Toyota Tells Dealers No More Microsites and Surrender Your Domain Names
There is a rumor going around that Toyota is notifying all of it’s car dealers to surrender all domain names to Toyota with the word “Toyota” in it.
Apparently if it’s tied to a sole dealer website it will be ok, but they are telling dealers to have only one website, and no private blogs.
I can see where they’re going with this. They will encourage dealers to link to a Toyota blog, which will result in millions of backlinks. This will surely juice up their blogs, and it will have a dramatic increase on organic search listings from Google, Bing and Yahoo.
I’m not sure if Google will welcome this, and they may consider it a “black hat” method to obtain backlinks. Plus, all the domain names Toyota acquires will get 301′d to Toyota’s main website. Imagine all of the time and money these dealers used to acquire these backlinks to their microsites? I guess it’s a great idea in a Dr Evil kind of way.
On the other hand, this can be great news for any other brand of vehicle. The less Toyota websites that are out there, the more room their will be for Nissan, Honda, Chevy, etc…
This rumor still hasn’t been confirmed, but we will keep you posted.
If anyone has any additional information, please leave a comment below.
this will not happen, it has been tried in the past to ‘oversee’ content, but there is nothing in the dealer agreement that will allow this, especially for multi franchise dealers.