And thanks for your comments Brandon.

They’re some good points you raise and things to be taken into consideration. I will be careful & prayerful in who uses the domains. If I feel anything untoward is going on, action will be taken (as I will still control the nameservers/forwarding, etc.).

The point on re-indexing is a good one, but I see the use of these domains could be primarily in short-medium term marketing/advertising. The actual site could well be used on a subdomain (that would also get indexed – domain could be an ‘addon’ or forwarded) but using something like howcanichange.com on the marketing material rather than howcanichange.nameofmychurch.com as it’s easier to remember, talks up less room on flyers and could help lead ‘non-churchers’ to the site rather than it being ‘oh that’s to do with a church – boring…’, etc.! I hope that makes sense!

But very good points and something that will have to be considered in the development of the site.

Thanks again.

igwt, james

Another concern would be people trying to drive traffic to a previous iteration of a web site, but not using reputable and/or commercially acceptable tactics. There are a number of acceptable ways to market a website, and a number that are not. If you are hoping to reach more people than those in a specific organization, than search engine indexing is a concern.

As far as consequences, if a previous organization had used “illegal” tactics (as defined by the search engines) then a domain my be banned altogether from that engines listings. Definitely an extreme example, but it happens and trying to get that reversed is almost impossible. In this scenario, an organization would be penalized for something that they had no control over, and would be without recourse.

A simpler solution would be to just use a sub-domain from an existing website. A sub-domain is still considered part of the main domain, and would leverage the existing site that an organization has built.

For example, textdriven.com is a domain for blogs. thedigitalsanctuary.texdriven.com is a sub domain of textdriven.com. Although they are technically two websites, search engines do not look at it that way. They look at them as a single domain, for better or worse. If we take the previous example, if the unlikely event that textdriven.com was banned by Google, than all of the sub domains would also be affected.

There is no doubt that reusing domains for some organizations would be very valuable. There may opportunities for church plants, very small churches, missionaries, or any number of other specialized organizations to utilize this approach.

For larger organizations with an established web presence, a sub domain within their current domain would probably serve their needs better. It would allow them to build their community presence over time, providing a series of resources that would provide value to the congregation and the community at large. After all, we all would like the church to be a resource on more days than just Sunday!

Sorry for the length, but food for thought.

Cheers,
Brandon