Outranking a crappy outdated site with domain age & keywords in URL.
-
I'm trying to outrank a website with the following:
Website with #1 ranking for a search query with "City & Brand"
- Domain Authority - 2
- Domain Age - 11 years & 9 months old
- Has both the City & brand in the URL name.
- The site is crap, outdated.. probably last designed in the 90's, old layouts, not a lot of content & NO keywords in the titles & descriptions on all pages.
My site ranks 5th for the same keyword.. BEHIND 4 pages from the site described above.
- Domain Authority - 2
- Domain Age - 4 years & 2 months old
- Has only the CITY in the URL.
- Brand new site design this past year, new content & individual keywords in the titles, descriptions on each page.
My main question is.... do you think it would be be beneficial to buy a new domain name with the BRAND in the URL & CITY & 301 redirect my 4 year old domain to the new domain to pass along the authority it has gained.
Will having the brand in the URL make much of a difference?
Do you think that small step would even help to beat the crappy but old site out?
Thanks for any help & suggestions on how to beat this old site or at least show up second.
-
Thanks all. This is what I had recommended to the client to begin with. I just needed some backup from all you smart SEO's out there.
Unfortunately the URL would not be for sale as it's a brick and mortar business.
Thanks again!
-
I personally lean more towards the reaction of EGOL. If you put enough effort in it, keep it straight white hat and do all the steps suggested in the SEOblog section (like link earning in stead of link building) then over time you can outrank that site for sure. But keep working on it. Be social.. share everything you can on facebook, twitter and off course the BIG G+.
Tricks can help you in the short run but hurt you in the long run so i wouldn't go for that straight away.
You could also try registering the other domain you mentioned, put up some content and everything and build it next to your existing website (without copying text etc.). You could do this as a supporting role for your primary website if you wish. But i would focus on my primary website first and improving that one.
regards
Jarno
-
I like irving's suggestion to see if the webmaster is willing to sell the site. whats the link profile like? any particular high authority links that might be giving it the advantage over your site?
-
**Will having the brand in the URL make much of a difference? **
The brand? Yes, if people know you.
Really, I would not change domains for the tiny advantage that you think a keyword in the domain might bring. It is very possible that you will lose more linkjuice in the redirect than you will gain from the keyword in the domain.
Do you think that small step would even help to beat the crappy but old site out?
heh... That crappy old site is beating you because they are beating you.
It is easier to beat an old crappy site with "work" than it is to beat them with "tricks'.
-
Absolutely not, your site is aged. A new site is like starting all over even if you do 301 the old site to the new.
a) work on improving the on page SEO on your site
b) if that new domain is available you could play around with setting that up as a stand alone site and see if you can get it ranked #1, it could take 6-12 months before Google really trusts it enough.
c) if it's that old and outdated maybe he wants to sell it at a reasonable price if it's worth that much to you?
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
-
I am temporarily moving a site to a new domain. Which redirect is best?
A client is having their site redeveloped on a new platform in sections and are moving the sections that are on the new platform to a temporary subdomain until the entire site is migrated. This is happening over the course of 2-3 months. During this time, is it best for the site to use 302 temporary redirects during this time (URL path not changing), or is it best to 301 to the temp. domain, then 301 back to the original once the new platform is completely migrated? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Matt3120 -
When I crawl my website I have urls with (#!162738372878) at the end of my urls
When I crawl my website I have urls with (#!162738372878) at the end of my urls. I used screaming frog to look check my website and I seen these. My normal urls are in there too, but each of them have a copy with this strange symbol and number at the end. I used a website builder called homestead to make the website and I seen a bunch of there urls in my crawl as well - http://editor.homestead.com/faq is an example I recently created a new website with their new website builder and transferred it to my old domain. However, I didnt know they didnt offer 301 redirects or canonical tags(learned about those afterwards) and I changed my page names. So they recommended I leave the old website published along with the new website. So if I search my website name on google, sometimes both will show in the results. I just want to sort this all out somehow. My website is www.coastlinetvinstalls.com Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Matt160 -
Why did Google cache & index a different domain than my own?
We own www.homemenorca.com, a real estate website based in Spain. Pages from this domain are not being indexed: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.homemenorca.com&oq=site%3Awww.homemenorca.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58j69i59l2.3504j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8Please notice that the URLs are Home Menorca, but the titles are not Home Menorca, they are Fincas Mantolan, a completely different domain and company: http://www.fincasmantolan.com/. Furthermore, when we look at Google's cache of Home Menorca, we see a different website: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.homemenorca.com%2Fen&oq=cache%3Awww.homemenorca.com%2Fen&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58j69i59.1311j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8We reviewed Google Search Console, Google Fetch, the canonical tags, the XML sitemap, and many more items. Google Search Console accepted our XML sitemap, but is only indexing 5-10% of the pages. Google is fetching and rendering the pages properly. However, we are not seeing the correct content being indexed in Google. We have seen issues with page loading times, loading content longer than 4 seconds, but are unsure why Google would be indexing a different domain.If you have suggestions or thoughts, we would very much appreciate it.Additional Language Issue:When a user searches "Home Menorca" from America or the UK with "English" selected in their browser as their default language, they are given a Spanish result. It seems to have accurate hreflang annotations within the head section on the HTML pages, but it is not working properly. Furthermore, Fincas Mantolan's search result is listed immediately below Home Menorca's Spanish result. We believe that if we fix the issue above, we will also fix the language issue. Please let us know any thoughts or recommendations that can help us. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CassG12340 -
Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?
Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron0 -
Site architecture: Deep drop menus & flat hidden menu?
I hope this makes sense. I am creating a site that will have normal drop down menu structure that will be about 3 levels deep: site.com/category/topic/sub-topic . I also want to add content that will be set up under a hidden menu, but with a sidebar module (placed on the relevant pages that are set up under the drop down) with links to other custom pages that will be relevant to the drop menu pages, but i'm hoping that the flat structure pages will show better for search: site.com/content-page The reason I am asking is because I have seen a competitor do this for a personal injury law firm and they show everywhere (throughout California) for vanity search -"city car accident lawyer". When you go to the site, they have a personal injury drop down that is 3 layers deep, but when you click down the layers, and look at the URL, they are all "flat" site.com/car-accident-lawyer, not site.com/personal-injury/accidents/car-accident-lawyer. Is having a hidden menu a problem? Is this strategy problematic in any way? Hope that makes sense. Thank you for any direction. BB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Moving career site to new URL from main site. Will it hurt SEO for main page?
For one of our clients we are building a career site and putting it under a different URL and hosting service (mainly due to security concerns of hosting it under the same host and domain). almost 100% of the incoming traffic to their current career section (which it is in a sub-folder) receives traffic for branded keywords (brand + job/career/employment), that is, there are no job position specific keywords. The client is now worried that after moving the site, the inbound traffic to the main site will be severely affected as well as the SERP results. My questions are, will the non-career related SERPs be affected? I don't see how will they be but I could be wrong If no, how could we reassure her that the SEO to the main site wont be affected? are there any case studies of a similar case (splitting part of the website under a new URL and hosting service?) Thank you for your help. PS: this is my first post so please forgive me if this has been asked before. I could not find a good response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rflores0 -
News sites & Duplicate content
Hi SEOMoz I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world? Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific. Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place. News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc. All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 360eight-SEO
Chris Captivate0 -
Mobile Site - Same Content, Same subdomain, Different URL - Duplicate Content?
I'm trying to determine the best way to handle my mobile commerce site. I have a desktop version and a mobile version using a 3rd party product called CS-Cart. Let's say I have a product page. The URLs are... mobile:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon
store.domain.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.catalog#products.view&product_id=857 desktop:
store.domain.com/two-toned-tee.html I've been trying to get information regarding how to handle mobile sites with different URLs in regards to duplicate content. However, most of these results have the assumption that the different URL means m.domain.com rather than the same subdomain with a different address. I am leaning towards using a canonical URL, if possible, on the mobile store pages. I see quite a few suggesting to not do this, but again, I believe it's because they assume we are just talking about m.domain.com vs www.domain.com. Any additional thoughts on this would be great!0