Is buying a domain with a high PR and redirecting it to your site considered black hat?
-
I want to buy a domain that has clean backlinks and then redirect it to my new domain to bump up my PR. Is this considered a black hat technique?
Thanks
Carla
-
Carla - the answer is .... it depends!
There are various different strategies for buying domains, and attempting to use them for SEO purposes.
The best case would be to negotiate privately with the owner of an existing website, and purchasing the domain and all of the contents of the domain from them. Businesses merge all the time, This is regular thing, and Google won't punish or look down on anyone for doing this. It will be clear that the domain changed hands, probably by updates to the name servers, and whois information, but since the website never expired or dropped from the registry, Google would probably assume this was a merger.
Also, if you do this, one of the best strategies for dealing with the domain would be to redirect individual pages to the most analogous page on your site, to take greatest advantage of the merged site.
It's also possible to buy up expired or expiring domains. There are different stages in the life cycle of domain name expiration where you can buy names. If you buy them in what's called 'pre-release' status, the domains will be transferred to your own account before the name dropped out of the registry, so it will maintain it's original creation date. You won't get the content with the domain, but this kind of domain purchase 'might' have some more life to it.
Finally, there are domains that have completely dropped out of the registry. The links from these won't have much more life to them.
But in general, if you can buy the domain and website content directly from the original owner, it should show up as a business merger (or even as 'rebranding' in your case, since your website is new), and should be a relatively safe tactic.
-
By definition, if the purpose of buying the domain is to manipulate your search rankings then that is black hat. Ryan laid out the only case I can think of that would be an exception to this rule, that is buying a domain that is in your industry or field and redirecting the traffic would be more of a business acquisition then manipulation.
I think there are a lot of people who get tripped up trying to understand the differences between various SEO practices. Why is putting keywords in your title tag, and h1 tags considered white hat when one can argue that you are purposely doing this to manipulate search results, but participating in a link ring considered black hat?
The difference are subtle, the big thing being anything that is done with the sol purpose to trick a search engine into ranking you higher then your site naturally warrants is black hat. Making changes to your site that make it easier for search engines to understand, crawl, or attribute credit to is white hat.
A good analogy would be putting on a nice suit for an interview, this would be considered white hat since you are just trying to present yourself in the best possible manner. (Proper Title Tags, H1 Tags and Page Content, Link Structure, Anchor Text)
However, stealing a new suit, or bribing somebody at the company to say good things about you is considered black hat. (Link Exchange Rings, Buying Links, Buying Social Media, Spamming Forums ect..)
In the end both practices may get you the job so to speak, but more then likely, eventually, the company will find out about it and which practice will you be more proud of? Putting on a nice suit? or paying somebody to say good things about you?
-
Is buying a domain with a high PR and redirecting it to your site considered black hat?
Yes
At this point I sense an angry mob is waiting for me with their fingers hovered over the thumbs down button.
In brief, when you take actions to improve the user experience, you are practicing white hat SEO. When you are taking actions to manipulate search engine rankings, you are practicing black hat SEO.
If you own the site "chocolate.com" and you decide to purchase "fudge.com", "whitechocolate.net" or any site related to your niche, then redirect the traffic, that is perfectly fine. You have a legitimate business reason for doing such. When you purchase "acme-comics.com" and redirect the domain to your chocolate site in an effort to raise PR and manipulate your rankings, that is black hat SEO.
A debate can begin on what Google can and cannot detect, but that is irrelevant. Even if Google does not enforce a particular policy does not make it any less black hat.
As a final note, the effectiveness of such tactics has greatly diminished over time. Many sites have a great deal of spam links which have been devalued by Google. If you redirect a site from another niche, those links will not offer you a lot of value since the links are not relevant to your site. Some things to think about.
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
-
Our clients Magento 2 site has lots of obsolete categories. Advice on SEO best practice for setting server level redirects so I can delete them?
Our client's Magento website has been running for at least a decade, so has a lot of old legacy categories for Brands they no longer carry. We're looking to trim down the amount of unnecessary URL Redirects in Magento, so my question is: Is there a way that is SEO efficient to setup permanent redirects at a server level (nginx) that Google will crawl to allow us at some point to delete the categories and Magento URL Redirects? If this is a good practice can you at some point then delete the server redirects as google has marked them as permanent?
Technical SEO | | WillyGx0 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
Mobile site domain authority
Hello, I think this may be a coding issue, but hoping someone can help me. I am still having issues with our mobile site ranking, even though we created redirects/canonical to identify similar content between desktop version and mobile. I did notice through MOZ analysis of backlinks that we have no domain authority. If the mobile site is automatically detected dependent on the user, shouldn't we also have the same domain authority? How does that work exactly? How can we build up the domain authority for our mobile site? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Do bad links to a sub-domain which redirects to our primary domain pass link juice and hurt rankings?
Sometime in the distant past there existed a blog.domain.com for domain.com. This was before we started work for domain.com. During the process of optimizing domain.com we decided to 301 blog.domain.com to www.domain.com. Recently, we discovered that blog.domain.com actually has a lot of bad links pointing towards it. By a lot I mean, 5000+. I am curious to hear people's opinions on the following: 1. Are they passing bad link juice? 2. does Google consider links to a sub-domain being passed through a 301 to be bad links to our primary domain? 3. The best approach to having these links removed?
Technical SEO | | Shredward0 -
If you are organizing the site structure for an ecommerce site, how would you do it?
Should you use not use slashes and use all dashes or use just a few slashes and the rest with dashes? For example, domain.com/category/brand/product-color-etc OR domain.com/anythinghere-color-dimensions-etc Which structure would you rather go for and why?
Technical SEO | | Zookeeper0 -
Best practice for eCommerce site migration, should I 301 redirect or match URLs on new site
Hi Guys, I have been struggling with this one for quite some time. I am no SEO expert like many of you, rather just a small business owner trying to do the right thing, so forgive me if I say something that makes no sense 🙂 I am moving our eCommerce store from one platform to another, in the process the store is getting a massive face lift. The part I am struggling with is whether I should keep my existing URL structure in place or use 301 redirects to create a cleaner looking URLs. Currently the URLs are a little long and I would love to move to a /category/product_name type format. Of course the goal is not to lose ranking in the process, I rank pretty well for several competitive phrases and do not want to create a negative impact. How would you guys handle this? Thanks, Dinesh
Technical SEO | | MyFairyTaleBooks0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
Help with domain redirect advice please!
I run the website http://buildyourjacket.com. We have other domains as well, most importantly www.buildyourjacket.com and cvcsports.com. If you Google "letterman jackets" (our primary search term) cvcsports.com shows up as the first result (yay!). But that is not what we want. Until a few weeks ago, Google would show http://buildyourjacket.com as the domain for the first search result from "letterman jackets". But then a few weeks that changed. I don't know how that could have happened. There are two reasons why we want the domain http://buildyourjacket.com to be the one that shows up: 1) It's a better sounding/looking domain and 2) When it was showing up, Google also showed right below the domain another link of our that said "Build Your Own Jacket" which definitely helped us get more clicks. Can someone please help me and tell me what I should do? Thank you so much.
Technical SEO | | BrandonDoyle0