Can links from an old site raise DA for other site? Or just unethical?

[asbchris]

So this may be an odd question.

So a competing company went out of business.

Their domain name is now available.

So just for research purposes, would you ever or would it be unethical for a person to buy an expired competing domain name, and point it to another site to collect their link juice?

The site was only a DA of 10, but not sure if one - its bad to buy a competing companies expired domain - and two - even though in the same industry, this would be bad to point it to another site or create a site from it.

Just curious your thoughts.

[MoosaHemani]

Ok, so company ran out of business, the domain got expired; you bought it and point it back to your website. I don’t see anything wrong, technically!

The only thing you should consider checking is the link profile of the domain because a bad link profile can lead you to an unexpected bad situation, where as a good link profile will only help.

The question is how people will react to it? This is very much depends upon industry to industry, customer base and business itself. Let’s say the company which ran out of business contain a bad offline reputation, redirecting a domain might redirect the reputation as well (same is for the positive side).

You have technical details clear but before making a move, make sure about how you potential and current clients feel about it.

Hope this helps!

[RobMay]

You could use this strategy, if you wanted. There is nothing wrong with assimilating an x-competitors domain URL and turning that ownership into a site your company uses and 301 redirects (perhaps they had a strong brand following?). You might be able to leverage some of that related traffic and turn those visitors into customers. You will want to look at the DA/PA, but as well, the # and quality of the backlinks that were acquired during the process when they owned it. Make absolutely sure it's a clean URL, with clean related backlinks that aren't tied to bad areas, because that will funnel down through to your site via the 301 redirect, if you go this route.

I had this happen to a company/client site. They stole an expired domain from the main competitor who was still in business and re-appropriated it for their own use in PAY DAY LOANS (which had absolutely nothing to do with the original destination URL it was originally taken from). Then, that SPAM site/company went out of business for whatever reason, and I was tracking the domain to re-acquire it myself (through auction) and hopefully be able to re-use it for the main site. The site's profile will probably need a major backlink analysis to see if it has been corrupted by this company who bought it when it expired and used it for spam related work. Auugggh.

Sometimes, these types of strategies do work, but you have to carefully evaluate and plan the benefits vs the cons and cost. I'll leave it up to you, but that's my 2 cents

Cheers!