Purchase a domain to gain its rank, Highlander-style?
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(urls have been altered)
We are KitchenApps.Com, your online portal for kitchen appliances. One of our biggest selling products is toasters, but despite SEO efforts, **KitchenApps.Com/toasters **ranks on page 6 for "toasters" and barely budges.
One of our competitors, Kool-Kitcken-Apps.biz just tossed in the towel and sold his domain/site to our boss for the cheap. It's an old domain, but the URL isnt lovely. He's got content, but it aint pretty and of course, we sell differently than he does, have some different products, etc. BUT BUT BUT hold everything, he ranks on the first page, with his homepage, for "toasters" his best ranked keyword. A lot of sites have linked to his site for toasters, buying toasters, etc.
Of course, the boss wants to just toss his content, and since his domain is different than company name (which is literally KitchenApps.Com) we should redirect Kool-Kitchen-Apps.biz to our SEO friendly KitchenApps.com/toasters url. He expects that will keep the same positioning, and we'll snag the toaster clicks.
Can we expect to maintain the positioning on page #1?
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Sadly, I'm in Montana, and have very few bushes around, so option D) is out of questions
How is the new domain ranking for other keywords? Maybe like 4 slice toaster, or whatever phrase gets a lot of traffic? If it's ranking high for other phrases I would use it as a temporary test dummy. Pretty up the website, and find out which phrases, designs, etc. convert the best while you improve your original /toaster website. Once you have all the data you need, and a highly improved /toaster page, just 301 it over.
However, if you don't have that much time, I'd just 301 it over, and go on with your day. There's always room for hopes and dreams, but this whole 24 hours in a day thing can get in the way if you don't have help.
If you choose to redirect, I would definitely put it on the inner /toasters page. It looks like you already have a good amount of links pointing to your home page, and not many to the inner page.
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Good point, I guess I should add some color. Attached is an OSE exam of their site, our toaster landing page and then our main home page. Obviously, we are two completely different sites, and our main page holds a huge edge over the /toaster page.
Knowing this, would you:
A) play it safe, keep Kool-Kitchen-Apps.biz domain/site, and 'pretty it up'
B) redirect to /toasters, dice roll
C) redirect to /, likely keep or improve ranking for "toasters"
D) panic, stop using computers, hide in neighbor bushes until arrested -
Well, I wouldn't expect you to jump to the first page just from 301'ing their website into yours. There are other factors at play, as I'm sure you know. However, you can expect a good portion of the link juice pointing at the other website to be transferred to yours. Depending on the other factors on your particular website, you should see a jump in your current ranking.
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