You’ve just registered a great new domain for you business,

www.yourgreatdomain.com, and as you’re ready to checkout, you’re offered terrific  deals on yourgreatdomain.net, yourgreatdomain.biz, yourgreatdomain.info, yourgreatdomain.co, etcetera, as well as cheap hosting to go with them.

For a few hundred bucks, you’re the proud owner of a dozen domains and hosting.

Now what should you do with all these sites?

Don't cut & paste content onto multiple domains and sub-domains.

If you believe simply duplicating your current website and putting the same content up on these new domains you will dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your keywords and search phrases, you will be sadly mistaken!

The major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing frown upon having multiple sites with essentially the same content. In fact, they will think you are attempting to cheat: deceiving the search engines and gaming the system. If they do, there are severe repercussions from the search engine police.

How severe?

Your site will be “black-balled” and not appear in any search results, except for your specific business name or URL.

Obviously, this will be the exact opposite of your objective, and will damage any business big-time if you rely extensively on search engines to deliver traffic to your website. Getting on the bad side of search engines is bad for business.

There are times when using a new domain or sub-domain (part of a larger domain with sub-domain added before the top-level domain with a period, e.g. subdomain.yourgreatdomain.com.) makes good sense.

For example, if you’re selling a single product or service as part of your business, such as a book, and have a number of affiliate websites that want to send customers to a single website focusing on that one particular product and the ability to purchase it.

In this case, a sub-domain makes it easier for the customer to find what they’re looking for, without users being distracted by other products and offerings.

If you have a strong rationale to use multiple domains to promote your business, take special care that the content and information on your multiple websites is significantly different from each other.

Do not cut and paste.

Invest in developing good content and a strong sales proposition. Trying to deceive Google, Yahoo and Bing may provide some short-term gains, but you risk long-term consequences.