If you use this method, be sure it's honest and sincere. Do NOT do this to spam search engines (in fact, to be perfectly safe, set your metatags to stop robots from indexing those pages). These are not intended for search engines - these pages are intended for focused marketing campaigns.

Regional content - If your site has regional content, you might purchase specific domain names to focus on that content. For example, if you had a stamp collection site, you could purchase "my-stamps.to" for Tonga related stamps, "my-stamps.us" for United States stamps and so on. You could also keep it simpler and purchase "my-tonga-stamps.com" for your general site, "my-english-stamps.com" for your English stamps and so on. These should also use 301 redirects to keep specific domain names from being indexed.

Uses for .NAME TLD - You might even consider purchase .name TLD for your senior managers. Put up simple web sites about them, with links to your main site. These SHOULD be indexed in search engines, as you want people to find them if they are looking for information about your personnel.

Don't forget email - Remember you can get email on each and every one of domains that your purchase. In fact, this is a great reason to purchase additional domain names - people can send you email by different means. So be sure to set up email for each and every domain to go to a general, "catch-all" account. It's a good idea, though, to heavily spam-filter this account as it can collect a huge amount of junk.

Subdomains - This is a great way to get much of benefit of above listed techniques without purchasing additional domain names. It does require a little more control of your DNS entries, however, as most ISPs and web hosts will not be willing to do these kinds of things for you.

In this case, you could define "housekeeping.com" as primary domain, then "cleaning.housekeeping.com", "sewing.housekeeping.com" and "cooking.housekeeping.com" as subdomains. You should continue to use 301 redirects to keep search engines from indexing these pages.

Renewals - Don't forget to renew all of these domains each year. At least examine each one when renewal time comes and consciously decide whether or not you need domain. Don't let them expire without your knowledge. Someone else may then benefit from your hard work.

Other people's mistakes - Sometimes you might find that domain you want is not available. In this case, take a look at WHOIS record and see when it expires. Set up a reminder for 30 days from this date and every week or so thereafter. On those days, try and purchase domain. Quite often, (especially these days) you may be surprised to find domain has become available.

Other TLD systems - Companies such as new.net are offering many more pseudo-TLDs such as .SHOP and .XXX to general public. I would avoid these new systems like plague. These are at best bad ideas and at worst scams. They are attempts to supercede official internet standard TLD system by companies with questionable motivations. They all require browser plug-ins or other customizations to work, and some of them come piggy-backed with spyware and other malicious applications.

These alternate TLDs do not get indexed in search engines, and they may conflict with future TLDs added in official domain name structure (and thus become useless). On top of that, they are extremely expensive.

In my opinion, it is critical that internet domain name structure remain under control of a central governing body. While this body (currently ICANN) is not operating as desired by majority, it's still much better being under one umbrella than splintering this all over place.

Straight TCP/IP address - I am always surprised to come across a site which is listed in search engines, ezines and other promotions as a straight TCP/IP address. This is not only tacky and a sign of a spammer, it's not very intelligent as well. If you do this and move your site (changing it's IP), you will lose all of traffic that you have so painfully gained.

Conclusions - The point is that owning more than one domain has many uses, although it is no longer of much value from a search engine optimization viewpoint. Instead, you can use other domain names to fulfill other types of marketing and to attract people from specific markets to your site.

It has a good page rank in Google - Another thing that webmasters work very hard on is gaining page rank with Google, number one search engine. A high page rank implies that site appears nearer top in search results pages. When you purchase a domain, you can inherit resulting page rank and traffic. Note that you will need to duplicate page or pages referred to by Google in order for this to work properly.

The Downside Of Using Pre-Owned Names

You inherit spam - If previous owner received spam email, then when you take over domain you may very well inherit it. Why is this? Well, when you own a domain name, you get email sent to every single username on that domain. Of course, most email servers are smart enough to "bounce" email messages for users who do not exist, but that email still gets sent to server. For a domain which received a lot of spam, it could mean a significant amount of bandwidth used just for junk messages to non-existent users.

You can inherit robot activity - I got a domain once which someone had listed with a number of robots (programs which perform automatic functions). These robots were exceptionally active and caused a tremendous amount of traffic - so much so that I had to give up using domain for a couple of months until robots stopped visiting.

You might inherit enemies - Sometimes people give up domain names for a reason. One of those reasons might be an enemy - someone (or a group) that is targeting name for some malicious act. For example, name might be target of email bombs or denial-of-service attacks. In these instances, you could find yourself inheriting these issues.

The domain could be banned - If a site gets involved in spamming search engines (attempting to fool them for higher placement on results pages), it can be banned. By purchasing these old domain names, you might be similarly banned. This normally would not effect your existing domains, but it might reduce value of domain name that you purchased.

Things to do before giving up a domain name

Be sure you really want to expire domain - Once someone else purchases your domain name, you may find it impossible or very expensive to get it returned. You will lose access to use of name entirely. So be sure that you want to give it up before you actually allow it to expire.

Be aware of expiration dates - Keep an eye on your domain name expiration dates as you may not get notified by registrar before expiration. This can happen because email is not a perfect delivery system, because of a glitch in registrar system or even because you didn't check your mail or email for renewal. Don't accidentally lose your domain names.

Change your email addresses - Once you lose access to a domain, you will lose access to any email that is going to that domain. Think of all of private emails that you get, and imagine them going to strangers. Well, once someone else gets domain he may receive those private emails.

Change any links that you can - If you are allowing a domain to expire, be sure you salvage any links that you might want to keep. While you can do this after a domain name expires, it makes more sense to do it beforehand. For example, if you had owned three domains that all went to same web site and you allowed two of them to expire, you might want to spend time to change links to domain name that you keep.