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Hi everyone,

I have hit a brick wall with regards with the SEO of one of our sites.

This is concerning a Belgium based webshop which sells toys. The server is based in the Belgium and the domainname ends also .be . They try to put as much possible dutch/belgium text on the website but the amount of this is very low compared to the english text on the website.

The problem starts when they import product description from the main manufacturer which is in english. this means when the customer visits the website, it's dutch, but the product description is in english

I have pointed out this but they pointed out the fact they import with 1 click 500 products, but it takes them ages to translate this to dutch.

Now is my theory, the way they are doing this, will hurt their ranking a lot in the google.be search engine compared to their competitors to the point that less than 10% of their site is in dutch/belgium and the rest in english.

I am thinking of the possibility of suggesting to let them use google translate to automatically translate the products before putting them on the website. It won't be a great translation, but it will stop hurting their ranking and will even contribute to increase their ranking.

I thought they do this, and put a small link to the english version of the manufacturer.

I would love to hear others thoughts on how to do this with as efficient and fast as possible.

Hi Tom,

I went ahead and made the purchase, in my opinion not expensive but with domains you know... it's worth whatever you are willing to pay for it.

thanks again for your help and guidance to check out those great links!

Hi Thomas,

I did a crosscheck and from the total 20 linking domains, I have 2 of them already in our own back links, so 18 of them would be new which will be 301 to our own domain. from this 18, 13 are above Domain Authority 23.

We ourself have only 28 root domains linking, in theory, even if 50% of the valuable 13 links passes some juice to our site, would it not increase the overall ranking?

Sami

Hi Thomas,

Thanks again once more for that comprehensive answer, the domainlist in the CSV are all RC car related, either it's an directory or forum or blog.

In Netherlands directories still have allot of value for some reason. our own backlinkbuilding is also build on forum backlinks and directory backlinks.

keep in mind these dutch directories are quite hard to get on to most of them. They are all manually moderated and most of them have to accept you manually and advertisement link are not done with most of the quality directories here.

I think I have to cross check with our own domain and see what actual value the domain will have net. It's no use getting the domain if from the 20 linking domains, already 15 link to our website. then we would be getting this domain for just couple of backlinks which we could get organically.

Hi Thomas,

I send you also private message, the domain is indeed offline. there is nothing on it anymore.

when you use siteexplorer for the domain, you will see the authority and details.

Sami

Hi Thomas,

the domain I am looking to get is;
goo.gl/8BI72Z

while I agree with authority below 20 is not much but in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king, our main site has authority of 21 which still brings quite some visitors (+ 600 a day) because we are targeting an niche market so I think google puts us up in the ranking for most keywords because there is also a lack of an better alternative.

in terms of the authority this domain is almost the same as our own main site, only difference is that this site has been offline for 5 months now, so not sure of the following;

• if worth anything after being dead for so long
• if any juice get's passed on

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for the comprehensive answer and those very helpful links, especially the moz articles on linkbuilding is very helpful.

Would purchasing the competitors domain and do a 301 redirect have any positive effect at all on the SEO ranking of our own website?

I run the SEO side for our company and the MOZ tools have been quite helpfull to track keywords and bump the rankings of certain pages by filtering the errors and filling missing tags like H1, H3 , meta etc.

However, the website is an webshop which sells niche products, this makes getting quality backlinks quite a challenge and besides some forums and directories there is little I think I can do to get more quality backlinks without entering grey hat or even blackhat practices. There is not even blogs related to this niche in relevant language, otherwise we would send them samples of products so they would write about it.

Recently ( 6 months ago, in SEO time this is ages I think) one of the competitors went bust and their domain name has become available for purchase. It's domainauthority ranks at 21/100 while our own stands at 20/100.

now comes my question:

• If we would to purchase this domain, and do a 301 redirect, would it pass on the juice to our site?
• what else can I do to improve the ranking except the usual part like: titletags, H1, metatags, img alt, valuable text etc.
• what other ways are there to get quality backlinks in nichemarkets, I don't want to buy backlinks as I consider that as a shortterm solution and blackhat, and since 80% of our traffic comes organic from google, last thing I want is a  penalty from our lord google