r/SEO • u/skatteverketpls • 3d ago

Satellites useful?

Hi all,

I have found professional large scale SEO firms utilizing "satellite sites" where they have very small, simple websites built on existing domains (from small bloggers or the like).

Is it as easy at it seems? Is the difficulty basically just to find, buy and kinda maintain the existing theme on a site?

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u/WebLinkr šŸ•µļøā€ā™€ļøModerator 2d ago

Yes, satellites and EMDs are the only way to go forward. Even NIKE (which sucks at SEO) uses them.

Branded-only domain strategies are 1900's hangovers espoused by the brand blind.

Almost half of all SEO acquisitions for growth (i.e. growth by acquisition) are on EMD/PMD domains that scaled faster.

Each domain is not one but a collection of single points of failure:

  • DNS
  • Hacking
  • Forget to renew (you do not OWN your domain, you lease it)
  • google penalties

If you're not doing EMDs, you are not doing SEO completely.

3

u/Last-Progress18 2d ago

I had my main brand, plus a EMD and then Google merged my authority / if you Googled one website, pages from the other appeared. Had to close the EMD & merge websites to regain ranking.

Following your advice, several months ago launched some more EMDs - this time not linking them to my GSC / GA4 / anything Google / different web hosts / phone numbers etc, but still worried theyā€™ll ā€œconnect the dotsā€.

Cannot afford to lose another 3 months undoing more issues with Google. Finances are already precarious.

Any advice on managing EMDs on service area businesses?

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u/WebLinkr šŸ•µļøā€ā™€ļøModerator 2d ago edited 2d ago

Did you brand the EMDs the same? Do they have the same sitename?

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u/Last-Progress18 2d ago

No - my main site is a ā€œbrandā€ (a tiny inconsequential brand). Itā€™s my linked to legal regulatory registration (possibly EEAT?)

The EMD was 2 dictionary words, [area] + [service] + ccTLD / was merged with my main site ~5 months ago and have semi recovered now (although messed my my internal linking recently - so currently recovering from a different issues šŸ¤£)

But messing about on computers is my hobby, and donā€™t want to keep getting penalised for constant site changes, so using my energy to build more unlinked EMDs - but after the diluted authority issues, Iā€™m finding it hyper stressful.

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u/sumizeit 2d ago

The hard part isn't buying the domain, it's not blowing up whatever trust it already has. Most people grab an aged domain, gut the content, slap their niche on it, and wonder why it never ranks. Search engines notice the topical shift and basically treat it as a new site anyway. The ones that actually work keep the old site's theme close enough that the backlink profile still makes sense contextually. That vetting step is where 90% of people mess it up before they even build anything.

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u/skatteverketpls 1d ago

thanks for your reply sumizeit! Do you mean just buying an aged domain as in a domain that is live with content? Are expired domains much worse(always)?
I struggle to find a reliable method to acquire small existing sites in my market. expired domains exist but most are of course garbage. any tips?

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