What's the best SEO way to benefit from your competitor's shutting down?

[Kuantokusta]

Hi !

Our main competitor is shutting down (website will be offline) at the end of the month and we are negotiating with them to buy their domain name: the idea would be to take advantage of their good rankings in the SERPs to redirect traffic to our pages (we're planning to crawl their site or get their sitemap and redirect th category / product pages to ours).

The question is: for how long this strategy will be useful: days / weeks / months? (= for how long their pages will continue to appear in the SERPs from the day we enable the 301 redirections to our site?)

Thanks in advance for your help!

And if you have better suggestions, we're up to hear them of course..

Cheers

[Kuantokusta]

Thanks Thomas!

At the end, I have the feeling that we won't have to bother that much with that because the price they will ask is too expensive / not worth...

But it's still interesting to have some insights about this topic and I hope it helps / will help others

[BlueprintMarketing]

Look at how many people are actually finding them via Google or any search engine and subtract that from the amount now and you will get your number

I would not count on any branding alliance between you carrying over or people thinking that you are them

you must put a lot of effort into that.

It's simply going to be taking them back links and that's the only important thing you should really be worried about other than that you should just retire the domain honestly

If you don't want that domains back links this is really not worth it in my opinion.

[BlueprintMarketing]

You have to do a street for 301 redirect to your site from the purchase domain. You may get some links this way it might not be the most ethical way of going about it

This is what you have to look for when you're assessing a domain brother chores or somebody else's

• the quality of the domain
• the quality of the page
• the position of the link on the page
• number of links pointing at the page where the link is found
• social signals of the page.

If you purchased this domain and redirect it to yours you will game everyone who types in that Tomine and all the back links from that company you should make sure it has no negative back links prior to doing so

Other than what I stated above and you were coming benefiting from having that domain 31 redirecting to a meeting giving it everything it has almost 90 something percent of it

You really have to establish rather not to high-quality domain before you 301 redirect to what you've established outside while you come in you want to purchase it the purchase then 301 redirects to your website

Two relative pages only you can use this tool to assess the back links it's very good

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/competitor-backlink-analysis-in-excel/

so as

http://seogadget.com/categorising-your-links/

Of course is use

ahrefs

majestic SEO

&

OSE

To check the demesnes back links if it has that links pointing that is no good to you and all. You want to make sure you're redirecting a domain that's high-quality. You really do not want more than one domain and a competitor is really somebody that you could just get rid of right now however if you should choose 301 redirect to be very careful

If you need help with this I strongly suggest using a recommended search engine optimization partner Moz

I hope this is of help to you sincerely,

Thomas

[Carla_Dawson]

I see...I don't think you will know the answer until you actually implement.

Good luck and let us know how things go.

Carla

[Kuantokusta]

Yes we're competing on the same keywords and the websites architectures are similar, which doens't mean that we will be able to redirect all the traffic to the corresponding pages easily...

We know the traffic they are actually getting via search engines... but I would like to know for how long this traffic would be redirected to us...

My guess is that in 5 - 10 days, their domain won't "send" us traffic anymore (due to 301 redirections or due to low rankings because of the lost backlinks -> their main backlinks come from their other websites).

[Carla_Dawson]

Ahh..I see. They should give you access to their Google Analytics. The traffic they receive should be similar to what you will gain if your web architectures are similar and are going for similar keywords. Is that the case?

[Kuantokusta]

Thanks Carla for your detailed answer

We already know the domain we want to buy is not receiving (lots of) spammy links.

The reason we want to know how long will it continue to appear on the SERPs is to know how much traffic (= money) it can bring to us, so we can decide how much is the domain worth...

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Pedro,

If you redirect the purchased domain to your permanent domain all the incoming links to the purchased domain will be pointing at your domain. Therefore if they have spammy links your website could go down.

I do not know how long the purchased domain would appear in the SERPs but I wouldn't worry about it too much if you redirect all the Urls to your new domain. For example

www.purchaseddomain.com redirects to www.pedrosdomain.com

www.purchaseddomain.com/seoservices redirects to www.pedrosdomain.com/seo-services-portugal

www.purchaseddomain.com/seoservices may appear in the Serps but when a user clicks on it they will get redirected to your website.

I did not use any specialized platform to buy the domain. Just trust and a little luck

I hope my answers helped!

Thanks Carla

[Kuantokusta]

Hi Carla,

Thanks for your answer.

But I think your case is different since we don't want to replace our domain name by the one we want to buy: we just want to redirect the SERPs traffic to our site. Any idea for how long the bought domain will still show up in the SERPs after the site is down and and the 301 redirects are enabled?

PS: by the way, did you use some specialized platform to buy / transfer the domain? (to avoid to pay without receiving the domain access)

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Pedro,

I did something similar a couple years ago and made a very silly mistake but an important one. Please review your competitors backlink portfolio and see how many links really have value and how many are spammy. When I purchased my domain, it had a PR2 but I didn't realize that many of the links were black hat. Luckily for me, Google released the disavow tool right after I bought the domain so I was able to disavow the spammy stuff.

If the domain you plan on purchasing has spammy links, I would negotiate with the seller to disavow the spammy stuff before actually purchasing to see what you are really getting

Good luck

Carla

[Kuantokusta]

Buying there website is not something we are considering due to technology and more complex questions... and not only that their site profile is not very good, their direct traffic / brand is not good neither: all their traffic comes from search engines, directly to category and product pages... that's why I'm still interested to have a better idea for how long they will show up in the SERPs after the site is down and and the 301 redirects are enabled

Do you have an idea? Should we expect days / weeks / months?

[BlueprintMarketing]

So you're saying that their link profile is not very good? And you're only looking to get traffic from their existing website? If that is the case then you have to leave their existing website or just 301 redirect the site over to yours which would only last as long as people remember to use that website it would no longer be in the SERPS you could do a 302 but if you want to show up for there trafic not links have a page that tells people the site is now your site  click here.

You might not want to pay much with out it being looked at this is not gray hat If you buy there site but if done wrong could be very bad

[Kuantokusta]

Yes, the goal is not to redirect everything to the homepage but to try to "automatically / manually" get a 301 redirect to our corresponding pages.

Our competitor doesn't have a lot of backlinks (the main ones come from their sites and they will take them off as soon as they shut down) so what we really want to take advantage of is the traffic from the SERPs.... but how long will they continue to appear there?

[BlueprintMarketing]

One other thing to remember is switch that who is on that domain name in Google realizes that you've swapped you are no longer that company and that they could change things drastically however you will most likely benefit greatly from the inbound links that are going to be pointing at your domain after their  redirected away from this other site the right way I will grab some info on what I mean for you. Give me 20 min

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

This is done correctly could be extremely valuable. If your company is selling the exact same product this other company is in your information is relevant meaning that your site is relevant with their sites links would be relevant to be very Valuable and I would use a quality search engine optimization firm to do this job I would not just wing it

If you buy there domain and point it at your site you must 301 to your  sites relavent pages not just 301 all to home page.

You could get links for good so that's worth a lot ONLY IF DONE RIGHT

Hope I was of help,

Thomas