What's the best SEO way to benefit from your competitor's shutting down?
-
Hi !
Our main competitor is shutting down (website will be offline) at the end of the month and we are negotiating with them to buy their domain name: the idea would be to take advantage of their good rankings in the SERPs to redirect traffic to our pages (we're planning to crawl their site or get their sitemap and redirect th category / product pages to ours).
The question is: for how long this strategy will be useful: days / weeks / months? (= for how long their pages will continue to appear in the SERPs from the day we enable the 301 redirections to our site?)
Thanks in advance for your help!
And if you have better suggestions, we're up to hear them of course..
Cheers
-
Thanks Thomas!
At the end, I have the feeling that we won't have to bother that much with that because the price they will ask is too expensive / not worth...
But it's still interesting to have some insights about this topic and I hope it helps / will help others
-
Look at how many people are actually finding them via Google or any search engine and subtract that from the amount now and you will get your number
I would not count on any branding alliance between you carrying over or people thinking that you are them
you must put a lot of effort into that.
It's simply going to be taking them back links and that's the only important thing you should really be worried about other than that you should just retire the domain honestly
If you don't want that domains back links this is really not worth it in my opinion.
-
You have to do a street for 301 redirect to your site from the purchase domain. You may get some links this way it might not be the most ethical way of going about it
This is what you have to look for when you're assessing a domain brother chores or somebody else's
- the quality of the domain
- the quality of the page
- the position of the link on the page
- number of links pointing at the page where the link is found
- social signals of the page.
If you purchased this domain and redirect it to yours you will game everyone who types in that Tomine and all the back links from that company you should make sure it has no negative back links prior to doing so
Other than what I stated above and you were coming benefiting from having that domain 31 redirecting to a meeting giving it everything it has almost 90 something percent of it
You really have to establish rather not to high-quality domain before you 301 redirect to what you've established outside while you come in you want to purchase it the purchase then 301 redirects to your website
Two relative pages only you can use this tool to assess the back links it's very good
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/competitor-backlink-analysis-in-excel/
so as
http://seogadget.com/categorising-your-links/
Of course is use
ahrefs
majestic SEO
&
OSE
To check the demesnes back links if it has that links pointing that is no good to you and all. You want to make sure you're redirecting a domain that's high-quality. You really do not want more than one domain and a competitor is really somebody that you could just get rid of right now however if you should choose 301 redirect to be very careful
If you need help with this I strongly suggest using a recommended search engine optimization partner Moz
I hope this is of help to you sincerely,
Thomas
-
I see...I don't think you will know the answer until you actually implement.
Good luck and let us know how things go.
Carla
-
Yes we're competing on the same keywords and the websites architectures are similar, which doens't mean that we will be able to redirect all the traffic to the corresponding pages easily...
We know the traffic they are actually getting via search engines... but I would like to know for how long this traffic would be redirected to us...
My guess is that in 5 - 10 days, their domain won't "send" us traffic anymore (due to 301 redirections or due to low rankings because of the lost backlinks -> their main backlinks come from their other websites).
-
Ahh..I see. They should give you access to their Google Analytics. The traffic they receive should be similar to what you will gain if your web architectures are similar and are going for similar keywords. Is that the case?
-
Thanks Carla for your detailed answer
We already know the domain we want to buy is not receiving (lots of) spammy links.
The reason we want to know how long will it continue to appear on the SERPs is to know how much traffic (= money) it can bring to us, so we can decide how much is the domain worth...
-
Hi Pedro,
If you redirect the purchased domain to your permanent domain all the incoming links to the purchased domain will be pointing at your domain. Therefore if they have spammy links your website could go down.
I do not know how long the purchased domain would appear in the SERPs but I wouldn't worry about it too much if you redirect all the Urls to your new domain. For example
www.purchaseddomain.com redirects to www.pedrosdomain.com
www.purchaseddomain.com/seoservices redirects to www.pedrosdomain.com/seo-services-portugal
www.purchaseddomain.com/seoservices may appear in the Serps but when a user clicks on it they will get redirected to your website.
I did not use any specialized platform to buy the domain. Just trust and a little luck
I hope my answers helped!
Thanks Carla
-
Hi Carla,
Thanks for your answer.
But I think your case is different since we don't want to replace our domain name by the one we want to buy: we just want to redirect the SERPs traffic to our site. Any idea for how long the bought domain will still show up in the SERPs after the site is down and and the 301 redirects are enabled?
PS: by the way, did you use some specialized platform to buy / transfer the domain? (to avoid to pay without receiving the domain access)
-
Hi Pedro,
I did something similar a couple years ago and made a very silly mistake but an important one. Please review your competitors backlink portfolio and see how many links really have value and how many are spammy. When I purchased my domain, it had a PR2 but I didn't realize that many of the links were black hat. Luckily for me, Google released the disavow tool right after I bought the domain so I was able to disavow the spammy stuff.
If the domain you plan on purchasing has spammy links, I would negotiate with the seller to disavow the spammy stuff before actually purchasing to see what you are really getting
Good luck
Carla
-
Buying there website is not something we are considering due to technology and more complex questions... and not only that their site profile is not very good, their direct traffic / brand is not good neither: all their traffic comes from search engines, directly to category and product pages... that's why I'm still interested to have a better idea for how long they will show up in the SERPs after the site is down and and the 301 redirects are enabled
Do you have an idea? Should we expect days / weeks / months?
-
So you're saying that their link profile is not very good? And you're only looking to get traffic from their existing website? If that is the case then you have to leave their existing website or just 301 redirect the site over to yours which would only last as long as people remember to use that website it would no longer be in the SERPS you could do a 302 but if you want to show up for there trafic not links have a page that tells people the site is now your site click here.
You might not want to pay much with out it being looked at this is not gray hat If you buy there site but if done wrong could be very bad
-
Yes, the goal is not to redirect everything to the homepage but to try to "automatically / manually" get a 301 redirect to our corresponding pages.
Our competitor doesn't have a lot of backlinks (the main ones come from their sites and they will take them off as soon as they shut down) so what we really want to take advantage of is the traffic from the SERPs.... but how long will they continue to appear there?
-
One other thing to remember is switch that who is on that domain name in Google realizes that you've swapped you are no longer that company and that they could change things drastically however you will most likely benefit greatly from the inbound links that are going to be pointing at your domain after their redirected away from this other site the right way I will grab some info on what I mean for you. Give me 20 min
Thomas
-
This is done correctly could be extremely valuable. If your company is selling the exact same product this other company is in your information is relevant meaning that your site is relevant with their sites links would be relevant to be very Valuable and I would use a quality search engine optimization firm to do this job I would not just wing it
If you buy there domain and point it at your site you must 301 to your sites relavent pages not just 301 all to home page.
You could get links for good so that's worth a lot ONLY IF DONE RIGHT
Hope I was of help,
Thomas
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
-
What One SEO Metric Would You Choose?
If you had to choose one SEO metric to measure a site's SEO performance what would it be? I know you shouldn't use one metric, but lets say you had 10 seconds to assess how well a site was probably doing from an SEO perspective. What metric would it be? *I also asked this question on the inbound forms.
Competitive Research | | eyeflow0 -
Competitors ranking in top three with worse SEO
Ok I am at a loss. Our client is trying to rank for keywords like "dental assistant programs utah", but they are still on the bottom of page 1/top of page 2. The guys in the top 3 have terrible SEO. No links, newer domains, etc. I looked into it extensively and learned about the "honeymoon period" people talk about but we are long past that. I've looked through webmaster tools to see if there are any issues, and I can't find a thing. Anyone have an idea of what we could be doing wrong that is making us be put down so far on the page? Before I got here the SEO guys were doing older tactics which I think was starting to hurt them with penguin and what not so I tried my best to delete the crap content and clean everything up on the website. thanks for all your help! I really appreciate it.
Competitive Research | | boyackp0 -
Site Ranking for keywords that they haven't targeted in content
There is a site that I am constantly battling for the #1 spot for a particular keyword and I can't see that they are doing any link building, they are not using any anchor text for the keyword "at all" just their company name (not exact match) and their content doesn't even contain the keyword. I used Open site explorer to analyze their activity, but they are doing something I can't figure out from that data. Any other tools to use? I have higher quality links than them, post content nearly 5 times per week to my blog and their blog hasn't been updated in ages, I kill them in social media, there isn't one instance that they are better than my site and I only build quality driven links, no blog comment crap and get featured on lots of industry blogs for our work. I distribute my content very effectively, I just can't figure it out. They were no where about 5 months ago now they are tearing it up for lots of keywords in the industry top spots. I can build a few links and surpass them, but I have to do it every week or so and I think they are doing something fishy. I just want to figure out what they are doing and bury them. I don't want to post their url and mine here as I don't want them to see this post in search results.
Competitive Research | | photoseo10 -
How can I do competitor mobile website analysis?
How can I do a competitor mobile website analysis? I am having troubles finding competitor tools for mobile sites.
Competitive Research | | seoflorida0 -
Keyword - Competition between competitors
So, I'm about 2-3 weeks into my subscription and see a renewal coming. I love the information I'm getting - but I really want to maximize my capabilities with these tools. Any article/blogs or forum post suggestions that I should read would be awesome, right now I'm still in that phase where i see lots of cool things - but have no idea to fully use them to really give me that even bigger boost. My First Question is - There are some keywords, that I climb and sometimes slip. But overall a competitor and i flip flop between 15-22 range for it. What would be a good way for me to really add that extra push to throw me down into the top ten and leave them in the dust?.. Also on the Keyword topic - There are a lot of keywords they probably rank for that I don't, what is the best way to go about identifying keywords they may targeting/have a good presence in that I'm not aware of. I do have a site that is on multiple newspapers, and .gov sites. Among other things... This has already proven to be very good for me. But I'm 99% sure I have a few/lot of leaks, that if they were plugged - We would see a lot of good things come from those results.
Competitive Research | | choiceenergy0 -
Find competitors based on keywords
Are there any tools where I can enter say 5 keywords and it will look at the top 10 sites for each of those keywords then return which sites show up the most.
Competitive Research | | eyeflow0 -
Is there a way to establish how old a link to a site is?
I wonder if anyone has any insight on the above question.
Competitive Research | | InTouchMarketing560 -
Where are the best places online to build powerful profile pages
So on SEOmoz you can create a profile page with followed links (after 200 points), just as you can do on Google Profiles. I'd like to build a strong backlink profile which features some of these highest links that my competitors will not have the time or effort to do. I'm working hard to answer questions on SEOmoz and to be a helpful part of the community, and have published some Google Knols for the Google profile building. My question is; are there any other sites that allow the same type of responsible profile building, preferably SEO related as this is my area of expertise. Thanks Aaron Solar Monster Ltd
Competitive Research | | aarondicks0