Purchasing a site for a 301 Re-direct

[Bush_JSM]

Hi Mozzers,

I have a question regarding a tactic I'm considering for a client.  My client has a web hosting company and is ranking well for his keywords and in position 3 for his main term.

There is a site available on flippa that is a keyword rich domain and has a decent link portfolio and domain authority and the price is attractive.

I'm considering buying it to 301 it to his domain but I've never done this tactic before.

Is this grey/black hat? Has anyone done this before and to what extent did it work?

Thanks

Bush

[Ontarioseo]

We did this a year or so back for a client merger - the soon-to-be-defunct domain was redirected to the new site and definitely did help things, but only after a delay of about 60 days. Having said that, the tactic would have passed human scrutiny because of the situation - not sure if that would factor in here.

Are the sites of a similar theme? If they are you could buy the new site and then email as many of the linking domains as possible and ask them if they would be willing to change their link to point to your client's existing domain. It's more work but could end up being a great solution if they agree to tweak the anchor text for you as well. Plus, you then have another relationship - and you can never have too many of those when link building.

[Bush_JSM]

Hi Wayne,

Thanks for your response. May I ask what the 60 day delay was down to?

They are of similar themes yes. I really like the idea of contacting the providers of the current links as well.

At this point I'm going off the stats on flippa so need to dig deeper on traffic and domain age etc.

Any negatives? If we do it we'll do it once and once only but will Google hit us with anything?

Bush

[Ontarioseo]

I can't say for sure what caused the delay and I'll be honest and admit I wasn't paying a lot of attention to it so my time frame could be off by a fair amount.

Negatives - it really still boils down to a form of manipulation and that always has the potential to go wrong right? It's the link profile that's going to help you anyway, so if the price is reasonable I'd go the "purchase/request new links" approach.

[Bush_JSM]

Wayne - you've been really helpful thanks.

Much appreciated - I'll check the link graph out in more detail now

Bush

[dittoeffect]

Wayne gave a good answer.

From a great deal of research I have found that a 301 redirect loses some of the link juice to avoid people abusing the power of building many domains and then forwarding them all to one main domain.

In my opinion this is well worth it still especially when you don't have to go through the work to have established the link portfolio.

One thing to look out for though is making sure that the link portfolio really is as good as you think it is.

Look into the backlinks and see if they are from reputable sources which will stay there or if thy are just a mass of profile backlinks and comment spam which could just make it seem like they have a lot of good links or even get those links removed later on.

At the very least the 301 redirect will help get the robots to your site to increase crawl frequency which i find to be great when you want your pages to be indexed and updated quickly on google.