Buying a rivals website

[Andrew[MG]]

Looking for some thoughts and opinions on this one:

One of my rivals has gone out of business and I am considering buying their domain from them. They have better natural positions than me and I'm hoping to benefit from redirecting their site to mine. I won't be able to redirect all of the pages, just the homepage to mine. Have any of you done this before? Were the results positive?

Thanks for your help....

[AussieWebmaster]

yes you will get lift but why not do all pages?

[Andrew[MG]]

I think we'll only be able to get the domain and not the actual site.

[jag]

Host it and create pages with the same page name and re-direct

Best,

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

@jag:

Doing that would seem to be definitely not "white hat" anymore to me. What c olor at hat is, is of course unimportant, but what c ounts is the reward/risk ratio....but isn't there some type of risk associated with that?

Part of me likes the idea of doing that ;-), but part of me cant help but wonder if that's gray hat/risky.

Then again buying a competitor's domain and redirecting it in order to improve your rankings (which the OP plans on doing) seems not to be exactly white hat either..and something that might potentially piss google off if they coudl tell.

Im really not a big believer in blindly sticking to the rules of one of the most powerful for-profit companies on this planet just b/c they say so.....but is there no risk in this?

[AussieWebmaster]

The buy and redirect model is fine - companies do it all the time - banks, airlines etc. - one day it's Commerce the next it is TD Bank - we still use them

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

Interesting, is it SEOs or financial analysts who value those sites before a company decides to buy them?

I once asked Avinash Kaushik about whether he thought financial analysts would have to become knowledgeable about web analytics in the future..to assess a company's e-commerce operations, which will probably become increasingly important in the future..(his reply was basically that yes he thinks so)

Is this already happening if airlines, banks,etc. buy other companies all the time? Or are the SEOs/Online Marketers of those companies in charge of that and financial analysts have nothing to do with it?

[Andrew[MG]]

The biggest problem here is trying to buy it from the recievers who now control the assets of the company.

Valuing the website is really hard. It's reasonably easy to work out what it was worth to them but it's hard to compute the SEO value + redirect value of people going to the old site.

In the end I guess we just need to try and get the lowest price and make a judgement call....

[jag]

NKOTB, usually an SEO account manager does it, may be changes with places

Best,

[bhartzer]

If you're able to get the domain and not the actual content, then that's just fine anyway. Watch the 404 errors on the site and make sure that you do some link analysis: redirect the old URLs to new ones on your current site that have traffic and links.

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by bhartzer

If you're able to get the domain and not the actual content, then that's just fine anyway. Watch the 404 errors on the site and make sure that you do some link analysis: redirect the old URLs to new ones on your current site that have traffic and links.

good idea - catch through 404s and Yahoo site explorer for inner linked pages