However, if you're going to have multiple domains, it's best if you can take full advantage of other factors favored by the search engines. Many engines rank home pages much higher than sub-pages, all other things being equal. If you have five domains, each pointing to their own uniquely optimized home page (versus all pointing to the same home page), you suddenly have five times the chance to rank in the top 10. You also avoid the problem of the engine seeing two domains pointing to identical pages. In that scenario, some engines may reject one domain at random as being duplicated content.

Obviously if you had five domains you could rent five full Web sites, but that can be cost prohibitive for many of us, and can be over-kill for some types of sites. Therefore, I put out a request in last month's special issue for hosting services that would host multiple domains that point to multiple home pages and/or sub-pages inexpensively.

Try to set it up so that each domain can point to its own home page. Ideally, being able to have separate sub-pages on each domain would allow you to optimize the most doorway pages per domain.

Caution: Do not use multiple domains for the purpose of dominating all the top slots of a given keyword. Your goal should be to occupy just one or two of the slots for a keyword so that you're not accused of spamming. Occupying only one or two positions for a single keyword is also only fair to Web surfers who may be searching for more than one choice.

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