Increase Your Landing Page Relevancy With Domain Aliasing
April 20th, 2007 by 
Thomas
In an earlier post, Amit covered the aspects of surviving Google’s “quality score”, and how you can avoid the nightmare of waking up and finding out that 75% of your keywords have been deactivated and now Google’s asking you for $5-$10 buck minimum bids. I wanted to expound on this a little and share my view on URL/landing page “relevancy” and some techniques you can use that not only target your potential customer on Google AND on your website, but also give the big “G” what they want: relevant text ads and landing pages for their visitors.
Let’s look at the following example:
Johnny Affiliate has a site selling “widgets” and has setup his campaigns with tightly structured adgroups and keywords using the word “widget” in both his text ad and display URL to improve overall relevancy.
Adgroup: “Blue Widgets”
Keywords: “blue widgets, buy blue widgets, cheap blue widgets, etc…”
Landing Page: Johnny sends his visitors to a landing page selling “blue widgets”.
This is a common example of how a lot of affiliates structure their campaigns but in the never-ending quest to lower bid prices and stand above the competition, we need to go further.
So how could we improve on Johnny’s campaign/landing pages and become even more relevant?
Domain aliases for display URL’s and landing pages.
Purchasing multiple domains and setting up domain aliases is a quick way to become more relevant in the eyes of Google AND your potential customer. For example, Johnny could purchase “Blue-Widget-World.com, Red-Widget-World.com, etc.” and use these domain names for each seperate adgroup. The benefits to this is that his display URL is targeted to the customer looking for “blue widgets” and his keywords are in the display URL as well, helping his overall Google relevancy.
So what is a “domain alias” and how do I set it up?
Domain aliasing allows additional domain names to lead to the exact same location of your original website. For example, if Johnny is hosting his domain name “widget-world.com” and added a domain alias for “blue-widget-world.com” on his web server, then “blue-widget-world.com” and “widget-world.com” would take the visitor to the exact same landing page as his original site “widget-world.com”. The difference being the domain name in the visitors browser window would reflect whatever domain name was used to send the visitor to his site.
We can make the same site become seperate “niche” sites, all with one code base. Most hosting companies provide a web panel for your hosting account which will allow you to add multiple domain aliases, and then re-direct them to your main site. The next trick is to display the matching domain name on your webpage. This can be done by setting a simple variable name.
For example, if your web host is running PHP, you could add the following code snippet at the top of your “index.php” landing page:
Now if the domain name Johnny used in his destination URL to send visitors to was “http://wwww.blue-widget-world.com”, the above code would recoginize the word “blue”in the domain name and set the “$DomainName” variable to match that domain -same thing with “http://wwww.red-widget-world.com” etc. If it doesn’t find the word “blue” or “red” in the URL, it will just default to Johnny’s main domain name, “widget-world.com”.
He can display the domain anywhere on his web pages simply by adding the code below:
<? echo $DomainName; ?>
The code: ‘”Welcome to <? echo $DomainName; ?>! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!” would display to the vistor as: “Welcome to Blue-Widget-World.com! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!” or “Welcome to Red-Widget-World.com! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!”
Johnny can now send his “blue widget” customers to “blue-widget-world.com”, his “red widget” customers to “red-widget-world.com” etc. without having multiple websites. He has turned one website into multiple “niche” sites that target his customers directly.
domain aliasing google relevancy landing pages
Posted in Google™ AdWords, Website Content, Website Design | 
Do you think Google will eventually penalize for this?
Great tip Thomas! I struggled with tis concept with many of my sites. I used to have multilpe domains with multiple copies of the same code. The only change on the new pages and new domain would be from “Red Widget” to “Blue Widget”. As my business grew this got way out of hand and became very time consuming. If I wanted to split test my sites I would have to make each change on 20 different sites. I started using the domain alias technique to simplify my accounts and code. Now I run all of my related sites from a single source of code. This has saved me a ton of time and headaches. Miles, why would you think Google would have a problem with this? I think it enhances the user experience and actually improves page relevancy. Every one wins… the end user gets exactly what they are searching for, Google gets the page relavancy, and most of all it saves the webmaster a ton of time. I have never came across anything against this in the Google TOS, If you know othewise please share.
Awesome. But how can I do this if all my pages are HTML? Is there a way to be more targeted without using asp, php or whatever?
Miles, I can’t see any reason why they would. Basically, your adding a relevant display URL with a landing page that matches, without duplicating your sites to change a few items.
Stressfree, if you have static HTML pages, you can simply instruct apache to process them by adding the following code to your .htaccess file on your web server:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm
You can now add PHP code to any HTML file and still keep the .htm or .html extension.
Which one would be a better option:-
1) using domain aliasing (www.blue-widget-world.com)
2) or using Sub Domain (blue.widget-world.com)
in both the options the the keyword is displayed in the display URL.
your thoughts?
Ajay, I would say it’s preference. I prefer domain names that set an authoritive presence in the market versus coming across as trying to be “eveything to everybody”:
“ComedyDVDs.com” versus “comedydvd.walmart.com”
“GardenSupplies.com” versus “garden.outdoorproducts.com”
Good post and this is an interesting technique. Question, can the aliasing point to a particular file on your original domain?
As an example –
red-widget-world.com ==> widget-world.com/red-widgets.html (a page you’ve already created for red widget kws).
Also, I can see how this will help CTR on your Google ads, but how will this affect your landing page quality score?
Will the content on widget-world.com count, in a quality score sense, for all aliased domains as well?
Doug, the domain alias you setup would resolve to the same place - “domain.com/file.html” same as “alias.com/file.html” because they are all pointing to the same files on your web sever. As far as quality score for the landing page, I don’t see it making any real difference as far as Google is concerned.
However, once the visitor lands on the page you can add multiple variables in the PHP code snippet to display anything you want. You could create these variables underneath the “$DomainName = “Blue-Widget-World.com”
$NicheKeyword = “blue widgets”;
$NicheKeyword2 = “cheap blue widgets”;
$NicheKeyword3 = “buy blue widgets”;
You could then place the “$NicheKeyword” variables in various places on your site and have it displayed for the keywords you used in the adgroup. The possibilities are virtually endless.
Your base keyword phrases are now on your site, making your landing page more relevant to your keywords. You could even create a database to pull all kinds of custom content off of a simple variable like “$SiteID = 1″, but that’s past the scope of this post.
Thanks for the tip on adding php to my HTML files. I got it up and working! One question though, would google see my pages as some type of cloaking page or something by modifying this???
Stressfree - absolutely not. The code just tells PHP to parse .html and .htm extensions, just like .php extensions. The server parses everything first, then outputs the results.
Hi all!
I am Lucy, I have found your website while searching for some info at Google. Your site has helped me in a big way.
G’night
Great post im new to all this but i have a question, what if the buyer gets to the site sees the url and comes back later and types that url in, will the page come up?
Wont the domain alias result in duplicate content websites which you will be penalised for (although penalised in organic listings)? The title will be different but the main content on the site will be the same for all aliases and Google penalises duplicate content. Would it be better to create a “landing page” for each domain, with different content, and links from those pages to the main website? So you still target those searchers but not penalised? I am not an SEO expert but thought this to be the case.
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