Purchased new site with good SERP ranks, do I operate and build links or redirect the TLD?
-
I recently purchased a blog within my product category - it has many first page rankings for difficult keywords within my niche. I am wondering if it makes more sense for for me to continue to operate this blog and build links to my site and blog (blog is in wordpress) or to export the XML feed and upload the content to my blog (new site also in wordpress), at which point I would do a 301 at the Top-Level domain.
Any thoughts, ideas, or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
-
I own a small ecommerce site and I've seen where one of my (much) larger competitors have purchased other sites and went the domain-redirect route. According to Open Site Explorer it is helping their SEO a bit.
One question I would have is how many of these visitors from the blog are turning into purchasers on your friend's site? If a lot of them are coming and buying products, and you do the domain redirect, then you could potentially lose a lot of sales. You could make up for the lost sales by increasing your rankings for other keywords, but how much of a boost would you need to make up for the lost sales from the blog? When you are weighing your decision, consider the conversion rate from the blog vs. the conversion rate from search engines.
Another consideration to make is if both sites rank on page 1 for a lot of keywords, and you cannibalize the blog, then you are down to a single placement on the SERP.
-
Thank you EGOL. This is actually for a friends site who I helped advise on the purchase. Currently the new blog, operating exactly as it had for many years, sending targeted visitors to his site through mentions in the posts.
While this is great as an independent source of qualified traffic, he would really prefer to have the product listings currently indexed with the new blog be located under his TLD instead (for obvious brand and eCommerce reasons)
The new blog's link profile is not nearly as diverse as the main website, but it does consistently generate its own traffic and does a decent job of starting conversations with visitors through comments. The existing blog's brand is NOT that important, to anyone.
Any additional thoughts? (thank you for your time and consideration)
-
This is a very complex question. It depends upon rankings, content, visitors, conversions, links, brand recognition, profits, products and many other things. Any answer not based upon careful consideration by a smart person who understands SEO and has a deep understanding of your site is not reliable.
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
-
Ranking of Travel Sites in SERPs
Hello, I have noticed that some travel sites rank for almost all the keywords but when I click the page, it has no relevant content and often no content at all. I remember Google once updated its algorithm to do away with such sites but I still found some. The question is - if they don't have relevant content or if they don't have content at all, how do they even rank? Secondly, how come they have pages for all keyword combination? How is this achieved? Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
New Section On Site Worth It?
We have been kicking around this idea for a while now, and I wanted to get the communities honest opinion before we begin building it. So we create a lot of posts on social media showcasing articles we find on SEO, tips and tricks, reviews, etc. We were thinking rather than always linking out to the other sites, we are going to create a section on our site called "From Around The Web" and have brief breakdowns of what was covered, then provide a link to the full article. Most of these would be between 300-500 words, and be optimized around what we were linking to and writing about. So since the content would not be "in-depth" would this hurt us in any way? To me, it doesnt not make sense to send people to the other article right away, when we can summarize it and link to the full articles from our site. (Most people dont want to read a 3000 word article on SEO, especially small business owners who just want the breakdown) Thoughts? Think it will help, or not be useful enough to invest labor in?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-Kley0 -
When migrating website platforms but keeping the domain name how best do we add the new site to google webmaster tools? Best redirect practices?
We are moving from BigCommerce to Shopify but maintaining our domain name and need to make sure that all links redirect to their corresponding links. We understand the nature of 301s and are fine with that, but when it comes to adding the site to google webmaster tools, not losing link juice and the change of address tool we are kind of lost. Any advice would be most welcome. Thank you so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WNL0 -
Does this require site-wide 301 redirects?
I have an old site that we are re-building, and also moving form Yahoo Stores to Big Commerce. yahoo uses site.com/page.html and BC uses site.com/page. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the old .html format? some of the pages on the old site have no links to them from external sites. Do they even need re-directs, or should I just let Google find the new page equivalents when they crawl the new version of the site? While some of the old pages (primarily product pages) have OK urls, others have obscure product numbers as the URL. Obviously the latter need re-directing to a more relevant page, but what about situations like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grabapple
_/accessory-product.html _ > product-accessory
In this example, the existing URL is fine, except for the .html extention. If I just used the old URL, would having a mix of /sample.html and /sample pages hurt me? Thanks in advance for your help and input! Dave0 -
How to make Link Building for the E-Commerce sites?
Hello everyone, I just ask one question: How to make Link Building for the E-Commerce sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | backlinkmag0 -
Has this new Dmoz link put my rankings at risk?
About 7 months ago, I applied for a link at Dmoz. This week, the link got approved. The only problem is that it seems there are hundreds of link directories that scrape Dmoz. Open Site Explorer is now showing about 130 new links to my site that are essentially Dmoz scrapper sites. Do you think Google will mistaken this as me buying directory links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JenniferDacosta0 -
Link Juice Vs. Page Rank
What is better from an SEO point of view a Page with Page Rank of 5 with 0 clicks linking to your site or a page with a Page Rank of 3 with 1000 clicks linking back to your site? Is link juice important? do search engines count Link Juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
How to retain link juice moving to new site, cms and servers?
We have been hosting our website with a provider (their design and CMS) and we are now moving to a new design, better content focussing on keywords in a different CMS platform on different servers but want to retain the link juice from the old site. We have used Open Site Explorer Report to determine all the links to the old site and the pages they link to. What is the best strategy to keep the link juice flowing to the new site? Example This site <http: www.dogslifedownunder.com="" what-is-worse-then-going-to-the-v-e-t="">links to this page <http: 19105="" www.sydneyanimalhospitals.com.au="" ourstaff="" thevets="" tabid="" default.aspx="">on the old site.</http:></http:> We will have a similar page on the new site with the same staff members called for example: How do we ensure that the we retain the link juice? Any thoughts most welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590