

[Ryan Ward]

I use to 301 redirects for PPC. alpharettahometourDOTcom and sandyspringshometourDOTcom. One redirects to my Alpharetta page, the other to my Sandy Springs page. My site is less than 2 months old. #2 for Sandy Springs MLS, #8 for relocate to Alpharetta, #18 for Alpharetta MLS and various other secondary terms on Google for new construction on first page for Sandy Springs. The redirects do not seem to be bothering anything with my experience. Make sure they are 301 redirects, not 302. If my SERP's keep rising I should have a great '07.

Hey Coastal, what did you fly in the Air Force? My old man flew the SR-71 for a short time out of Beale.

[RonnieG]

I was told the godaddy redirects are not very seo friendly. Is there a way to make them friendly or another way to do it that works any better?

Godaddy does 302 domain redirects. Not good. I get around that by redirecting my many GoDaddy PPC landing page domains to urls on a "throw away" site where I can convert them to 301 redirects via .htaccess and send them on to their final destination landing pages cleanly. By "throw away", I mean that the web site is one I do not care to have indexed. In fact the site's main url is 301 redirected elsewhere. This makes the interior contents invisible and unreachable unless you have the specific urls.

[coastal]

Nothing as sexy as the SR71, C-5 A and B models out of Dover Air force Base. 4 Years active duty and 6 in the reserves. 2nd biggest cargo jet in the world. I was not a pilot, just a loadmaster. The jet is like a large sea saw. Too much weight in the nose or the tail and we can't take off or land. I do the math to keep us from crashing, I also supervise the loading and unloading as well as customs paperwork for all of the places we fly to. The C 5 is large enough to carry six greyhound buses or 7 blackhawk helos. In 10 years I've been all over the globe. It was a pretty cool job, just not much money to be made and you spend a lot of time away from your family. Lately we've been spending a lot of time in Iraq and it's not a war that's worth dying for. I had a great year in real estate and finally said "good bye" to Uncle Sam.

[Ryan Ward]

Great plane! Standing in the engines is a hell of a perpesctive. BTW, I used ipowerwebDOTcom for my redirects. $6.95/year. Initially they were set up as 302's and it took me 5 or 6 tech support guys before someone knew how to change the htaccess file to make them 301's. 24 hours and they were up and running.