Buying expired domains with PR and redirecting question :)

[activitysuper]

Hi,

Might be a silly question but wanted to ask it anyway.

Lets say I run a gifts website and this year I decide I want to try for a more competitive keyword 'Christmas Gifts'.

Now each year I see a lot of search on for example 'Christmas Gifts 2011' and because of the search volume the EMD for this is gone (an affiliate has brought it or something).

So the affiliate works hard on ranking it builds up say PR2-PR3 but when it comes around to renewing the domain they don't bother because 2011 search volume has passed and they move onto 'Christmas Gifts 2012'.

My question is this: If I was to buy the 'Christmas Gifts 2011' when it expires and redirect it to my Xmas page would it pass the PR and give my new page a boost?

[Jinx14678]

In My opinion this could work, but will ultimately be devalued as Duplicate content. Also (not to pigeon hole all affiliate marketers) but most use tactics that get quick boosts, not longterm sustained traffic.

So not only are you possibly gonna cause yourself a duplicate content penalty, you assume the risk of all the links that Affiliate marketer acquired good and bad.

All in all this strategy could yield positive results, and is not necessarily a "Black Hat" tactic so its not gonna get you banned, but probably is not the best risk free strategy.

You would be better off creating a page with lots of content keyword optimized for "Christmas Gifts" and do a link building campaign around this page ex:  www.example.com/Christmas-Gifts  use quality articles and content from linked from this page around the topic of Christmas and Christmas Gifts plus LOTS of other items cause i did not look into it, but I am assuming they Keyword "Christmas Gifts" around this time is a VERY high competition keyword, and you will be fighting against established brands so "SEO tricks" probably will not help.

w00t!

[N5c]

It might work. You buy the expired high PR domain and 301 to your main site (make sure there is no duplicate content) and see what happens. In doing this, my testing has shown that about 50% of the time the PR will fall off and the other 50% you will keep it and some of that link juice will pass to your site.

If you do this, make sure you do a private registration on the expired domain.

[activitysuper]

When you say there is a chance of getting a duplicate penalty how do you mean?

If my site has unique content and the domain I want to redirect had unique content then all your telling Google to do is pass on the PR to the new site.

I know a lot of affiliates will use the content the merchants supply them, which yes can flag that domain as dup and gain a penalty from it, but if the affiliate has built up some good PR then there is a good chance they know dup content is wrong and would have not used it.

Thanks for all the feedback, much appreciated

[Jinx14678]

You are correct if there is no dup content currently then it will not be seen as duplicate.

Yes, you and mhelp3 are correct some of the "juice" may be passed, and since any penalty items on the site have been leveraged pre 301, the penalty content will probably not transfer as they have already "dropped off" the index.

The longterm issue with this strategy is it does not help user experience. It is merely an "SEO Trick" that more and more every day are being devalued by Algorithm updates.

Where i agree that this tactic probably a years ago and before was VERY VERY effective, now and going forward it will become LESS AND LESS effective.

Also private registration already looses some of its "Trust" with Google and usually sets off a red flag, which probably will devalue the entire endeavor.

Will this ultimately harm your main domain... Probably Not So if you are up for a risk of it maybe working and maybe not, but i would not base a strategy around this concept going forward as these types of old school white hat tactics are dying....

w00t!

[activitysuper]

Thanks for the great replies Shane.

Well I doubt I would use this tactic, I was just doing something and the idea popped into my head so wanted to get a second opinion.

Christmas keywords are very competitive like you said, so was just thinking of ideas on how to get a new page ranking in such a competitive area.