Client Buys retiring Competitor url

[Larry Linson]

I have a lawyer client who has a competitor retire from the business, and strangely just let his domain registration lapse. My client said he even tried to contact the guy to buy it out, and he never returned the call. Now, months later he finds it available for purchase on GoDaddy, which he quickly did. The competitor is in the same business but another state, but his domain ranking is better than that of my client. My client tells me this competitor had worked to develop a national reputation and following.

We are wondering now how to proceed to take advantage of this sites good SEO. I was thinking that we would look at the links to content on www.deadpage.com and create content, then notify the linker that she has a dead link, but wouldn't you like to link to our good replacement content on my client's site? Is there anything I might be missing?

 

[JimFranco]

do a 301 redirect from that domain to your clients

 

[Larry Linson]

I am wonder this though: a lot of those links are you him personally - as opposed to content. Will I confuse Google if lawyer A specific links are going to my client lawyer B.

 

[JimFranco]

It wont confuse Google. The links might not pass as much authority , but I imagine it would be better than trying to get webmasters to change links. I would just 301 the whole dead page to your clients landing page. Mighty want to throw in the name of old lawyer toward the end. Write something , this page is not affiliated with "name" , maybe make it an h4 or h3. that way there will be at least that name on that page and Google can see it easier.

just my 2 cents.

 

[Larry Linson]

OK. Got it. Thanks.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I would do a thorough backlink check before you 301 it. If they had a manual penalty, it can pass to your site. Not very likely but still something I would check.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Look at Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine (Wayback Machine) to see if it was ever indexed. You can then pick out specific urls to forward individually to related pages on your site instead of lumping everything into one 301 to your root domain.