Purchasing a domain to redirect to a new domain (note same industry) - Black hat or White hat technique?
-
Hi Everyone,
Ok so here is my question. I have a client who sells gourmet tea and gourmet spices. She has a culinary blog. There is a culinary blog that just posted that the website will be shut down in the near future. It has 100% white hat links. Would it be considered black hat to buy the domain and redirect it to my clients blog which is also a culinary blog? I would really like to ask Matt Cutts this question. Does anyone know how to send him questions?
Thanks
Carla
-
Thanks everyone! I feel so much more secure about going after this same industry domain. I agree it is good business.
Thanks
Carla
-
There wouldn't be any problem with buying the domain and the blog, moving the content from it page by page to your domain and redirecting each url on the other blog to the new url where the content can then be found on your domain. It's a fairly normal thing to do when companies merge, get bought, change domains, or go out of business. There's nothing black hat about that--it's just good business.
-
I agree with Mike and like to add that its only black hat if your sites are not related.
-
This makes me want to tell the story of Maille Ohye of Google talking about Canonicals at SMX East 2012. (I really like canonicals and probably talk about them too much on here)
She gave a hypothetical about having a fitness blog and taking over Matt Cutts fitness blog. Where canonicals came in was that she stated one of the primary uses for a cross-domain canonical was in passing equity from one site to the other site that will eventually be replacing it without causing confusion for users. So in the hypothetical she took over Matt Cutts' fitness blog, placed canonicals from his pages to their relevant counterpart on her site, moved content over as necessary, and placed a notice on the homepage of the Matt Cutts blog that it was going away but will be rolled into the Maille Ohye blog. This gives people enough time to switch over their bookmarks without bouncing from being redirected to somewhere they didn't expect. The canonicals would move equity to the main site, eventually pages would begin swapping out in the index, and eventually you would 301 redirect everything to their relevant counterparts on the main site once enough time has passed.
Following things that way I would assume that should be considered completely White Hat.
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
-
Moving my domain to weebly
I am thinking of moving my html website to weebly. They offer a 301 redirect for my domain name. Is that ok for SEO?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao0 -
Moving from www.domain.com/nameofblog to www.domain.com/blog
Describe your question in detail. The more information you give, the better! It helps give context for a great answer I have had my blog located at www.legacytravel.com/ramblings for a while. I now believe that, from an SEO perspective, it would be preferable to move it to www.legacytravel.com/blog. So, I want to be able to not lose any links (few though they may be) with the move. I believe I would need to do a 301 redirect in the htaccess file of www.legacytravel.com that will tell anyone who comes knocking on the door of www.legacytravel.com/ramblings/blah blah blah that now what they want is at www.legacytravel.com/blog/blah blah blah Is that correct? What would the entry look like in the htaccess? Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | | cathibanks0 -
Domain Forwarding / Multiple Domain Names / or Rebuild Blogs on them
I am considering forwarding 3 very aged and valuable domain names to my main site. There were once over 100 blog posts on each blog and each one has a page authority of 45 and domain authority of 37. My question is should i put up three blogs on the domains and link them to my site or should i just forward the domains to my main site? Which will provide me with more value. I have the capability to have some one blog on them every day. However, i do not have access to any of the old blog posts. I guess i could scrape it of archive.org. Any advice would be appreciated. Scott
Technical SEO | | WindshieldGuy-2762210 -
Domain Hosting
I'm currently working with a client who provides products in Ireland Is it massively beneficial for the sited to be hosted on an irish server or will there not be much difference with it being hosted in England?
Technical SEO | | Sandeep_Matharu0 -
Which domain should i set up a blog on?
I have a client who uses a .com for there website in Australia. Were now building an external blog which will be on a subdomain. We recently discovered they also own the Australian version of there domain name. Should we build there blog on: blog.currentdomain.com 2) blog.newdomain.com.au Thanks
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
260k 301 redirects
Hello, I just found that some of the urls on my site have both ugly characters and some other things I'd like to fix (such as ---- into a single - ) After some local tests i've seen that If i leave some imperfections there will be 48k different urls on the other hand if the renaming procedure is strict i'll have around 260k out of 2.3M urls to be renamed. If I'm going to do this I'll create new canonicals meta tag and redirect old urls with 301 headers to the new location. The content will not change. My big doubt is SEO wise, I know that I'll have better urls, but aren't those too much redirects on a single day? what would you do if you wish to have shipshape urls and know some of these are crap? thanks
Technical SEO | | mylittlepwny0 -
301'ing domain to an addon domain
My googlefu failed me in finding this... How to 301 a domain to an addon domain? Domain structure is as follows: http://addondomain.maindomain.com/ http://www.maindomain.com/addondomain/ http://www.addondomain.com/ <--(addon domain has its own domain as well) I want main domain to all point to the addon domain like so: http://www.maindomain.com/ --> http://www.addondomain.com/
Technical SEO | | JasonJackson0 -
Domain redirect seo
Hello, my domain www.pacomarca.com and when i start the new campaing i get this pronblem: We have detected that the domain www.pacomarca.com and the domain pacomarca.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here. my domain is in networksolutions.com. how can i resolve it? many thanks Gonzalo
Technical SEO | | Kuna0