Buying a website and redirecting everything

[pbhatt]

We are considering purchasing an existing website in our industry with a domain authority of 52 and 20K inlinks and redirecting it to our new website with a domain authority of 26 and 1,000 inlinks. Would this be the best way to improve our new site's authority and inlinks? Would Google penalize us for doing that or would it effectively transfer the old sites authority to us?

[kdaly100]

No and No

You cant transfer authority really you may transfer the traffic for a while by the redirect but I would stick with the old site and work it as is.

[joseph.chambers]

• In google webmaster tools you would need to verify the domain.
• Get a list of similar pages your website has with the other one you want to buy.
• 301 all of the pages to a similar page on your existing website.
• Tell google you did so in webmaster tools.

The reason you want to 301 these pages is because you want to rank for those as well and you dont want all of the people finding links on the web and being redirected to your home page. The authority will happen over time.

[pbhatt]

Thanks Kieran and Joseph. @Kieran, we would be taking over the company, so we wouldn't want that site to function separately anymore. @Joseph, that was the plan we would follow when we take over.

What would happen to the existing rankings of the old site at that point? If the old site (that we are buying) ranked on the first page for "cool widgets" and we are on page 10 right now, would we see an immediate improvement, or would all of those rankings be lost?

[linztm]

As Joseph said, using a 301 redirect will not be tracked as a referral but instead will be direct.  Taking over a company with many indexed pages can be time consuming but as he said, over time your authority and in links will be improved.