Lost in landing page hosting SEO strategies

November 28, 2008 1:04 AM

Our client (Switzerland-based, but internationally operating) currently has companyname.ch as their main site. That's where all their sites' content is hosted. We've also set up companyname.ca and companyname-keyword.com for their international operations. Those sites are just one index.html page where all links then go to "companyname.ch/page=pageid&locale=ca" for the canadian site and "companyname.ch/page=pageid&from=com" for the keyworded site. We recently moved the canadian site's hosting from our servers in Switzerland to a Canada-based host for (minute) SEO reasons. Questions follow...

Questions are two-fold:
1) Is such a "landing page strategy" wise, from an SEO POV? Or should all sites have their own content without ever linking to anything at the company's main site?
2) Is it even worth having the hosting according to the domain's country-level name (eg, companyname.ca hosted in Canada is "rewarded" with better SERP by Google et al, as compared to having all of the client's sites hosted in Switzerland)?

posted by slater to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

This article might give you some useful information.

Many times it is advantageous to purchase multiple domain names even if you only have one website. However in doing so you could risk getting penalized for duplicate content if the search engines find the different domains and index the site under those different domains. This article explains how to make sure that doesn’t happen

posted by niles at 8:47 AM on November 28, 2008