Outranking a crappy outdated site with domain age & keywords in URL.
-
I'm trying to outrank a website with the following:
Website with #1 ranking for a search query with "City & Brand"
- Domain Authority - 2
- Domain Age - 11 years & 9 months old
- Has both the City & brand in the URL name.
- The site is crap, outdated.. probably last designed in the 90's, old layouts, not a lot of content & NO keywords in the titles & descriptions on all pages.
My site ranks 5th for the same keyword.. BEHIND 4 pages from the site described above.
- Domain Authority - 2
- Domain Age - 4 years & 2 months old
- Has only the CITY in the URL.
- Brand new site design this past year, new content & individual keywords in the titles, descriptions on each page.
My main question is.... do you think it would be be beneficial to buy a new domain name with the BRAND in the URL & CITY & 301 redirect my 4 year old domain to the new domain to pass along the authority it has gained.
Will having the brand in the URL make much of a difference?
Do you think that small step would even help to beat the crappy but old site out?
Thanks for any help & suggestions on how to beat this old site or at least show up second.
-
Thanks all. This is what I had recommended to the client to begin with. I just needed some backup from all you smart SEO's out there.
Unfortunately the URL would not be for sale as it's a brick and mortar business.
Thanks again!
-
I personally lean more towards the reaction of EGOL. If you put enough effort in it, keep it straight white hat and do all the steps suggested in the SEOblog section (like link earning in stead of link building) then over time you can outrank that site for sure. But keep working on it. Be social.. share everything you can on facebook, twitter and off course the BIG G+.
Tricks can help you in the short run but hurt you in the long run so i wouldn't go for that straight away.
You could also try registering the other domain you mentioned, put up some content and everything and build it next to your existing website (without copying text etc.). You could do this as a supporting role for your primary website if you wish. But i would focus on my primary website first and improving that one.
regards
Jarno
-
I like irving's suggestion to see if the webmaster is willing to sell the site. whats the link profile like? any particular high authority links that might be giving it the advantage over your site?
-
**Will having the brand in the URL make much of a difference? **
The brand? Yes, if people know you.
Really, I would not change domains for the tiny advantage that you think a keyword in the domain might bring. It is very possible that you will lose more linkjuice in the redirect than you will gain from the keyword in the domain.
Do you think that small step would even help to beat the crappy but old site out?
heh... That crappy old site is beating you because they are beating you.
It is easier to beat an old crappy site with "work" than it is to beat them with "tricks'.
-
Absolutely not, your site is aged. A new site is like starting all over even if you do 301 the old site to the new.
a) work on improving the on page SEO on your site
b) if that new domain is available you could play around with setting that up as a stand alone site and see if you can get it ranked #1, it could take 6-12 months before Google really trusts it enough.
c) if it's that old and outdated maybe he wants to sell it at a reasonable price if it's worth that much to you?
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
-
Keywords and keyword traffic
Hi I am struggling to know what keywords i should be targeting and how the website should be best optimised for said keywords. The website offers bespoke service in the lake district UK a popular tourist destination, The business operates within say a 30 km riadus of the area. So target vistors to the website would specifically be looking for services in the lake district. The trouble is for many targeted keywords for the area are quite low or no data shown. For example: tipi camping lake district, tipi hire lake district, Glamping lake district However nationally keywords for the service have a lot higher traffic i.e. tipi hire or tipi camping, glamping what keywords should be my target? and should I targeting my website for? I don't want to target customers looking for these services outside of the lake district and also by targeting keywords without the term lake district means my competition is greater as i'm competing with the whole of the Uk for serivces It can't provide. please advise thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bengo-990 -
Different URL structure Desktop VS Mobile Regarding SEO when building a new seperate mobile site
Hi I have a old OScommerce webshop, that i will keep for now, but i have build a complete new mobile site for mobile devices, but it has another url structure. Can i launch this site without any problems when its Google Mobile Search Engine that index the mobile site, and then just make the neccesary rel alternate tags for the desktop site for the product pages and main categories that i can. There will be some differences in the urls i cant make a alternate for.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | noerdar0 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
What to do about old urls that don't logically 301 redirect to current site?
Mozzers, I have changed my site url structure several times. As a result, I now have a lot of old URLs that don't really logically redirect to anything in the current site. I started out 404-ing them, but it seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate AND it wasn't removing them from the index after being crawled several times. There are way too many (>100k) to use the URL removal tool even at a directory level. So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this. Should I (a) just 404 them and wait for Google to remove (b) keep the 200, noindex or (c) are there other things I can do? 410 maybe? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Mobile Site Outranking Main Site
Hi, We have recently been hit with a problem regarding our mobile site, where it is outranking our main site. This is causing a drop in orders and ranknings for our main site. It would appear that google has indexed our mobile site and so the two are now competing against each other. Our main site is on a .co.uk and our mobile site on a .mobi, but we have now taken down the mobile site until we get this sorted. Does anyone else have any experience of this happening and how to stop it happening again? Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve251 -
Can Keyword-Stuffing on a Single Page Penalize My Entire Site?
Hi forum! I want to improve my internal linking through adding keyword-rich anchor text to my search results pages (my site has an internal search engine for products). For example, if I were a shoes store, my product search engine results are currently:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
-Running
-Hiking
-Walking
-Track and I want to make them actual keyword-terms by changing them to:
-Running Shoes
-Hiking Shoes
-Walking Shoes
-Track Shoes This creates a problem - the keyword "shoes" is stuffed on the page. I don't care how well these dynamic search results pages appear in search, only the actual product pages. Is it okay to keyword stuff on these pages, or would it penalize my entire site?0 -
Question regarding error url while checking in open-site explorer tool
Hello friends, My website home url & inner page url shows error while checking the open-site site explorer tool from SEOMoz, for a website** eg.www.abc.com website as**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zco_seo
**"Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.abc.com/error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/default.aspx. Would you like to see data for that URL instead?"**May I know the reason, why this url showing this result while checking back link report from the tool?**May I know on what basis this tool is evaluating the website url as well?****May I know, Will this affect the Google SERPs for this website?**Thanks0 -
Changing domain extension to detoxify a domain
Hi there, A linkbuilding company that has been building links for us has not gained any sustained results. They have advised that our domain may be toxic, and that we should consider permanent redirecting from .co.uk to another domain extension in order to remedy this. Is this a recommendation worth considering?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise0