Strategies for best use of competitors expired domain
-
I recently bought an old competitors expired domain that was ranking around the page 2 or 3 on Google for most keywords that I target.
Curious as to best strategy for utilizing this domain:
1. set up some content with back links to my own domain
2. Set up redirects to set up all of the competitors old domain URLs to corresponding sections on my website
3. Something else? -
Thank you both, finally getting around to doing this now!
-
Hi Sandi,
You make one page with a "press release" writing that the company is been taken over by (yourcompany.com). All the other URL's you redirect to this page. On this page you can link to the most important places you want on your own website.
This way the authority of the old competitors domain will be forwarded to yours. And after like 6 months/1year you could link the whole domain to your site.
As Thomas mentions below it is a good idea to check which links could be of use (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/) and contact the most important to change the link domain to yours.
Hope it helps! Regards, Tymen
-
Hi Tymen! Thanks for your feedback sounds like a good idea! Could you please elaborate a bit what you mean as if you are trying to explain to someone that is a novice - ie "I would make a One-pager with a catch all URL's. This way all the old url's of the site will go to this page and you get no 404's. On this page you explain that there is nothing there anymore and you should go to your site. I would not put to many links on the page."
-
Expanding on what Tymen has said,
This could be a good strategy, but why would you not just 301 redirect the whole site to a page on your own site (explaining that they don't exist anymore). This way I see you getting more value to your site (one hop through the redirect instead of one hop from the redirect and the link)
Also, something that may be worth looking into is if they have any high value links, seeing where they come from and explaining the company is not existent and trying to get the links that they once had.
-
Hi Sandi,
I would make a One-pager with a catch all URL's. This way all the old url's of the site will go to this page and you get no 404's. On this page you explain that there is nothing there anymore and you should go to your site. I would not put to many links on the page.
Eventually the authority of the competitors site will go but if you have everything in place you will get it. What you could also do is login into the Seach Console account of the competitor and see which pages have good content. This content you could copy to your site before you take it offline.
Good luck!
Tymen
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 a blog from a domain to a new domain in the same hosting server
I have the need to find the best solution to move my viverezen.org blog on new domain naturazen.org because somebody stolen my brand. Now I registererd brand NaturaZen and I am going to use this website as main and have the old viverezen just to point in the new website I dont want lose autority and more important I dont want lose the 500 visits I have everyday. Both domain are under same hosting company What is best SEO solution you can give me to help? I thought to point the hosting on new domain naturazen and put all link with redirect 301 on viverezen but probably I am wrong stuck_out_tongue thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VivereZen0 -
Using pictures from another domain
We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer. Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server. There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues. Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues? will this generate Google penalties? Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it. We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters. How important is the file name for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S0 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
Expired News Content
Ive read some stuff about expired content here, but have yet to find an answer so I thought I would post my question is regarding a news based site and expired content issues. So my site does Recaps, and Previews for sporing events. Well eventually the content does become not relevant as nobody cares about a prediction after the game is done. What would be the best method to deal with this? Should I just leave it there or 301 redirect it to the more relevant games. The reason why I'm asking is because when I have added a more recent game such as New York vs Boston, when I would search for that keyword in google, the page google would show would be like Atlanta vs L.A. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ravashjalil0 -
Domain changed 5 months ago still see search results on old domain
Hi, We changed our domain from coedmagazine.com to coed.com in April'13. Applied 301 redirects on all pages, submitted 'change of address' to google but we still see site:coedmagazine.com fetching 130K results on google as opposed to site:coed.com fetches 40K results. Can anybody here throw some light on what might be going wrong? [ Site runs on wordpress, hosted with wordpress as well ] thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
Change of domain procedure
Hi Guys, I have been tasked with conducting a change of domain for our company website. The website will be exactly the same, just change from www.jamesburfield.co.uk to www.burfieldcreative.co.uk. This was attempted before but my boss got cold feet and switched back after he saw a drop in rankings. (He put in the redirects and went through the change of domain procedure with google). I have told him that I think its possible with minimal disruption and we have agreed even with some disruption it will better in the long run for the company. Here is the process I intend to follow: 1. Copy and upload site to new domain 2. Redirect all pages with a wildcard or individually - possibly drop the www also 3. Follow the change of domain procedure in webmaster tools 4. Change the href of as many as possible back links to point at the new domain Please let me know your thoughts on my plan and if there is anything else I can do to ensure we maintain our rankings. Any help is appreciated as this is my suggestion and my neck is on the line! Thanks guys! Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpsonGareth0 -
For multi language sites, what is best - two domains or one with both languages?
We are assisting a client in setting up English and Spanish sites in Texas. They want to be able to find customers who are Spanish speaking predominantly or totally along with the customers they now get who are English speakers. We are building them a new site and I have researched to find answers all over the board or less than clear. Should the structure be such that we have one site with a set of English and Spanish pages all with Spanish links to Spanish pages and English links to English pages. Should we instead just have an English site for those people who utilize English and a different site for those who utilize Spanish? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher0 -
Could Sub domains damage our SEO?
Hi there, We're currently looking into integrating a new internal search function to our site which will involve housing the search results on a sub domain of our site. We have no intention of these search result pages becoming landing pages for organic traffic but would the inclusion of a sub domain affect the optimization of the main domain? i.e. could it effect our authority? Nige
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NigelJ0