Strategies for best use of competitors expired domain

[IsaCleanse]

I recently bought an old competitors expired domain that was ranking around the page 2 or 3 on Google for most keywords that I target.

Curious as to best strategy for utilizing this domain:

1. set up some content with back links to my own domain
2. Set up redirects to set up all of the competitors old domain URLs to corresponding sections on my website
3. Something else?

[Tymen]

Hi Sandi,

I would make a One-pager with a catch all URL's. This way all the old url's of the site will go to this page and you get no 404's. On this page you explain that there is nothing there anymore and you should go to your site. I would not put to many links on the page.

Eventually the authority of the competitors site will go but if you have everything in place you will get it. What you could also do is login into the Seach Console account of the competitor and see which pages have good content. This content you could copy to your site before you take it offline.

Good luck!

Tymen

[ThomasHarvey]

Expanding on what Tymen has said,

This could be a good strategy, but why would you not just 301 redirect the whole site to a page on your own site (explaining that they don't exist anymore). This way I see you getting more value to your site (one hop through the redirect instead of one hop from the redirect and the link)

Also, something that may be worth looking into is if they have any high value links, seeing where they come from and explaining the company is not existent and trying to get the links that they once had.

[IsaCleanse]

Hi Tymen! Thanks for your feedback sounds like a good idea! Could you please elaborate a bit what you mean as if you are trying to explain to someone that is a novice - ie "I would make a One-pager with a catch all URL's. This way all the old url's of the site will go to this page and you get no 404's. On this page you explain that there is nothing there anymore and you should go to your site. I would not put to many links on the page."

[Tymen]

Hi Sandi,

You make one page with a "press release" writing that the company is been taken over by (yourcompany.com). All the other URL's you redirect to this page. On this page you can link to the most important places you want on your own website.

This way the authority of the old competitors domain will be forwarded to yours. And after like 6 months/1year you could link the whole domain to your site.

As Thomas mentions below it is a good idea to check which links could be of use (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/) and contact the most important to change the link domain to yours.

Hope it helps! Regards, Tymen

[IsaCleanse]

Thank you both, finally getting around to doing this now!