Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Buying an existing domain with higher ranks for redirecting
-
I've recently came across one of my competitors who's looking to sell their domain. Now they currently rank higher than my primary site for a few keywords we are targeting.
Would it be wise to buy the domain and do a name server change over to my primary domain? Would it even help boost ranks for the keywords they rank higher for? Or will the link juice be minimal?
Any thoughts would be great!
-
Hi Upick,Fisrt of all I wan to tell you that It’s no secret that one of the tactics search engine optimization specialists use to increase search rankings is domain purchasing. The idea is that you find a domain that currently ranks well within your niche, buy it and then redirect the site to your domain. Alternatively you could purchase this domain and continue to build off of it and utilize its existing rankings and site traffic.
Below are several do’s & don’ts to keep in consideration when purchasing a domain.
DO:
- Look for existing rankings
- Research websites existing links. Are they all pointing to the home page or do internal page links exist?
- Examine the existing content on the site; can it be leveraged for more links?
- Take into account the domain age/authority before purchasing
- Take the time to determine if the price of the domain will outweigh natural content building and link building.
- Check to see if any existing penalties or filters have been placed on the domain.
- Map out domains internal pages to the pages of your current website.
- Look for websites that are relevant to your niche.
- Examine incoming links and see if they target your specific keywords.
- Determine if the links from this domain will stay put even after a redirect placed.
- Do look for yahoo, best of the web, DMOZ, business.com directory links.
- Look to see if the backlinks come from other sites that the current site owner may own as well. There is a good chance these links could disappear after the purchase.
- Check out the websites existing traffic and verify it if possible.
- Check the age of the domains existing links.
- Look for authority news sites linking to the domain.
DO NOT:
- Purchase a domain based off its Google Page Rank.
- Purchase a domain that only has low quality and spammy links.
- Place too much value on a keyword matching domain. (watch out for hyphenated URLS)
- Redirect the entire website to your homepage.
- Buy a site that’s not indexed in the search engines.
- Purchase domains that are not in your niche.
- Use any other redirect outside of a 301 redirect. The value will not pass otherwise.
- Substitute organic link building with multiple domain purchases.
- Purchase a domain that has its entire link equity coming from a small quantity of domains.
- 301 redirect several newly acquired domains at once; this could send a red flag to Google.
These “Do’s & Don’ts” of domain purchasing hopefully will guide you in the right direction when it comes to you purchasing additional domains. There are too many scammers with the intent of selling you a low value site at a high price. This is why it’s crucial to do your homework before you purchase any domains. Yes there are deals to be had out their but you have to be extra careful when you think your getting a steal. If you follow the basics tips listed above you should be just fine!
For more details please visit the Buying Expired Domains
I hope that your query has been solved.
-
Great advice. If there are similar pages on both sites then why not redirect them to the similar page on your site. You can then add a link on the homepage of the new domain to pass through some juice
-
If you buy the domain and re-direct then remember to think of your competitors customers - not just the potential ranking boost!
Ideally you want their customers to become your customers, so think about how you might redirect specific pages from their domain to landing pages designed to reassure people looking for you competitors products/services and position yourself as a viable alternative.
The last thing you want if for them to think they're in the wrong place and bounce straight away, never to return!
Before buying the domain, can you get any supporting stats / analytics? How many direct visitors, how many via search etc.You're likely to have a small window of opportunity, but it's definitely worth thinking about how you can get some of those customers that you might not be able to replace just from search.
-
A 301 should work fine.
You should in theory gain some linkjuice and rankings from the domain.
However the effects wont be as good as regular do follow links to your site.
But as Marcin says it's still an efficient way...
-
Hi upick,
you can buy the domain and do a 301 redirect to your site. I've done it many times, and it is still surprisingly powerful method to quickly get the desired rankings, obviously if the domain you're 301-ing was powerful enough.
Hope it helps.
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
-
Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 16, 2019, 3:00 PM | murraycustomhomescom0 -
Should I redirect a domain we control but which has been labeled 'toxic' or just shut it down?
Hi Mozzers: We recently launched a site for a client which involved bringing in and redirecting content which formerly had been hosted on different domains. One of these domains still existed and we have yet to bring over the content from it. It has also been flagged as a suspicious/toxic backlink source to our new domain. Would I be wise to redirect this old domain or should I just shut it down? None of the pages seem to have particular equity as link sources. Part of me is asking myself 'Why would we redirect a domain deemed toxic, why not just shut it down.' Thanks in advance, dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 28, 2018, 12:03 PM | Daaveey0 -
Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 13, 2017, 4:00 PM | Fulanito1 -
Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!
One of our web pages will not rank on Google. The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem. There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine. There is no duplicate page content issue. The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine. We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine. It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!! The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages. Can anyone help? Know about this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 9, 2015, 12:14 PM | CayenneRed890 -
Can you redirect specific sub domain URLs?
ello! We host our PDFs, Images, CSS all in a sub domain. For the question, let's call this sub.cyto.com. I've noticed a particular PDF doing really well, infact it has gathered valuable external links from high authoritative sites. To top it off, it gets good visits. I've been going back and forth with our developers to move this PDF to a subfolder structure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 23, 2013, 12:46 PM | Bio-RadAbs
For example: www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf In my perspective, if I move this and set up a permanent redirect, then all the external links the PDF gathered, link juice and future visits will be attributed to the main website. Since the PDF is existing in the subdomain, I can't even track direct visits nor get the link juice. It appears in top position of Google as well. My developer says it is better to keep images, pdf, css in the subdomain. I see his point and an idea I have is to: convert the pdf to a webpage. Set up a 301 redirect from the existing subdomain to this webpage Upload the pdf with a new name and link to it from the webpage, so users can download if they choose to. This should give me the existing rank juice. However, my question is whether you can set up a 301 redirect for just a single subdomain URL to a folder structure URL? sub.cyto.com/xxx.pdf to www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf?0 -
Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 16, 2013, 3:35 PM | BrandLabs0 -
SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.
A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 12, 2012, 7:06 PM | knielsen1 -
Any way to find which domains are 301 redirected to competitors' websites?
By looking at the work from an SEO collegue it became clear that his weak linkbuilding graph probably is not the cause for his good rankings for a pretty competitive keyword. (also no social mentions where found) I was wondering what it could be, site structure and other on page optimization factors seems to be ok and I don't think there will be exceptionally good or bad user behavior... Finally I looked at the competitors and found that they have more links, better content en better design, so I got a little stuck. The only reason I can think of is that he is doing 301 redirects (or is rel=canonical tags). Is there a way to trace these redirects back to the source in order to include this important variable in your competitor research? thnx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 30, 2011, 3:52 AM | djingel10