HomeTownRent.com has an interesting way of getting themselves out there.
Instead of doing one site for the entire nation, they have created many sites, one for each metro area. I have not counted, but I am guessing they own about 400 web sites. Very interesting approach. In a way they are a regional web site with a national reach.
I thought of doing that years ago but many issues are involved:
- Paying for the domain names and hosting for each regional site.
- Maintaining each site – wow that would be a pain.
- Duplicate content issues – Google doesn’t like duplicate content. In fact someone at the last SMX Advance conference asked a question about doing multi-regional sites like this and Matt Cutts from Google advised against it. Matt said to make one really good site.
Related Articles
4 users responded in this post
Maybe dupe content penalties will not be assessed in this case as there’s so much unique content on each page compared to the surrounding template. Now if they were publishing exactly the same listings on each different site then they might have to watch out…
Some places will give you a better deal as the number of domains increases as they want the “other” business so it may not be as expensive as you would think. There are many companies out there that do single site URL’s for Real Estate sales in a template around $10. They have found ways to make it cost effective to have multiple domains.
As the original developer of the site and founder of it many years ago. I will tell you that it is database driven and is one code base. To make a site appear like it is different from a bunch of domain names, you just have you server side scripts look at the domain name and use if statements and includes to make the site look different.
Google will penalize you for duplicate content, but none of the listings are duplicates (or as far as I know) just the headers.
Chapelhillrent.com is the original site, we grew it to about 10 sites and then sold it.
I am proud the guys that bought the company from myself and the other founder are still going strong.
Andrew, thanks for stopping by and providing the history.
Leave A Reply