Conserving Link Equity When Purchasing a Domain
-
Suppose you were interested in buying a successful blog with lots of powerful links and they offered to sell you the domain but none of the content. Do you have any tips for conserving the link equity when buying the domain?
(Note: about half of the inbound links are to the homepage and the plan is to relaunch the site with new content.)
-
Redirect the old URLs to similar themed pages or home page to preserve some of the link equity. Think about a user's experience also if they clicked one of the links from those sources.. better to serve them something if it's in your control to keep them happy
-
I couldn't agree with EGOL more. The best option is to place equivalent or higher quality content, discussing the same topic as the previous article on the URL.
However, I think there are some ways to buy yourself some times if you don't have all of the content that you need. This is how I might personally approach it:
- Create "subject buckets" and divide the content into as many buckets as possible. If it's a well structured blog, then Categories and Tags are going to be extremely helpful for this.
- Find the most powerful URL in each bucket and create an extremely high quality (likely lengthy) article on that URL in which you cover as many topics in that bucket as possible. (Also, pay attention to links that are generating a lot...or any...traffic. The URLs that aren't generating traffic have a much lower likelihood of being changed discovered and removed by a webmaster.)
- 301 the other URLS in that bucket to the high quality post until you can get the rest of the content written. In some cases, (and depending on how varied the topics are) this might be more of a permanent solution that will a.) consolidate your link juice and b.) reduce your total page count (good post-panda).
Also keep in mind that rewriting content is going to be much easier (or cheaper in most cases) than having completely original content written. That being said, make sure the writers know they need to make the article "your own". I'd suggest a service called Vappingo. They don't publish their "re-write" rates on the site, but if you contact them they'll definitely help you out. I had them rewrite some sub-par content I purchased and was extremely impressed by the quality...and I'm picky about content quality.)
-
Thanks! Those are very good and helpful suggestions. One reason I'm optimistic is that a lot of the links are from large media companies that linked to the site in articles. As long as I put similar content there I think a good number of the links will remain.
Do you think Google will discredit all previous links if the all the content is deleted? We will be moving to a different hosting company and I am considering to keep the registrar the same company (but different registration information).
-
The content must have been what made this blog successful. That is what attracted the links... so if the content leaves the links will probably evaporate too.
I bought a website that had some great content that was not owned by the person who I bought the site from. I allowed the site to go unchanged until I had enough same-topic content to repopulate those pages (on the same URL) with articles that were just as good or better.
So, if I was buying this site I would do an inventory of inbound links and get to work on content that will fit those URLs. I would try to delay taking possession until I had the new content ready - if possible. If not, I would get short articles up ASAP and improve then quickly.
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
-
Malicious Link
Hello all, We're doing an adwords campaign, and Google has said that there is a malicious link on the website we're looking to advertise - so cannot launch the campaign. I've tried to go through Search Console (I am a novice BTW). And it says that "Domain properties are not supported at this time". Which I don't understand. Any advice please?!
Technical SEO | | PartisanMCR0 -
Internal no follow links
I have just discovered that the WordPress theme I have been using for some time has no follow internal links on the blog. Simply put each post has an image and text link plus a 'read more'. The Read more is a no-follow which is also on my homepage. The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow. What is your opinion on this? Should I spend time removing the no follow?
Technical SEO | | Libra_Photographic0 -
Why am I getting millions of links from my root domain to my subdomains?
My site's subdomains (us.example.com, de.example.com, etc.) are showing millions of links (in Google Webmaster Tools) from the root domain. This seems very unnatural to me. Any idea what would be cause this or is this? In addition, I just found out that we deliberately stop googlebot crawling GEO-IP redirects, so that when googlebot tries to crawl our UK, DE, FR, etc. sites, it is not redirected to us.example.com. I'm thinking they may be linked? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | CMcC0 -
What is the advantage of using sub domains instead of pages on the root domain?
Have a look at this example http://bannerad.designcrowd.com/ For each category of design, they have a landing page on the sub domain. Wouldn't it be better to have them as part of the same domain? What is the strategy behind using sub domains?
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
We registered with Yahoo Directory. Why won't this show up as a a linking root domain in our link analysis??
Recently checked our link analysis report for 2 of our campaigns who are registered in the dir.yahoo.com (yahoo directory). For some reason, we don't see this being a domain that shows up as linking to our website - why is this?
Technical SEO | | MMP0 -
Why are my links not being counted?
I have a site that has over 400 links going to it. When I use Moz open site explorer or any other SEO tool its says I have only 12 links. Does anyone know why this could be happening?
Technical SEO | | Goopping0 -
Redirecting Domains
Hi Everybody, My clients owns a lot of domains related to his website. I redirected them to the website. So his website is: www.vallnord.com but if you type Vallnordski, vallnordsnow, etc etc they will go to the website, but they will not change the url and will keep vallnordski, vallnordsnow instead of going to vallnord.com Not very clear actually, so if you have 20 seconds to type them you will see it very clear. I was wondering if this was a good practice or it is better to actually redirect someone completely (If they type vallnordski.com take them to vallnord.com)? Is redirecting a good SEO practice? Regards, Guido.
Technical SEO | | SilbertAd0 -
Can I do a redirect to a new domain name only a couple of weeks after having redirected to another domain?
I have a client with two website with very similar content. Both had a lot of inbound links and performed fairly well in SERPS. We recently combined both sites and have redirected one of the domains to the other. The traffic dipped slightly initially, but is recovering nicely. Now the client registered a new domain name he would like to use for the site. Should I wait a few weeks for everything to settle down after the first redirect/consolidation of sites before doing a new redirect to a new domain name, or should I not worry about having any issues with doing it right away?
Technical SEO | | Drewco0