Is it worth buying a GREAT domain with rank?
-
Hey Guys,
I am in communication with the owner of a domain with very good domain rank - that ranks well for keywords important to me. Strangely enough the website it terrible?! (I though Google valued "content" these days?!). Anyhow, it's link profile is tidy including sites such as DMOZ.
His asking price for the domain is SUBSTANTIAL, however where it ranks for some keywords would be valuable for our organisation if we could leverage its authority.
My questions are:
1) Is it worth buys a GREAT domain with a crappy website that ranks for keywords that are important to us?
2) (if the answer to 1 is YES) How should one go about leveraging the rank to benefit our site/business?
3) What would be the best way to utilise the site - redirects? Build out some kind of content and link to main site?
Anyhow, hopefully some of you have great experience in this domain in the current Google Panda/Penguin white hat world?
Would REALLY appreciate your thoughts!!
-
OK... you say that you have....
-- GREAT domain
-- Great rankings
-- Valuable keywords
-- Tidy link profile
-- horrible website
That gets my blood pumping... I would be sniffing this site to see if I can do these...
-- improve the SEO and triple the traffic
-- redesign the site and make it twice as easy to use and double the conversion rate
-- create new content to make it more credible and go after new keyword that will double the traffic
-- reformat the product pages and double the income
-- so, after you triple the traffic from SEO, double conversion rate, double the traffic with new keywords and double again with better product pages.... this site will be making a fantastic amount of money
This, to me sounds like a candidate for a flip. A 301 redirect might be selling a champion racehorse for horse meat.
If this site was under my nose I might be grabbing it and taking away the sales from everyone else in that niche.
(No guarantees on the above... depends upon the attributes of the site you are starting with, your skill set and how hard you are willing to work)
-
Hey Brent
To me, this doesn't look like a wise investment. Regardless of its link profile, I'd be much more inclined to try and rank your current website rather than buying this domain and 301 redirecting it.
In any case, we can try and look at it from a financial standpoint and see if it is worthwhile.
To estimate the worth of ranking for those keywords, let's do some very rough estimations:
Take the local exact match search volume - example, 6,100.
Take the average click through rate for rank 1 - example 40%
Take the average conversion rate - example 3% (your mileage may vary greatly)
Take the average value of a conversion for that keyword - example £20.
So, 6,100 x 40% = 2440. 2440 x 3% = 73.2. 73.2 x £20 = £1464 - this is your average value for that keyword.
How much more than that amount is the asking price? What would be a comfortable investment for you? 3 months worth, 6 months? You may be able to find a comfortable price you'd want to buy at.
If you did buy the domain, 301ing the old domain to your site will pass on all of the value of their link profile, which in turn might help you rank in its place. The important thing to remember, however, is that this is all theory. The 301 redirect may not work that way and the site in question might not rank for that keyword for much longer, in which case the purchase would be pointless.
It's for those reasons why I would concentrate on trying to rank your current website. If you're thinking about investing, turn it around and think what you could do with that budget instead, or even half of it. You could create rich content, infographics, tools or plugins to try and rank higher in organic search, you could invest it in PPC adwords, you could look at display advertising and retargeting networks and so on.
You may find you'd make your money go further investing the money elsewhere.
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
-
Keyword keeps fluctuating between a high rank and no rank?
I've searched around and I can't seem to find anyone else describing the issue I'm seeing. Basically for a very long time our website (snappages.com) has always ranked in the tens and twenties for "create a website". It's a high volume keyword and we get a lot of traffic from it. Around May 16th it suddenly disappeared completely from search results on Google and now it will sporadically show back up with a SERP in the twenties every 5-10 days for a few hours and then completely disappear again. This pattern has continued to this day. I've checked and there are no manual penalties and nothing has really changed dramatically from a content perspective or anything like that. I would understand if we got penalized and our ranking dropped, or even if it just completely disappeared? This is the only keyword that this is happening for, all the others remain unaffected. Anyone know how I can find out why this is happening or have suggestions on how to fix it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stestone0 -
Is This Worth Fixing?
Hi, I'm working on a site that was last optimized some years ago. It has a fair number of pages that the url, h1, title tag and image alt exact match. Although this comes back as A+ in Moz's on page grader, it seems a bit much. What do you think, is all this too heavy an SEO fingerprint for Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Domain Forwarding for SEO
Hey guys, I recently created a new website for a client who was ranking #1 for the term "jupiter obgyn" but they have now dropped down to #4. This happened because their old home page was at www. instead of just jupiterobgyn.com. When you type in the www. version, it does take you to the root domain but it's not carrying the old PA! The www. version of the page had a 22 PA and the new root domain hosted page is a 1. How can I fix it so that "link juice" carries over? Is this something i need to do in 1and1 (their web host) or within Wordpress? Thanks!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Worth contributing articles to a Page Rank 1 site?
My intuition tells me that it is not going to help with any SEO link benefit by posting an article as a guest writer on a Page Rank site of #1. It's a rather new fashion content site. The article would be informative and not a sales pitch. The only link is to our url home page in the bio. I've been told that links from low page ranking sites don't help anymore. But maybe over time the site will achieve higher PR status, and then the link in it would help us? Any thoughts? Thanks! ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Why is my ranking not improving???
Our site is about 4 months old now, although the domain is older. We are adding fresh new content, building good facebook/twitter/Goolge+ and undertaking good PR - but our ranking does not seem to be improving at all. Have I missed something obvious???? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Help needed for a domain
I have a small translation agency in Brazil (this website), totally dependent on SEM. We are in business since 2007, and we were on top position for many relevant keywords until the middle of 2011, when the ranking for the most important keywords started dropping. In that time, we believed that we needed to redesign the old static website and replace it by a new modern one, with fresh content and with weekly updates, which we did, and it's now hosted on Squarespace. I took care to keep the old links working with 301 redirections. When we made the transfer from the static site to Squarespace (Mar/2012, see the attachment), the ranking dropping became even more serious. Today, we have less than 50 unique visitors per day, in a total desperate situation! To make things worse, we received an alert from Google on 23/September/2012 talking about unnatural inbound links, but Google said that "As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole", so we thought we didn't need to worry about. Google was correct, I worked many hours to register our website in web directories, I thought there would be no problem since I was doing this manually. My conclusions are: Something happened prior to Mar/2012 that was making us losing territory. I just don't know what! The migration to Squarespace was a huge mistake. I lost control over the html, and squarespace doesn't do a good job optimizing the pages for SEO. We also were also blasted by Penguin on September, but I believe this is not the main cause of the drop. We were already running very badly at this time. My actions are: a) I generated a DTOX report and I'm trying to clean up the links marked as toxic. That's a hard work! After that I will submit a reconsideration request. b) I'm working on the site: Improving internal link building for relevant keywords Recently I removed a "tag cloud" which I believe was hurting my SEO. Also, I did some redirections that were missing. c) I trying to generate new content to improve link building to my site. d) I'm also considering to stop putting all my coins on this domain, and maybe start a fresh new one. Yes, I'm desperate! 🙂 I would appreciate a lot to hear from you guys, expert people! Thanks a lot, MWcEdPa.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodrigofreitas0 -
Compare the rankings
Hi All, I have an example 2 domains are targeting the same keyword, one of them ranks higher then another. Here is the image from OSE http://www.freeimagehosting.net/udq2f Would you be able to tell ( based on the image )which of the domains is winning , "domain 1" or "domain2" and what exactly the " looser " should do to improve its rankings Rgds Webdeal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal0 -
Domain expiration and seo
My domain name is free with my service with yahoo but it expires every year and gets extended automatically as I continue service, how does this impact my seo efforts? I've heard that the search engines prefer sites to expire in 3 years or more? Is this a fact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0