Purchase a domain to gain its rank, Highlander-style?
-
(urls have been altered)
We are KitchenApps.Com, your online portal for kitchen appliances. One of our biggest selling products is toasters, but despite SEO efforts, **KitchenApps.Com/toasters **ranks on page 6 for "toasters" and barely budges.
One of our competitors, Kool-Kitcken-Apps.biz just tossed in the towel and sold his domain/site to our boss for the cheap. It's an old domain, but the URL isnt lovely. He's got content, but it aint pretty and of course, we sell differently than he does, have some different products, etc. BUT BUT BUT hold everything, he ranks on the first page, with his homepage, for "toasters" his best ranked keyword. A lot of sites have linked to his site for toasters, buying toasters, etc.
Of course, the boss wants to just toss his content, and since his domain is different than company name (which is literally KitchenApps.Com) we should redirect Kool-Kitchen-Apps.biz to our SEO friendly KitchenApps.com/toasters url. He expects that will keep the same positioning, and we'll snag the toaster clicks.
Can we expect to maintain the positioning on page #1?
-
Sadly, I'm in Montana, and have very few bushes around, so option D) is out of questions
How is the new domain ranking for other keywords? Maybe like 4 slice toaster, or whatever phrase gets a lot of traffic? If it's ranking high for other phrases I would use it as a temporary test dummy. Pretty up the website, and find out which phrases, designs, etc. convert the best while you improve your original /toaster website. Once you have all the data you need, and a highly improved /toaster page, just 301 it over.
However, if you don't have that much time, I'd just 301 it over, and go on with your day. There's always room for hopes and dreams, but this whole 24 hours in a day thing can get in the way if you don't have help.
If you choose to redirect, I would definitely put it on the inner /toasters page. It looks like you already have a good amount of links pointing to your home page, and not many to the inner page.
-
Good point, I guess I should add some color. Attached is an OSE exam of their site, our toaster landing page and then our main home page. Obviously, we are two completely different sites, and our main page holds a huge edge over the /toaster page.
Knowing this, would you:
A) play it safe, keep Kool-Kitchen-Apps.biz domain/site, and 'pretty it up'
B) redirect to /toasters, dice roll
C) redirect to /, likely keep or improve ranking for "toasters"
D) panic, stop using computers, hide in neighbor bushes until arrested -
Well, I wouldn't expect you to jump to the first page just from 301'ing their website into yours. There are other factors at play, as I'm sure you know. However, you can expect a good portion of the link juice pointing at the other website to be transferred to yours. Depending on the other factors on your particular website, you should see a jump in your current ranking.
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
-
Temporary Domain Changes
Hi All, Our development team needs to do a temporary site name change from www.sitename.com to new.sitename.com and then wants to return to www.sitename.com. They need to do this for the whole site due to how it's built with single sign on (SSO) and how certain post login pages utilize pre login pages and need to keep people logged in. This process is changing with a CMS upgrade and website and post login pages will be independent of the pre login pages moving forward. My question is what is the best way to manage this transition? Right now it seems like the best solution I've been able to work out with development is to reduce the domain shift down to one week and use 302 Redirects, don't index the new.sitename.com site, and for that week and take my lumps as they come from search. Looking for any other suggestion that may help marketing work with dev without casting blame on any teams for drops in organic traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dapacifi0 -
Why have my rankings dropped?
I have a client who has just seen his average page rank creep up from around 39 to 34 over about two months, then it appears to have dropped back to position 40+ in the space of a week. I believe he's made a lot of changes to targeted keywords, so I'd like to think it's simply because his old targeted keywords are dropping and new keywords still have to build their rankings. But I'm also worried in case he has over-optimised and might get getting penalised. Any advice on where to start digging?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Change domain.com to www.domain.com - influence on linkbuilding, seo, etc.
Hello, Do you know what can happen when i change domain.com to www.domain.com? Will it have an influence to my link-building portfolio (external links to domain.com), position on google search, etc. Thank you for help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reyzer0 -
Consolidating two separate domains and redirecting towards a new replatformed domain
A client has two different sites selling the same products with the same content, they would like to replatform onto Magento while redirecting those 2 sites to the new URL. The question is, besides monitoring the 301 redirects is there anything else to take into consideration when consolidating two sites into one new site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RocketWeb0 -
Exact match domain ranking comparison.
Assuming all the following websites content is of the same value to google's eyes (or assume duplicate content isnt penalized and they are all the same) and they all go to the same landing page (assuming the above rules) in what order do you think these would rank in a US google search for 'shoes'. A)www.sho.es B)www.sho.es/shoes C)brand.com/shoes D)shoes.brand.com E) (if you have the time) Repeat B),C) and D) for .net
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howiex10 -
Moving low ranking domain
I have a website, that I rewrote great content for, but I recently found that there are many, many links going to the subdomain that may be pulling it down. Has anyone had experience taking down a site and then moving the content to a new site? Will it be considered duplicate content if you completely take the old site down and use rel="canonical" on new site pages? I don't want to lose the good content, but I cannot have it on the current URL with all the bad backlinking (it's a complicated situation, as I need to keep those backlinks which are affiliates). Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
SEO value in baclklink from blog.domain VS domain
Will a back-link from "domain.com/abc" and "blog.domain.com/abc" have same value from an SEO perspective? Assume same article written on both sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen
I have been told the bots look at the domain value and the only links from blogs that have less value are in case of comments. As long as the "blog.domain/abc" page includes a full article and not a blog comment then it counts fully for SEO. Is this correct?0 -
Confusion about domain extension.
Hi, need bit suggestions from you guys. After researchi found a KW that have some good Lcoal search volume.. My question is should i buy the CLD as it has good LS volume or i should go for .com , .net etc. Becasue as i know that LS means that number of people searching form that location(based on IP) not number of people searching in that local version of google. So no need to go for CLD as it vl help only in local version.. Bit confused waiting for reply thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Big_Zee0