Purchasing a site for a 301 Re-direct
-
Hi Mozzers,
I have a question regarding a tactic I'm considering for a client. My client has a web hosting company and is ranking well for his keywords and in position 3 for his main term.
There is a site available on flippa that is a keyword rich domain and has a decent link portfolio and domain authority and the price is attractive.
I'm considering buying it to 301 it to his domain but I've never done this tactic before.
Is this grey/black hat? Has anyone done this before and to what extent did it work?
Thanks
Bush
-
Wayne gave a good answer.
From a great deal of research I have found that a 301 redirect loses some of the link juice to avoid people abusing the power of building many domains and then forwarding them all to one main domain.
In my opinion this is well worth it still especially when you don't have to go through the work to have established the link portfolio.
One thing to look out for though is making sure that the link portfolio really is as good as you think it is.
Look into the backlinks and see if they are from reputable sources which will stay there or if thy are just a mass of profile backlinks and comment spam which could just make it seem like they have a lot of good links or even get those links removed later on.
At the very least the 301 redirect will help get the robots to your site to increase crawl frequency which i find to be great when you want your pages to be indexed and updated quickly on google.
-
Wayne - you've been really helpful thanks.
Much appreciated - I'll check the link graph out in more detail now
Bush
-
I can't say for sure what caused the delay and I'll be honest and admit I wasn't paying a lot of attention to it so my time frame could be off by a fair amount.
Negatives - it really still boils down to a form of manipulation and that always has the potential to go wrong right? It's the link profile that's going to help you anyway, so if the price is reasonable I'd go the "purchase/request new links" approach.
-
Hi Wayne,
Thanks for your response. May I ask what the 60 day delay was down to?
They are of similar themes yes. I really like the idea of contacting the providers of the current links as well.
At this point I'm going off the stats on flippa so need to dig deeper on traffic and domain age etc.
Any negatives? If we do it we'll do it once and once only but will Google hit us with anything?
Bush
-
We did this a year or so back for a client merger - the soon-to-be-defunct domain was redirected to the new site and definitely did help things, but only after a delay of about 60 days. Having said that, the tactic would have passed human scrutiny because of the situation - not sure if that would factor in here.
Are the sites of a similar theme? If they are you could buy the new site and then email as many of the linking domains as possible and ask them if they would be willing to change their link to point to your client's existing domain. It's more work but could end up being a great solution if they agree to tweak the anchor text for you as well. Plus, you then have another relationship - and you can never have too many of those when link building.
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
-
301 Redirects
Looking for the best way to do the following. Business has changed its name, and has also become a corporate store. The old domain name is now no longer needed as a website page has been created inside the main corporate site. Obviously i dont want to loose all the traffic that we had and want to redirect them but there is a problem, that im unable to redirect the old domain to the new one due to office 365 installed on the hosting platform, and the old emails will need to run for another 6 months. I can remove the old site and put a landing page up, but i still need to redirect all the pages to the new site, and there is approx 50+ of them. My main question is i currently have atleast 50+ redirects already in there due to seo changes over the years, some would go back atleast 5 years, whats a safe amount of time that i can remove the older redirects And am i going about this the right way so i dont loose all the hard work on rankings etc
Technical SEO | | Dunjoko0 -
301 Redirects
Hello, All. Hopefully this will be an easy question for some of you. I have a (WordPress) site with the format of: http://www.site.com/folder-old/page-old/ I have since re-named both the parent and sub-folders to (example): http://www.site.com/folder-new/page-new/ Everything is working well EXCEPT I am also trying to redirect visitors from the old URL/structure to the new. I have a 301 redirect setup as the following: Redirect 301 /folder-old/page-old/ http://www.site.com/folder-new/page-new/ -- But it doesn't seem to be working. Not sure if this is something finicky with WordPress or if the redirect is incorrect. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Site's IP showing WMT 'Links to My Site'
I have been going through, disavowing spam links in WMT and one of my biggest referral sources is our own IP address. Site: Covers.com
Technical SEO | | evansluke
IP: 208.68.0.72 We have recently fixed a number of 302 redirects, but the number of links actually seems to be increasing. Is this something I should ignore / disavow / fix using a redirect?0 -
Site Penalized - 301 Redirect Question
Hello, We have a website that was penalized roughly two years by Google for "Unnatural Links"... We are experiencing a lot of problems with this site, completely unrelated to the penalty or SERPS, and we're debating doing a 301 Re-direct to another site we own that is totally clean and has no "Unnatural Links". If we do a 301 from the penalized site to our alternative website, will there be any cross-contamination? Will the penalty carry over to our other site? Please let me know what you guys think. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
How Often is Site Crawled
Good morning- I saw some errors in my first crawl and immediately removed the pages from my website. I then re-created my XML sitemap and uploaded to Google. The question I have is will the site be crawled to recognize the changes in the next day or so? The pages were just placed on the site as test pages and never removed. The initial crawl that notified me it was done found the errors and were removed. Thanks for your help. Peter
Technical SEO | | VT_Pete0 -
Are my canonical re directs working?
Buonjourno from Wetherby UK 🙂 Ive been battlling sometime to get this site http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk to rank for term Right To Manage. Amongst other tactics ive set up a canonical http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/about/right-to-manage.aspx * - Canonical version http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/how-we-care-for-you/right-to-manage.aspx http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/what-our-customers-say/right-to-manage.aspx http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/ - But has this canonical redirect feature worked? The reason i doubt it is i notice when i enter a page http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/what-our-customers-say/right-to-manage.aspx which has the below code in place: rell="canonical" href="http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/About/right-to-manage.aspx/" /> It does not jump to http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/about/right-to-manage.aspx So my question is... "is the canonical redirect working or not & waht is the best way / tool for diagnosing a canonical error" Grazie tanto,
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
David0 -
301 redirect or 302
A client of mine has an international company named www.taxglobalizers.com if you come from Holland they 302 redirect you to the www.taxglobalizers.com/en version of the site and if you come from Holland they redirect with a 302 to www.taxglobalizers.com/nl version. I think it is best to change this in a 301 redirect. Am i correct in this? Kind Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
.CA site same as .com site - are both necessary?
Dear Friend, We representa a major national brand in the auto care industry, and they have locations in both US and Canada. There is a primary content site at .com that we have duplicated at .ca. We are hosting the .ca site on a separate IP on a server in Canada - but by in large it is the same site. (there are some minor changes we made to change US English to Canadian English - though minor. When we search Google.ca we generally see strong search results for the .com site, but rarely, if ever any evidence of rankings for the .ca site. The .com site was launched several years ago about 18 months before the .ca site. Why doesn't Google.ca show the .ca site? Is this an issue of duplicate content, and Google.ca simply shows the .com version which it knew about first? Are we wasting our time, money and efforts having both? Thanks, Tim ps. this isn't about location. We use a separate site to locate local shops, and have coordinated that well with Google Places, and when looking for local auto care - we do well in both US and Canada. The sites described above are largetl content sites.
Technical SEO | | lunavista-comm0