Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      What is your Brand Authority?
      Moz

      What is your Brand Authority?

      Check yours now
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Outranking a crappy outdated site with domain age & keywords in URL.

    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.

    Outranking a crappy outdated site with domain age & keywords in URL.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    6
    1524
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • DCochrane
      DCochrane last edited by

      I'm trying to outrank a website with the following:

      Website with #1 ranking for a search query with "City & Brand"

      • Domain Authority - 2
      • Domain Age - 11 years & 9 months old
      • Has both the City & brand in the URL name.
      • The site is crap, outdated.. probably last designed in the 90's, old layouts, not a lot of content & NO keywords in the titles & descriptions on all pages.

      My site ranks 5th for the same keyword.. BEHIND 4 pages from the site described above.

      • Domain Authority - 2
      • Domain Age - 4 years & 2 months old
      • Has only the CITY in the URL.
      • Brand new site design this past year, new content & individual keywords in the titles, descriptions on each page.

      My main question is.... do you think it would be be beneficial to buy a new domain name with the BRAND in the URL  & CITY & 301 redirect my 4 year old domain to the new domain to pass along the authority it has gained.

      Will having the brand in the URL make much of a difference?

      Do you think that small step would even help to beat the crappy but old site out?

      Thanks for any help & suggestions on how to beat this old site or at least show up second.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • DCochrane
        DCochrane last edited by

        Thanks all. This is what I had recommended to the client to begin with. I just needed some backup from all you smart SEO's out there.

        Unfortunately the URL would not be for sale as it's a brick and mortar business.

        Thanks again!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • JarnoNijzing
          JarnoNijzing last edited by

          I personally lean more towards the reaction of EGOL. If you put enough effort in it, keep it straight white hat and do all the steps suggested in the SEOblog section (like link earning in stead of link building) then over time you can outrank that site for sure. But keep working on it. Be social.. share everything you can on facebook, twitter and off course the BIG G+.

          Tricks can help you in the short run but hurt you in the long run so i wouldn't go for that straight away.

          You could also try registering the other domain you mentioned, put up some content and everything and build it next to your existing website (without copying text etc.). You could do this as a supporting role for your primary website if you wish. But i would focus on my primary website first and improving that one.

          regards

          Jarno

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • eli.boda
            eli.boda last edited by

            I like irving's suggestion to see if the webmaster is willing to sell the site. whats the link profile like? any particular high authority links that might be giving it the advantage over your site?

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • EGOL
              EGOL last edited by

              **Will having the brand in the URL make much of a difference? **

              The brand?   Yes, if people know you.

              Really, I would not change domains for the tiny advantage that you think a keyword in the domain might bring.  It is very possible that you will lose more linkjuice in the redirect than you will gain from the keyword in the domain.

              Do you think that small step would even help to beat the crappy but old site out?

              heh... That crappy old site is beating you because they are beating you.  😛

              It is easier to beat an old crappy site with "work" than it is to beat them with "tricks'.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
              • irvingw
                irvingw last edited by

                Absolutely not, your site is aged. A new site is like starting all over even if you do 301 the old site to the new.

                a) work on improving the on page SEO on your site

                b) if that new domain is available you could play around with setting that up as a stand alone site and see if you can get it ranked #1, it could take 6-12 months before Google really trusts it enough.

                c) if it's that old and outdated maybe he wants to sell it at a reasonable price if it's worth that much to you?

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • naturalsociety

                  Shopify Site with Multiple Domains?

                  Hey there! My client has a website on Shopify. I don't even know how to open this can of worms, but let me try. The site URL is:  https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/ However, there is another (older?) URL that gets updated as the main site gets updated and shows the exact same content. It's a straight duplicate, but is it's own URL and doesn't redirect to the main site. https://www.powerchairrecyclers.com/ And this isn't the SITE.Shopify back-end site name that was used for set up initially. I just have no idea what's going on here. Not sure if it's a serious error that needs to be fixed, or if it's something weird with how Shopify work. Any insight would be immensely helpful. Thanks! Mike

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naturalsociety
                  0
                • Saba.Elahi.M.

                  When creating a sub-domain, does that sub-domain automatically start with the DA of the main domain?

                  We have a website with a high DA and we are considering sub-folder or sub-domain. One of the great benefits of a sub-folder is that we know we get to keep the high DA, is this also the case for sub-domains? Also if you could provide any sources of information that specify this, I can't see to find anything!

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saba.Elahi.M.
                  0
                • NickG-123

                  Site-wide Canonical Rewrite Rule for Multiple Currency URL Parameters?

                  Hi Guys, I am currently working with an eCommerce site which has site-wide duplicate content caused by currency URL parameter variations. Example: https://www.marcb.com/ https://www.marcb.com/?setCurrencyId=3 https://www.marcb.com/?setCurrencyId=2 https://www.marcb.com/?setCurrencyId=1 My initial thought is to create a bunch of canonical tags which will pass on link equity to the core URL version. However I was wondering if there was a rule which could be implemented within the .htaccess file that will make the canonical site-wide without being so labour intensive. I also noticed that these URLs are being indexed in Google, so would it be worth setting a site-wide noindex to these variations also? Thanks

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NickG-123
                  0
                • 94501

                  What are the pros & cons of recycling an old domain name?

                  Hi, Old domain name is about books and book buyback. It had about 1000 pages at one time, been around since 2006, and still shows in Open Site Explorer as 86 links from from 46 domains, PA 43 DA 35, spam score of 4. The 4 evidently relates to low number of internal links and no contact info. The domain name's ownership hasn't changed, but for the last year has either not been up at all or only the homepage in the last couple of months. Now the idea is to maybe re-purpose it for place rating content... no more book content... totally different subject matter. Is this an organic search advantage or would it be better to start fresh with a new domain name? Is Google going to have a harder time seeing it as relevant for a new subject (with good new content) or seeing a new site as important? Thanks... Darcy

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 94501
                  0
                • Motava

                  Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords

                  For the website in question, the first domain alphabetically on the shared hosting space, strange search results are appearing on the SERP for keywords associated with the site. Here is an example: A search for "unique company name" shows the results: www.uniquecompanyname.com as the top result. But on pages 2 and 3, we are getting results for the same content but for domains hosted on the same server. Here are some examples with the domain name replaced: UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE
                  ftp.DOMAIN2.com/?action=news&id=63‎
                  META DESCRIPTION TEXT UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
                  www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120‎
                  META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
                  www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
                  META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
                  mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17‎
                  META DESCRIPTION TEXT3 ns5.DOMAIN6.com/?action=article&id=27‎‎ There are more but those are just some examples. These other domain names being listed are other customer domains on the same VPS shared server. When clicking the result the browser URL still shows the other customer domain name B but the content is usually the 404 page. The page title and meta description on that page is not displayed the same as on the SERP.As far as we can tell, this is the only domain this is occurring for.So far, no crawl errors detected in Webmaster Tools and moz crawl not completed yet.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Motava
                  0
                • 360eight-SEO

                  News sites & Duplicate content

                  Hi SEOMoz I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world? Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific. Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place. News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc. All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this. Thanks,
                  Chris Captivate

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 360eight-SEO
                  0
                • salvyy

                  Exact keyword URL or not?

                  Hi all, I have a quick question about the proper use of permalinks. Let's say that I have a website about sports and I want to create an internal page dedicated to shoes. I know that the keyword "shoe" has 15.000 monthly visits, while the keyword "shoes" has 1.000 monthly visits. How do I have to name the internal page? http://www.example.com/shoe or http://www.example.com/shoes (with a final 's')? I would think that by naming the URL http://www.example.com/shoes, the search engine would consider that page for the keywords "shoe" and "shoes", but I am not sure about it. Should I create a URL that only focuses on one specific keyword ("shoe", in this example) or a URL that may encompass more than one keyword ("shoe" and "shoes")? I hope this is clear. Thank you for your time and help. All best, Sal

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy
                  0
                • ContentWriterMicky

                  How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?

                  SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.