News Source: http://www.wolf-howl.com
Published: Dec 15, 2007 - 07:12 am
Story Found By: scottclark 1623 Days ago
Category: SEO
Before we pop open the .htaccess file and hope for the best, what is the best practice? What if they’re not related but a totally new direction for your company?
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.Cha-Cha-Cha-Chia!!! (I had to get that out of my system)
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7 Comments
Comments
I’ve had a client in this situation recently so I’d be interested in Matt’s take on this too.
I guess the question that you want Matt to answer is if I do purchase my competitors domain(s), am I purchasing the link equity or not? If I am, do I pass it along by using a 301 redirect under current industry understandings?
Aaron Wall alledgedly purchased domains for their link equity, and that got him in a whole lot of trouble.
@g1smd - I would need to know more about the history of the names, and what was done after they were purchased before I’d believe any harm came from that.It’s always disappointing to see an inexperienced company pop open the website closet and start ripping wires out...changing the registrant contents and mucking with years of historical good graces. "Can’t you fix it?" they say, as we survey the tangled mess.At Pubcon a year ago (or was it two) I think I remember Matt saying that domain changes, private registrations, etc. taken on their own were not a problem - but that they could be "one more nail in the coffin" of a site where there’s evidence of spam/violations. It’s all so damn vague. Matt can tell me if it was coincidence, but I have seen, with my own weary eyes, a legit site come up in the SERPs when all we did was remove private registration. It looked like a duck and walked like a duck. That stuck with me, so now I move sites as if they were Liang Dynasty China being relocated across a busy mosh pit.Google’s guidelines for webmasters say build your sites as if search engines don’t exist. I’m assuming this means adjusting registrars, DNS, host files and such are included. But all of this makes me tip-toe. Be that as it may, I can’t help but think Google’s status as a registrar (and the high-speed bennies that come with that) allow quite a bit of finesse and detailed dns/registrant/etc. recordkeeping in-house.
Matt Cutts said: "Aaron obtained and promoted a domain in ways that Google considers blackhat ... there is a spectrum of combining sites or transferring sites .. end of the spectrum is ... buying expired domains, or buying sites purely in an attempt to benefit from their pre-existing links."That is at least a part of what got his sites canned. There are several long discussions here and at Matt Cutts blog with a lot more information.
Google’s guidelines for webmasters say build your sites as if search engines don’t exist.Yeah, except use nofollow. Because we know users get a whole lot out of that. Oh, and don’t robots.txt us out. Leave the default in place and let us crawl your site. Yahoo, MSN et al can hurt Google bad by buying up lots of properties and blocking Google bot. Making a walled garden that only they have the keys to.
"Google’s guidelines for webmasters say build your sites as if search engines don’t exist. I’m assuming this means adjusting registrars, DNS, host files and such are included. But all of this makes me tip-toe."You have no reason to tip-toe if you’re not trying to game the engines. If you’re robbing someone’s house, and you call up the owner of the house before you hit it, and you get thrown in jail, then that’s your damn fault. If you’r going to attempt a robbery, then yeah, don’t announce it to the whole world.And if you don’t think tip-toing is fun, you probably haven’t played Splinter Cell.