Buying and Redirecting a URL

[mikepetersonwi]

I have a client that has an opportunity to buy a domain from a competitor that is retiring. Assuming the domain is legitimate and has a decent amount of traffic, age, and backlinks, what are the strategies to benefit from that? We are not looking to replace my clients domain, just leverage a second domain if it makes sense.

Thanks in advance

 

[Phil Rozek]

@mikepetersonwi, the big decision is whether you buy the domain and just redirect it, or you build a 2nd (and probably smaller) site on the domain.

A couple of benefits of the latter are (1) you may get a couple of sites ranking for the terms you care about, either in an overlapping or in a "divide and conquer" way, and that (2) you can link those pages to wherever you want.

Whether you should bother with the full build is a question of how much time and money you want to sink into it, of course, but it's also a question of which page(s) had the links. Were all of your competitor's good links pointing to the homepage, or did many of them point to subpages, blog posts, etc? If it's the latter, what'll happen is you buy the domain, redirect it, and then most of the links that benefited your competitor won't benefit you because as much because they're not pointing to equivalent pages on your site. (Maybe you'd just redirect them all to your client's homepage, but that wouldn't give you the full benefit.)

So the other thing I'd look at is how many pages have a link profile you'd want to inherit (and try to benefit from by redirecting).