good idea or bad?

I own a 'house sitting' company in Chico. My webpage sits on the first page for most terms you would think of for 'house sitting'. Lots of other local companies on the same page. I just bought 10 new keyword domains like 'chicohousesitting.com .net .org' 'chicohousesitter.com .net .org' and so on. I want to try ranking all these urls onto page one. They will all have my actual business name and contact info on them.
Good idea? Lots of trouble? I figure I can try different methods to rank on each one each month, or should I do the same thing - like buy 10 G-Garlic campaigns one month and 10 bookmark campaigns the next and so on.
People might get pissed if most all the first page urls only go to the same company with different websites?

Dirkg,

You have a very thoughtful idea here however I think you may be making more work for yourself than is needed and also endangering your SERP position. The main reason some companies buy up related domains (if they aren?t going to flip them) is to prevent competition from similar businesses (in terms of SEO) and to gain more presence in SERP?s.

While this tactic is effective sometimes, and while others may not agree, using multiple domains with the same or similar content on each one is seen as a spam strategy by search engines and is disapproved of. In Google?s own quality guidelines it mentions not using multiple domains, sub-domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Aside from search engines looking out for this strategy, if you have multiple websites to rank you will have to do ten times the SEO to get them to rank well. To do this effectively (not get noticed) you would have to have a substantially different back link profile for each site. You would have to make different content, image files, and internal link structure for all the sites or you would run the risk of not having pages indexed because they are seen as duplicate content.

I would suggest focusing on your one website and keeping the other domains on the back burner for now. You could also 301 redirect those domains however if you are not ranking for any of them right now it doesn?t really seem necessary.

This post from SEOMoz talks exactly about this strategy,

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/uncover-competitors-using-multiple-sites-for-multiple-first-page-rankings



This post also touches on the subject,

http://blog.ineedhits.com/tips-advice/why-owning-multiple-domain-names-is-bad-for-seo-02539442.html

I hope this helps you,

Shawn

From what I understand those new domains are EMD for keywords that your website is not ranking yet, I'm right?

If I get it then I will suggest to rank those domains for those kw but only those domain and stay out with your primary website.

But if I get it wrong and you are already on first position for those kw then I will stay out and do not rank those new domains for those kw as TheContentAuthority said beside the effort and the other things... get on the first 2-3 position the same company will make look bad.

I would 301 the domains to your main domain. Really you are just camping on the domains so your competition can't try to rank an EMD for keywords that you already rank.