I'm thinking about buying a competitor and 301 redirecting? How much SEO value?

[bradwayland]

I'm thinking about buying a competitor and 301 redirecting their site to mine.  The high level stats are as follows.  My site has a DA of 46 and the homepage has a PA of 55.  375 root domains, 170,000 links.  The site sells millions of dollars worth of product each year.  The competitor (who I had never heard of) has a DA of 58 and a homepage PA of 64.  They have 634 root domains and 260,000 links.  They aren't selling much of anything (less than 100,000 per year).  We might be able to operate their site but I'm concerned about maintaining 2 platforms.  My question is about the value of buying this site and 301 redirecting it to my site.  Would this create long term SEO value or not?  Any examples that have been documented are greatly appreciated.

[irvingw]

I would buy it and keep it as a separate site. If he's buying links it might get penalized eventually so i would look to see how shady the links are and anchor text percentages before buying and ask to see their GA account so you can see if their traffic has remained strong.

301'ing a site that has been doing grey hat link building to your white hat site, i probably wouldn't do that.

[TylerAbernethy]

Well in the first case with my competitor that 301'd to a new site, absolutely, that was almost a year ago, and they are still sittin' just fine.

It does sound like a good buy, since your site is less powerful, but then again, it would depend on the link profile of the sites in question.

If you have a really clean profile, and they have a messy one, you might lose some value of having your site completely "virgin" if you will, to any spam.

Also, even though they have a higher DA, do they actually rank higher than you for any phrases?

If so, how many, and how valueable are they?

[bradwayland]

We rank first page for nearly every phrase we want.  However, competitors of ours that have been actively buying links are still being rewarded and it has hurt us a little in the last year.  We used to be 2-5 for our key phrases.  Now we are more like 3-7 for hundreds of phrases.  Is there any evidence that buying a domain with a lot of relevant backlinks and redirecting has created long term value?

[TylerAbernethy]

I have a competitor that bought a site that we had the chance to buy, and they jumped to the top of the search engines (keyword difficulty of 55), and the results were overnight.

In their case they bought a brand new domain, and 301 redirected the site to the new domain.

On the other hand, Another company of mine has a 301 redirect from another site, and we still struggle to rank....

How well are you ranking without the 301?

If it is the difference between average spot 10's for your target keywords, and average spot of 1-5, then you should probably jump all over it...