Strategies for best use of competitors expired domain
-
I recently bought an old competitors expired domain that was ranking around the page 2 or 3 on Google for most keywords that I target.
Curious as to best strategy for utilizing this domain:
1. set up some content with back links to my own domain
2. Set up redirects to set up all of the competitors old domain URLs to corresponding sections on my website
3. Something else? -
Thank you both, finally getting around to doing this now!
-
Hi Sandi,
You make one page with a "press release" writing that the company is been taken over by (yourcompany.com). All the other URL's you redirect to this page. On this page you can link to the most important places you want on your own website.
This way the authority of the old competitors domain will be forwarded to yours. And after like 6 months/1year you could link the whole domain to your site.
As Thomas mentions below it is a good idea to check which links could be of use (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/) and contact the most important to change the link domain to yours.
Hope it helps! Regards, Tymen
-
Hi Tymen! Thanks for your feedback sounds like a good idea! Could you please elaborate a bit what you mean as if you are trying to explain to someone that is a novice - ie "I would make a One-pager with a catch all URL's. This way all the old url's of the site will go to this page and you get no 404's. On this page you explain that there is nothing there anymore and you should go to your site. I would not put to many links on the page."
-
Expanding on what Tymen has said,
This could be a good strategy, but why would you not just 301 redirect the whole site to a page on your own site (explaining that they don't exist anymore). This way I see you getting more value to your site (one hop through the redirect instead of one hop from the redirect and the link)
Also, something that may be worth looking into is if they have any high value links, seeing where they come from and explaining the company is not existent and trying to get the links that they once had.
-
Hi Sandi,
I would make a One-pager with a catch all URL's. This way all the old url's of the site will go to this page and you get no 404's. On this page you explain that there is nothing there anymore and you should go to your site. I would not put to many links on the page.
Eventually the authority of the competitors site will go but if you have everything in place you will get it. What you could also do is login into the Seach Console account of the competitor and see which pages have good content. This content you could copy to your site before you take it offline.
Good luck!
Tymen
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
-
Migrating to a new domain
Hi The company I work for are planing to re-brand & come under our parent company name. This means the whole site will be moved to a new domain. Does anyone have any experience with this and can give me some useful docs to read/any advice? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Legacy domains
Hi all, A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well. Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was? Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com. What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains? Many thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarkovitch0 -
Can I Use Multiple rel="alternate" Tags on Multiple Domains With the Same Language?
Hoping someone can answer this for me, as I have spent a ton of time researching with no luck... Is there anything misleading/wrong with using multiple rel="alternate" tags on a single webpage to reference multiple alternate versions? We currently use this tag to specify a mobile-equivalent page (mobile site served on an m. domain), but would like to expand so that we can cover another domain for desktop (possibly mobile in the future). In essence: MAIN DOMAIN would get The "Other Domain" would then use Canonical to point back to the main site. To clarify, this implementation idea is for an e-commerce site that maintains the same product line across 2 domains. One is homogeneous with furniture & home decor, which is a sub-set of products on our "main" domain that includes lighting, furniture & home decor. Any feedback or guidance is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LampsPlus0 -
How do you raise domain authority?
Hey guys, hoping you can help me out here. I've been tasked with raising several sites' domain authority to a level of 30. Right now, many of them are hovering around 20. Three weeks into this project and our numbers have dropped 1-2 points on average but I don't think our efforts would reflect that this quickly. From what I've read online, a good strategy is guest posting on relevant sites and collecting links from sites with higher DAs. I've also read at least one Moz article about this potentially being ineffective. I've read some of the related posts but they seem mostly dated and the answers didn't seem to help me. Hoping someone with some experience with this can help me out, I appreciate it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DustinAB0 -
Should I serve images from the same Top level domain as the current domain?
We run a multidomain e-commerce website that targets each country respectively: .be -> Belgium .co.uk -> United Kingdom etc... .com for all other countries We also serve our product images via a media subdomain eg. "media.ourdomain.be/image.jpg"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jef2220
This means that all TLD's contain the images of the .be media subdomain. Which is acually seen as an outbound link. We are considering to change this setup so that it serves the images from the same domain as the current TLD, which would make more sense: .be will serve images from media.ourdomain.be .co.uk -> media.ourdomain.co.uk etc.. My question is: Does google image search take the extension of the TLD into consideration? So that for example German users will be more likely to see an image that is served on a .de domain?0 -
Changing Domain
We have an old domain that we have had registered for many years(pinpoint;asersystems.com) and redirected to our regular domain (which is a short version of our name (pinlaser.com). Management wants to switch and use the longer version as the primary domain for branding purposes. I have cautioned against this for many reasons: Need to do 100's of redirects Potential loss of back links Most links will now be 301 redirects and not look natural to search engines. I would appreciate feedback on any and all risks associated with this potential move. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pinlaser0 -
Best procedure for distributing identical content about your company/site for affiliates to use?
When dealing with affiliate websites, whereby you send them a stock standard bio or info on your company for them to use on their sites, what is best practice? Is is OK to have multiple websites all linking to you with pages that contain the same content? Should I ask them to implement canonical or no-index tags for those particular pages? Should I ask them to rewrite the content (which may be impractical or they're unwilling to do)? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Change of domain procedure
Hi Guys, I have been tasked with conducting a change of domain for our company website. The website will be exactly the same, just change from www.jamesburfield.co.uk to www.burfieldcreative.co.uk. This was attempted before but my boss got cold feet and switched back after he saw a drop in rankings. (He put in the redirects and went through the change of domain procedure with google). I have told him that I think its possible with minimal disruption and we have agreed even with some disruption it will better in the long run for the company. Here is the process I intend to follow: 1. Copy and upload site to new domain 2. Redirect all pages with a wildcard or individually - possibly drop the www also 3. Follow the change of domain procedure in webmaster tools 4. Change the href of as many as possible back links to point at the new domain Please let me know your thoughts on my plan and if there is anything else I can do to ensure we maintain our rankings. Any help is appreciated as this is my suggestion and my neck is on the line! Thanks guys! Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpsonGareth0