Is buying a domain with a high PR and redirecting it to your site considered black hat?
-
I want to buy a domain that has clean backlinks and then redirect it to my new domain to bump up my PR. Is this considered a black hat technique?
Thanks
Carla
-
Carla - the answer is .... it depends!
There are various different strategies for buying domains, and attempting to use them for SEO purposes.
The best case would be to negotiate privately with the owner of an existing website, and purchasing the domain and all of the contents of the domain from them. Businesses merge all the time, This is regular thing, and Google won't punish or look down on anyone for doing this. It will be clear that the domain changed hands, probably by updates to the name servers, and whois information, but since the website never expired or dropped from the registry, Google would probably assume this was a merger.
Also, if you do this, one of the best strategies for dealing with the domain would be to redirect individual pages to the most analogous page on your site, to take greatest advantage of the merged site.
It's also possible to buy up expired or expiring domains. There are different stages in the life cycle of domain name expiration where you can buy names. If you buy them in what's called 'pre-release' status, the domains will be transferred to your own account before the name dropped out of the registry, so it will maintain it's original creation date. You won't get the content with the domain, but this kind of domain purchase 'might' have some more life to it.
Finally, there are domains that have completely dropped out of the registry. The links from these won't have much more life to them.
But in general, if you can buy the domain and website content directly from the original owner, it should show up as a business merger (or even as 'rebranding' in your case, since your website is new), and should be a relatively safe tactic.
-
By definition, if the purpose of buying the domain is to manipulate your search rankings then that is black hat. Ryan laid out the only case I can think of that would be an exception to this rule, that is buying a domain that is in your industry or field and redirecting the traffic would be more of a business acquisition then manipulation.
I think there are a lot of people who get tripped up trying to understand the differences between various SEO practices. Why is putting keywords in your title tag, and h1 tags considered white hat when one can argue that you are purposely doing this to manipulate search results, but participating in a link ring considered black hat?
The difference are subtle, the big thing being anything that is done with the sol purpose to trick a search engine into ranking you higher then your site naturally warrants is black hat. Making changes to your site that make it easier for search engines to understand, crawl, or attribute credit to is white hat.
A good analogy would be putting on a nice suit for an interview, this would be considered white hat since you are just trying to present yourself in the best possible manner. (Proper Title Tags, H1 Tags and Page Content, Link Structure, Anchor Text)
However, stealing a new suit, or bribing somebody at the company to say good things about you is considered black hat. (Link Exchange Rings, Buying Links, Buying Social Media, Spamming Forums ect..)
In the end both practices may get you the job so to speak, but more then likely, eventually, the company will find out about it and which practice will you be more proud of? Putting on a nice suit? or paying somebody to say good things about you?
-
Is buying a domain with a high PR and redirecting it to your site considered black hat?
Yes
At this point I sense an angry mob is waiting for me with their fingers hovered over the thumbs down button.
In brief, when you take actions to improve the user experience, you are practicing white hat SEO. When you are taking actions to manipulate search engine rankings, you are practicing black hat SEO.
If you own the site "chocolate.com" and you decide to purchase "fudge.com", "whitechocolate.net" or any site related to your niche, then redirect the traffic, that is perfectly fine. You have a legitimate business reason for doing such. When you purchase "acme-comics.com" and redirect the domain to your chocolate site in an effort to raise PR and manipulate your rankings, that is black hat SEO.
A debate can begin on what Google can and cannot detect, but that is irrelevant. Even if Google does not enforce a particular policy does not make it any less black hat.
As a final note, the effectiveness of such tactics has greatly diminished over time. Many sites have a great deal of spam links which have been devalued by Google. If you redirect a site from another niche, those links will not offer you a lot of value since the links are not relevant to your site. Some things to think about.
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
-
Google is still indexing the old domain a year after 301 redirects are put in place
Hi there, You might have experienced this before but for me this is the first. A client of mine moved from domain A (www.domainA.com) to domain B (www.domainB.com). 301 redirects are all in place for over a year. But the old domain is still showing in Google when you search for "site:domainA.com" The HTTP Header check shows this result for the URL https://www.domainA.com/company/cookie-policy.aspx HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently =>
Technical SEO | | iQi
Cache-Control => private
Content-Length => 174
Content-Type => text/html; charset=utf-8
Location => https://www.domain_B_.com/legal/cookie-policy
Server => Microsoft-IIS/10.0
X-AspNetMvc-Version => 5.2
X-AspNet-Version => 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By => ASP.NET
Date => Fri, 15 Mar 2019 12:01:33 GMT
Connection => close Does the redirect look wrong? The change of address request was made on Google Console when the website was moved over a year ago. Edit: Checked the domainA.com on bing and it seems that its not indexed, and replaced with domainB.com, which is the right. Just Google is indexing the old domain! Please let me know your thoughts on why this is happening. Best,0 -
Redirects
Hello, i would like to ask which is the best redirect to use in a website now i have all my links to go to https://www.anavasis.gr Which is the best between: https://www.anavasis.gr https://anavasis.gr https://www.anavasis.gr/index.php https://anavasis.gr/index.php thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | anavasis0 -
Mobile site ranking instead of/as well as desktop site in desktop SERPS
I have just noticed that the mobile version of my site is sometimes ranking in the desktop serps either instead of as well as the desktop site. It is not something that I have noticed in the past as it doesn't happen with the keywords that I track, which are highly competitive. It is happening for results that include our brand name, e.g '[brand name][search term]'. The mobile site is served with mobile optimised content from another URL. e.g wwww.domain.com/productpage redirects to m.domain.com/productpage for mobile. Sometimes I am only seen the mobile URL in the desktop SERPS, other times I am seeing both the desktop and mobile URL for the same product. My understanding is that the mobile URL should not be ranking at all in desktop SERPS, could we be being penalised for either bad redirects or duplicate content? Any ideas as to how I could further diagnose and solve the problem if you do believe that it could be harming rankings?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
41.000 pages indexed two years after it was redirected to a new domain
Hi!Two years ago, we changed the domain elmundodportivo.es to mundodeportivo.com. Apparently, everything was OK, but more than two years later, there are still 41.000 pages indexed in Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aelmundodeportivo.es) even though all the domains have been redirected with a 301 redirect. I detected some problems with redirections that were 303 instead of 301, but we fixed that one month ago.A secondary problem is that the pagerank for elmundodportivo.es is 7 yet and mundodeportivo.com is 3.What I'm doing wrong?Thank you all,Oriol
Technical SEO | | MundoDeportivo0 -
301 Redirect How Long until the juice passes through to new site
Hi Guys, Following on from a question i asked last week in regard to a 301 http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking I was thinking that i had some kind of issue on the site, although i have gone over it with a fine tooth comb i cannot find any issue's and from the amount of reads the thread has had im sure if there was something obvious it would have been pointed out. So i am quite confident the 301 from site A to site B is fine and working as intended, so my question is how long should it take until the juice is passed From site A to Site B as its 9 weeks now and still down 85% on traffic and even text for my home page if copied into the search bar don't bring up my site Bing is fine and did not see any real traffic drops but Google is not giving me back the rankings i had prior Whenever i have done a 301 before the rankings pretty steady and i see no real loss in rankings but this time ... painful all changes in WMT made
Technical SEO | | kellymandingo
Canonical tag implemented
all Pages 301 and correct 200 response from the targeted page
Sitemap Updated
Many Links Changed from Old site to new (including DMOZ)
no Robots text Blocking directory's
Google crawling freely and regularly The strange thing is New content is indexed immediately and ranks easily, I added a page for my service in my local area and went straight to position 5 in Google however old existing content wont move, I tracked 150 keywords only 4 are top 75 Don't know what else to do so any advice would be much appreciated PS site is around 17k pages Paul0 -
How is this site doing this?
http://www.meccabingo.com It shows a splash / promotion page yet you check the cache and it's the real homepage, they are doing this so they don't lose rankings but how are they redirecting users to that but Google is caching the real homepage? is it friendly? thanks!!
Technical SEO | | AdiRste0 -
During a site platform transition, should we 301 redirect all URLs or only those with inbound links?
We have an ecommerce client transitioning to a new platform. Due to the nature of the platform, all the pages will have different URLs. There are between 7000-8000 total pages on the website. We wrote 301 redirects for all URLs which are showing inbound links. Unfortunately, automating this process is pretty difficult and hand writing URLs for 8000 links is unfeasible. Is it worth investing the time to 301 redirect all 8000 URLs, or are we safe with only doing those with inbound links? One other option would be to implement a generic redirect for all the rest of the old URLs that sends them to the homepage. Would this be a good compromise?
Technical SEO | | outofboundsdigital0 -
Accidently did a 301 redirect on root domain and lost domain keyword position
I just bought a domain about a week ago and instantly ranked number 4 for for my keywords with the domain keyword bonus. I created a landing page off the root of my domain while I'm building out my main site. I accidentally did a 301 redirect instead of a 302 from my root to my landing paging and this resulted in me losing my position and only being about to find my domain in the google if I searched for my domain specifically. Anyway to regain my original position? I have removed the redirect. Have I been put in the sandbox?
Technical SEO | | JohnTurner790