Purchase a domain to gain its rank, Highlander-style?
-
(urls have been altered)
We are KitchenApps.Com, your online portal for kitchen appliances. One of our biggest selling products is toasters, but despite SEO efforts, **KitchenApps.Com/toasters **ranks on page 6 for "toasters" and barely budges.
One of our competitors, Kool-Kitcken-Apps.biz just tossed in the towel and sold his domain/site to our boss for the cheap. It's an old domain, but the URL isnt lovely. He's got content, but it aint pretty and of course, we sell differently than he does, have some different products, etc. BUT BUT BUT hold everything, he ranks on the first page, with his homepage, for "toasters" his best ranked keyword. A lot of sites have linked to his site for toasters, buying toasters, etc.
Of course, the boss wants to just toss his content, and since his domain is different than company name (which is literally KitchenApps.Com) we should redirect Kool-Kitchen-Apps.biz to our SEO friendly KitchenApps.com/toasters url. He expects that will keep the same positioning, and we'll snag the toaster clicks.
Can we expect to maintain the positioning on page #1?
-
Sadly, I'm in Montana, and have very few bushes around, so option D) is out of questions
How is the new domain ranking for other keywords? Maybe like 4 slice toaster, or whatever phrase gets a lot of traffic? If it's ranking high for other phrases I would use it as a temporary test dummy. Pretty up the website, and find out which phrases, designs, etc. convert the best while you improve your original /toaster website. Once you have all the data you need, and a highly improved /toaster page, just 301 it over.
However, if you don't have that much time, I'd just 301 it over, and go on with your day. There's always room for hopes and dreams, but this whole 24 hours in a day thing can get in the way if you don't have help.
If you choose to redirect, I would definitely put it on the inner /toasters page. It looks like you already have a good amount of links pointing to your home page, and not many to the inner page.
-
Good point, I guess I should add some color. Attached is an OSE exam of their site, our toaster landing page and then our main home page. Obviously, we are two completely different sites, and our main page holds a huge edge over the /toaster page.
Knowing this, would you:
A) play it safe, keep Kool-Kitchen-Apps.biz domain/site, and 'pretty it up'
B) redirect to /toasters, dice roll
C) redirect to /, likely keep or improve ranking for "toasters"
D) panic, stop using computers, hide in neighbor bushes until arrested -
Well, I wouldn't expect you to jump to the first page just from 301'ing their website into yours. There are other factors at play, as I'm sure you know. However, you can expect a good portion of the link juice pointing at the other website to be transferred to yours. Depending on the other factors on your particular website, you should see a jump in your current ranking.
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
-
How do i rank for 1000 keywords?
i have dr 25 and 200 referring domains and ranking for 90 kws in usa. i saw this trend that if you rank for more kws then chances are that you can rank for those high traffic kws in 1 to 5 positions. what i mean is that it increases your odds ? possible answer1 :increase dr and da both and ur and pa ( ahrefs and moz) i know pagerank matters but these are some metrics we can look at for right now possible answer 2 : get a lot of backlinks maybe from same site but how does my backlinks can help me to rank for 1000 kws so that i can have at least 100 kws to rank in position 1 to 5? detailed answers will defi be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
Domain name change
Here's the scenario... Client has two domain names: domain.com - targeting one country (Australia) otherdomain.com - targeting all other countries Both have identical products, but different currencies (AU$ and US$). The problem (as most of you will know) is that without using a sub-domain or country-code top-level domains, Google has no idea which domain should be served for which domain. Furthermore, because the root domain is different, Google doesn't see any connection between the two - other than the fact they have identical products! My recommendation to the client is to change to: domain.com to domain.com.au otherdomain.com to domain.com Arguably, we could leave the second one alone. But I think it's better for the brand to use the same root domain for each. Obviously this means both will need to be redirected. Since NONE of the pages within the sites will change, do we need to redirect every page, or just the root domain? Any other risks or concerns we should know about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Why have I lost my #1 ranking?
Hello! Ever since switching to a new website back in late 2014, my rankings have suffered. My webpage https://www.shwoodshop.com was always the #1 google position for the keywords "wood sunglasses" and "wooden sunglasses". For a while my site bounced back a forth between the #1 and #2 spots, but in the last 4 months I have been stuck with a #3 rank for both keywords. I hired an SEO company to help fix the problem but after a year of work, there was still no positive change. I have had multiple experts take a look at my site, but to no avail. All signs seem to point to a stronger, healthier site than my competition. My domain authority and page authority are much greater than the competition with the #1 and #2 rankings. I have used the On-Page grader and other tools to try and help, and even though I am getting an "A" grade, I'm still not improving my rankings. I ran a link metric comparison for my website versus the competition and attached it to this post. The main area I seem to be lacking is the Internal Equity-Passing Links. The top competitor has a ridiculous amount, which I think may be due to their use of breadcrumbs. Is this enough to make the difference? My other thought is that I could be suffering from duplicate page content. My website is setup to be "localized" via Subdirectories With gTLDs (.com/us, .com/eu, .com/au, .com/international). The on-page content is the exact same, but the prices for the products changes depending on your location. Moz shows a ton of duplicate pages due to this. Could I be getting penalized for this? I am an SEO novice and trying to learn as much as possible while investigation this issue. Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated! -Taylor wUiyU
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shwoodeyewear0 -
Is there any ranking benefit to buying and redirecting high PageRank domains?
Hello, I'm interested in learning how to assume ownership of a site without Google resetting the PageRank and the links back to zero. I've read that buying sites is one of the most powerful SEO "shortcuts" you can employ, but can be tricky. I've heard that, unfortunately, buying an existing domain and 301 redirecting for SEO credit is not that simple. When the WHOIS registration information on the newly purchased domain is updated to reflect its transfer to you, the new owner, that domain will almost immediately be reset by Google to a PageRank=0. That's the standard practice when a domain changes hands. Since Google is a domain registrar, obviously, change of ownership information is readily available for their use in factoring it into their algorithms. If you decide to 301 redirect the new domain to another domain you already own, you will get credit for the site's current incoming link profile, at least in the short-term. However, this purchased domain will eventually reset to PR=0 (usually during the next PageRank update) AND you will then get no credit for all of those links post-transfer. What is your experience with buying and redirecting domains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice0 -
How to rank product pages?
Hi guys, Please advice me on something improving my product pages ranking. We are doing well for head terms, categories but not ranking for product pages. We have issues with product pages which I am think is hard to tackle. For instance we have duplicate products (different colors), duplicate content internally (colors) and from manufacturer websites. Product pages linked from sub-category i.e. Home > Category > Sub-Category (20 per page) using pagination for next 20 and so on. Product pages linked internally via widgets that says other Similar products, featured products etc. Another issue with our product pages is that we are using third party reviews platform and whenever users add reviews to product pages this platform creates an hyperlink to different anchors which is not relevant to product. Example - http://goo.gl/NUG652 Can somebody please give some advice on how to improve rankings for product pages. writing unique content for thousands of pages is not possible. Even our competitor not writing unique content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webmaster_SEO0 -
Moving low ranking domain
I have a website, that I rewrote great content for, but I recently found that there are many, many links going to the subdomain that may be pulling it down. Has anyone had experience taking down a site and then moving the content to a new site? Will it be considered duplicate content if you completely take the old site down and use rel="canonical" on new site pages? I don't want to lose the good content, but I cannot have it on the current URL with all the bad backlinking (it's a complicated situation, as I need to keep those backlinks which are affiliates). Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
SEO value in baclklink from blog.domain VS domain
Will a back-link from "domain.com/abc" and "blog.domain.com/abc" have same value from an SEO perspective? Assume same article written on both sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen
I have been told the bots look at the domain value and the only links from blogs that have less value are in case of comments. As long as the "blog.domain/abc" page includes a full article and not a blog comment then it counts fully for SEO. Is this correct?0