Would a 301 redirect on a keyword based domain be a worth-while investment?
-
Similar questions have been asked - but I couldn't find a direct answer to my specific question here.
I have the opportunity to purchase our exact keyword phrase domain name for fairly cheap (if I sold red balloons it would be redballoons.com).
If I i set it up to 301 redirect to our main domain - would it provide any short-term or long-term SEO benifits?
ADDITIONAL INFO:
I sell a service to a niche market and in a relatively short amount of time have been able to rank #21 on our main keywords. Our domain is fairly young (about 1.5yrs), but we are WAY behind our main competition in the link building category (they have been at it for 10+ years). I'm looking for an interim solution to drive genuine SEO traffic while we work on our link building over time.
Our main keywords only get about 15,000 global searches per month (google) and some of those are not our market (don't know how many exactly).
The competition for our keyword is classified as "medium" in google adwords.
It's really only worth it to me if I can begin getting page 1 results from this practice.
Thanks in advance!!!
-
Thanks so much everyone - great advice it seams. I will continue to work on my on-page factors and especially my link building efforts.
I felt like it was a long shot and you confirmed my suspicions. Thanks again!!
-
The only value I can think of is if you build a unique content site on redballons.com and then optimize it. You can then link it to the main site and have some SEO value. We see this done often within local link profiles. But I am not sure I would go to all that trouble, instead I would use that energy working on great content to draw traffic.
Redirecting a domain ( as John pointed out) has no SEO value, but may have some marketing or branding value.
-
Hi Aaron.
If I understand correctly, you want an alternative to PPC advertising so you can appear on page one of SERP for a specific keyword. You are viewing the exact name domain match as a possible solution.
I would suggest taking a step back and re-evaluating all aspects on on-page seo. Is your content really the best it can be? Have you maximized all the seo relevant factors on your site? Often there are changes you can make the difference.
I would avoid buying the keyword domain and put your time, focus and $$ into your main site.
-
I don't see how redirecting that domain to your site is going to help your SEO all that much, unless that site had a lot of existing links pointed to it. People aren't going to link to your pages through redballoons.com; they're going to link to your domain now. I would be very surprised this would get your from rank #21 to page 1 on the results pages (unless that domain had a bunch of relevant links pointing to it).
If you're building a brand name at your domain now, buying domains with the keywords you're targeting and redirecting those to your site aren't going to help much. I wouldn't bother.
I can think of one use for buying this domain... if you're doing PPC, you could try using redballoons.com in your display URLs instead of your current domain and see if you get a higher CTR and/or more conversions.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My question is in regards to possible conflict in creating an additional website under a new domain for our company.
Our companies, Vulcan Information Packaging and ATC both live under the domain “www.binders.com”. This is a great thing as far as us dominating in the binder industry. However, in the next 2-3 years and forward, we want to build our presence as a company who offers packaging products such as boxes, marketing kits, and other forms of packaging. Obviously, the “binders.com” brand/domain does not contribute much to this effort and can be confusing to customers visiting the site. Essentially, we want to build an additional branding for our company in the packaging industry. Keeping this in mind, we own the domain “www.vulcaninformationpackaging.com” and we are considering building a new website using this domain which contains the word “packaging”. This new site would only promote and contain packaging related products. This new website will advertise and direct traffic to our company Vulcan Information Packaging, which is the same company “binders.com” directs traffic to. So my question is to determine whether doing this might be a practice that Google and other search engines might frown upon. I tend to think it will be fine because we will be promoting and driving traffic for non-binder products where as, binders.com is heavily in binder related products. thank you, Dominic Zaidan
Branding | | dzaidan0 -
Changing domain name and site design while recovering from penguin? Still SEO power in EMDs?
Our website recently suffered from a penguin update courtesy of some black hat techniques used by an SEO company we hired a few years ago. We are working on cleaning up and disavowing the old spammy links, but at the same time this penalty has hit us while we were working on making some major changes to our website. As a law firm we have 2 separate practice websites we are planning to merge under 1 domain to help boost our local results. Our problem is that the domain names for each practice are specific to the type of law they practice, so we will have to move both practices to a branded name domain that works for both practices. I thought since traffic was already affected because of the penguin update this might be an opportune time to change the domain name, but since I am far from an expert at SEO I'm wondering if there are variables I am unaware of that might make this decision a very bad one. Also we currently have exact match domains for our two different sites -- the way I understand it EMDs don't carry the same SEO weight they once did, but the firm is worried that losing the EMDs is going to cause a dramatic drop in traffic. If we keep the EMDs but permanently redirect them to the new site, will it maintain their SEO value? Would google consider that black hat and possibly penalize us for it in the future? Thanks for any advice or insight!!
Branding | | MyOwnSEO0 -
Examples of Domain Change for Big Brands
Hi I am trying to put together a case study with big brands that have changed their domain names over the last 2 years. So far I have: t-mobile.co.uk -> ee.co.uk guardian.co.uk -> theguardian.com Are there any others you could think of? It'd be much appreciated! Thanks, C
Branding | | Carlos-R0 -
Moving to a new domain
Hi, We are about to rebrand. This means we need to move all of our content on to a new domain. I want to make sure this process is as smooth as possible and we don't lose too much by way of rankings. I have read this page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html and plan on following the instructions to the letter, but was wondering if anyone had any additional tips? Also, the article linked above is OLD. From 2008, is there anything'new' that I should know? Thank you (in advance) for any help you can offer, it is much appreciated! Best wishes, Amelia EDIT: I forgot quite a big element when first posting this question! We are merging two existing websites into the new URL. The two sites are for two different products we offer, but we'll now be offering both products under the same URL.
Branding | | CommT0 -
Is there any downside to have a product name (branded keyword) that has a top keyword in it?
The company I work for recently purchased another company. We are currently re-branding their product into our solution offering and are working on coming up with a new product name, while keeping SEO in mind. The product names that we are thinking of also includes a non-branded keyword that we actively look to rank for. We currently rank relatively high for this keyword. Is there any negative to having a product name that has a non-branded keyword in it. My first thought is that it is great because that non-branded keyword will be used repeatedly on our site when we mention the product. Things that I don't know though are: will it appear we are keyword stuffing does Google recognize that its a branded keyword and doesn't rank us for the non-branded aspect Any feedback or ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Vince
Branding | | IFSNA0 -
ECommerce Sites: Sub domain vs. Unique Domains
Hello everyone! I manage 3 large eCommerce sites that sell textbooks, digital learning solutions, electronic teaching resources, etc., to three different markets in the education space (K-12, College, and Post-College/Career Search). Currently, the 3 sites live on three different sub domains of the companies main domain. Is this best practice? I assume we want all three under the same domain to consolidate domain authority. But... What if I told you that we have dozens of sub domains of the companies main domain? Some are for marketing sites, some are for digital products, some are customer-specific sites, etc. We probably have close to 100 sub domains that are used regularly. Then what if I told you that the company doesn't hardly even use the root domain (other than a handful of old pages)? Even the root domain redirects to a sub domain. Just looking for some insight on this, as I will be doing an SEO/marketing/conversion overhaul going forward. On a side note, we use Magento as an eCommerce platform, and it's rampant with duplicate content, duplicate page titles, pages with too many links, and so on and so forth. That's another problem for another day...
Branding | | brad.s.knutson0 -
Can we publish two guest posts on one domain with same pen name but different linking website?
Can we publish two guest posts on one domain with same pen name but different linking website? Actually I have been doing guest posts with pen name “Jane Andrew” for “abc.com”(bit old and well performing website). Now I need to post for a new website “xyz.com” on some old domains (where I have already published my articles) so the situation is that I want domains and pen name to remain same but linking website would be different. I had few questions in my mind regarding that and I would be grateful if you help me getting the required information. Is it right from SEO, branding and marketing point of view? How Google interprets this? Is there any harm for the old well performing website or for the new one? And also both websites are owned and managed by the same owner.
Branding | | shaz_lhr0 -
Protecting Your Domain/Brand
Hi All, We've registered our domain with register.com they will not all us to buy .ca unless we reside in canada, same fro uk. Has anyone run into this problem? I wouldnt want someone to snatch it up and use it to their advantage.
Branding | | TP_Marketing0