301 an old site to a newer site...

[RR500]

Hi

First, to be upfront - these are not my websites, I'm asking because they are trying to compete in my niche.

Here's the details, then the questions...

There is a website that is a few months old with about 200 indexed pages and about 20 links, call this newsite.com

There is a website that is a few years old with over 10,000 indexed pages and over 20,000 links, call this oldsite.com

newsite.com acquired oldsite.com and set a 301 redirect so every page of oldsite.com is re-directed to the front page of newsite.com

newsite.com & oldsite.com are on the same topic, the 301 occurred in the past week.

Now, oldsite.com is out of the SERPs and newsite.com is pretty much ranking in the same spot (top 10) for the main term.

Here are my questions;

1. The 10,000 pages on oldsite.com had plenty of internal links - they no longer exists, so I imagine when the dust settles - it will be like oldsite.com is a one page site that re-diretcts to newsite.com ... How long will a ranking boost last for?

2. With the re-direct setup to completely forget about the structure and content of oldsite.com, it's clear to me that it was setup to pass the 'Link Juice' from oldsite.com to newsite.com ... Do the major SE's see this as a form of SPAM (manipulating the rankings), or do they see it as a good way to combine two or more websites?

3. Does this work? Is everybody doing it? Should I be doing it? ... or are there better ways for me to combat this type of competition (eg we could make a lot of great content for the money spent buying oldsite.com - but we certainly wouldn't get such an immediate increase to traffic)?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Welcome to the world of competitive tactics based on real or perceived return on investment, and where ethics is a matter personal belief.  Some people believe they matter, others claim ethics are irrelevant, because obviously, they will do whatever they can, in attempts to make as much money by any means necessary as they think they can get away with.

[RR500]

Thanks for the quick reply's... I can see that it's probably not a long term solution, but as mentioned I was surprised how well it's working now.

And because of this, I worry newsite.com will continue to buy and re-direct sites every few months (weeks / years) or however long the results last.

[blackballonline]

When I run into issues like this It's best not to go outside of the webmaster guidelines for moving a site. (updated 3/20/2011) Clearly they have not applied best practices for user experience and missed a golden opportunity in my opinion. Be grateful that they did. With some more work they could be dominating even more. The similar content issue mentioned in GWT guidelines link above will bite them I'm sure. But like Alan said, when is up to the algorithm.

I would stay the course and make your site the best it can be. The competition and the SE are both out of your control.

[AlanBleiweiss]

It doesn't hold the same value as if every page on oldsite.com were redirected to the proper equivalent page on newsite.com - the long term value would be in links pointing to those redirecting to the new ones, combined with the links pointing to the old site's home page redirecting to the new site's home page.

How much value it gets that will last depends on how many links pointed to oldsite.com's home page.  Yet ultimately, if no new signals are generated and newsite.com doesn't build out in depth or spread of keywords, it's going to fall off over time.

Exactly how much time is anybody's guess.

The vast majority of people who do such things do it for the short (whatever that means) term boost, and if there are ads on newsite.com, the clicks on those ads.

Good question as to whether the search engines know about this and if so, how they deal with it.  Ultimately they don't say exactly.

In the past couple years I have not heard of anyone doing such things as their primary path to long-term success.

The actual length of time it lasts would definitely depend on the market it's in.  Are many other sites actively doing across-the-board SEO - both on-site and off-site?  If so, it'd last less time than if the market was relatively quiet.

How long it would take you to bypass newsite.com is also an unknown factor, regardless of method you chose.  SEO best practices call for putting in the footwork to do best practices and trusting that over time, you'll see value.  And you may or may not overcome newsite.com depending on what they do and the rest of the market.