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
-
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 | | Fulanito1 -
Do low quality subdomains affect the ranking performance/quality of a root domain?
Hi, Late last year the company I work for launched two new websites that, at the time, we believed were completely separate from our main website. The two new websites were set up externally and were not well-planned from an SEO perspective (LOTS of duplicate content) - hence, they have struggled to rank on Google. Since the launch of the new websites we have also noticed that our main website (that previously ranked very well) has suffered a decline in visitation and search engine rank. We initially attributed this to a number of factors, including the state of the market, and ramped up our SEO efforts (seeing minor improvement). We have since realised that these two new websites have been set up as subdomains of our main website, with MOZ displaying the same domain authority and root domain backlink profile. My question is, do poor quality subdomains affect the ranking performance of a root domain? I have not yet managed to find a definitive answer. Please let me know if more information is required - I am quite new to the whole SEO concept. Thanks! Amy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulissai0 -
How to recover google rank after changing the domain name?
I just started doing SEO for a new client. The case is a bit unique as they build a new website and for some reason lunched in under another domain name. Old name is foodstepsinasia.com and new one is foodstepsinasiatravel.com OLD one is a respected webites with 35 in MOZ page authority and with +15000 incomming link (104 root domains) NEW one is curently on 0 The programmer has just that build the new website has set it up so that when people write or find the old domain name it redirect to the front page of the new website with the new domain name. this caused that my friends lost a lot of their rankings was so I believ it was a very bad solution. But I also think I can get most of the old rankings back, but my question is what to do now to get as much back of the rankings as fast as possible?? A) I believe I must change the domain name back to foodstepsinasia.com on the new website ? O B) Should I on the old website try finding the url of the pages with most page authority and recreate these urls on the new website or should i redict them to a page with related content? Looking forward to feedback from someone who have experience with similar cases. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nm19770 -
Primary Domain or Redirect?
We are starting a new travel guide for a resort town. I have bought an expired domain with decent related links and PR (which seems to have survived the transfer (4 months ago). Beofre we launch the new site I am trying to decide if we should use this expired domain as the primary URL for the new site or just do a permanent redirect and buy a new domain that better matches the theme of the site. I am obviously concerned with starting from scatch with a new domain. I am confident we can build some good rellevant links in a short time but this space is very competetive. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Locals0 -
Should I buy a .co domain if my preferred .com and .co.uk domain are taken by other companies?
I'm looking to boost my website ranking and drive more traffic to it using a keyword rich domain name. I want to have my nearest city followed by the keyword "seo" in the domain name but the .co.uk and .com have already been taken. Should I take the plunge and buy .co at a higher price? What options do I have? Also whilst we're on domains and URL's is it best to separate keywords in url's with a (_) or a (-)? Many thanks for any help with this matter. Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoSheikh0 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
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 | | djingel10 -
Keyword-Rich Domains - Redirect?
Hi, Mozzers- I have a client that has a bunch of pretty nice keyword-rich domain names. Their traffic and rankings are good. They provide legal services in the Chicago area. I have lots of good content that I could use to start a blog using a domain like keyword,keyword-blog.com. Good idea? Currently I have a resources area on their website but feel like this area could be getting a little bloated and some news-related stuff isn't really appropriate. 2 Questions: Should I use one of the decent domains for a blog and build up the rankings, traffic, and link to the main site? Or is this lots of work for little payout? Both sites would be hosted in the cloud. Some of the domain names are related to their name, others are keyword or geo-targeted. Would it be wise to setup 301 redirects going to their website? Pros/cons? If you need additional info, please PM me for details. Thank you, friends! LHC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhc670