Purchasing a domain to redirect to a new domain (note same industry) - Black hat or White hat technique?

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Everyone,

Ok so here is my question. I have a client who sells gourmet tea and gourmet spices. She has a culinary blog. There is a culinary blog that just posted that the website will be shut down in the near future. It has 100% white hat links. Would it be considered black hat to buy the domain and redirect it to my clients blog which is also a culinary blog? I would really like to ask Matt Cutts this question. Does anyone know how to send him questions?

Thanks

Carla

[MikeRoberts]

This makes me want to tell the story of Maille Ohye of Google talking about Canonicals at SMX East 2012. (I really like canonicals and probably talk about them too much on here)

She gave a hypothetical about having a fitness blog and taking over Matt Cutts fitness blog. Where canonicals came in was that she stated one of the primary uses for a cross-domain canonical was in passing equity from one site to the other site that will eventually be replacing it without causing confusion for users. So in the hypothetical she took over Matt Cutts' fitness blog, placed canonicals from his pages to their relevant counterpart on her site, moved content over as necessary, and placed a notice on the homepage of the Matt Cutts blog that it was going away but will be rolled into the Maille Ohye blog. This gives people enough time to switch over their bookmarks without bouncing from being redirected to somewhere they didn't expect. The canonicals would move equity to the main site, eventually pages would begin swapping out in the index, and eventually you would 301 redirect everything to their relevant counterparts on the main site once enough time has passed.

Following things that way I would assume that should be considered completely White Hat.

[William.Lau]

I agree with Mike and like to add that its only black hat if your sites are not related.

[Chris.Menke]

There wouldn't be any problem with buying the domain and the blog, moving the content from it page by page to your domain and redirecting each url on the other blog to the new url where the content can then be found on your domain.  It's a fairly normal thing to do when companies merge, get bought, change domains, or go out of business.  There's nothing black hat about that--it's just good business.

[Carla_Dawson]

Thanks everyone! I feel so much more secure about going after this same industry domain. I agree it is good business.

Thanks

Carla