Large Scale Domain Forwarding
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I recently purchased a domain from a domainer who owns and parks many, many exact match domains in my niche. He gets a lot of type in traffic via these domains and is willing to forward them to my domain to help get my site started with traffic. We were planning on forwarding a few dozen domains at the most. I'd like to make sure I'm not raising any red flags with google for forwarding so many domains to a new site.
I found this article, which says Panda made some changes with regards to what I'm trying to do here. Not sure if they guy is right though.
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I would imagine most of those domains won't have any link profile or backlinks of their own. In that sense, you are not really doing it for SEO...you are doing it for traffic. Also, if you think about it...when companies merge, domains get redirected. Think Continental.com > United.com in which case there is a massive SEO advantage in doing so. Anyways, long story short, in your case, most of the domains with the domainer won't have any Search Engine history, therefore not much SEO advantage. As you said, doing it for a few domains is okay. At the same time, start building a natural link profile and content that people would want to link to...along with activity in social media...all that would work in your long term strategy and those domains would blend it very well.
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Maybe I wasn't clear on what I was asking.
I know there is 0 SEO benefit for me here. I'm not going for it. I'm just getting some extra traffic to start things out. What I'm wondering is if there will be drawbacks as Google sees many domains forwarding to a new (my) domain name. Should I pace out the forwarding over a few weeks to maybe soften the change?
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Yes, I understand. I would check the domains being redirected to see if they have any history associated with them. If they have been linked from anywhere on the web, then Google knows they exist. If not, they are pretty much (almost) like brand new domains. This process would also make sure and help you find if there was nothing fishy/spammy going on with those domains in the past. I would still do a staggered redirect depending upon how many you are planning to do. As you said few dozen, I would just spend some time looking them up and based on the results, select the ones that have most type-in traffic first. And then in a few weeks, check to see how it's working for you and if you want to redirect more of those.