So during the Matt Cutts in Hotseat presentation at Pubcon Brett gave me the mic to ask a question (heh dangerous I know). While I did get my question out and Matt did kinda answered I think it’s a topic that could use a little enlightenment, especially considering there has been some back room chatter about it recently.
Let’s say I own Really-Great-Chia-Pets.com and to protect my assets I want to go out and register some variations with/without the hyphens, possibly a few misspellings and the .net and .org versions. From Google’s point of view are there any things I should worry about doing so I don’t get myself in trouble.
Let’s say I want to eliminate my competition and I buy their website Super-Duper-Chia-Pets.com . How should I integrate the existing content and redirect the existing link equity? What other factors would Google consider questionable?
What if I wanted to buy a somewhat related topic website like Mikey-Mikes-House-of-Topiary.com . From Google’s point of view what would be a best practice for integrating and redirecting the existing links?
Lastly let’s look at unrelated domains, what’s Googles opinion of me redirecting Celestial-Folk-Ballerinas.com into my chia-pet website? How close or far apart do the subjects have to be before I make the transition from good to bad?
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{ 17 comments }
Here here! I asked a few of the Googlers at PubCon but got no official answer. My biggest question is the same as your unrelated sites question. I want to merge two semi-off-topic sites but don’t want to “dilute” the relevancy of the main site. I’d love to test, but the main site is too important to risk a negative effect.
In my opinion redirecting the misspellings and the versions of your domain with/without hyphens, you are trying to help your visitors find clearly what they are looking for anywaybe hurt for it at all. Not sure if it will give you any positive gains, but you should not be negativly impacted from it, and you will not. Now redirecting an unrelated site to your domain, I think Google just will not give that any positive link love. They will just ignore the links.
The underlying question is, “Why are we seeking permission from Google to do webmaster things when it’s Google’s responsibility to make their search engine work according to our typical practices?”
Just because Google is the most popular SE doesn’t mean that they can now make the rules. They need to go back to coding their SE to be better than the others rather than spending so much time trying to make us code or setup sites to their specifications.
I’m hoping for more than an academic answer, and perhaps even an integration tool / reporter built into GWT.
@Marisa, Google has no responsibility other than to its shareholders, within the constraints of ethics and legality. The marketplace will have its say, of course: if Google’s results are trumped by those of other engines, search users will migrate elsewhere. If not, um, not!
@Mark V. McDonnell, I’ll leave any questions of legalities regarding Google’s SE practices in light of their online advertising business to the legal eagles, justice department and FTC. Ethically, I’d say Google’s “do no harm” has become a sham, making it past time to remove it from their site.
I do understand the concepts of supply and demand, free marketplace and capitalism. The question is not IF google will tumble from the top, but WHEN. In the meantime, Google has become the new Microsoft, ethically and perhaps legally. One main difference: it’s much easier to switch your search engine than it is to switch your OS. Someone ought to point that out to the GOOG.
I think he had an opportunity to expound on it during that whole Aaron Wall mess, they choose to talk in private and not share any information. I’d suspect that will be same response to this plea.
I can answer all of the above questions pretty accurately, I think this makes me special.
I think your are also asking whether one rich site is better than several niche sites, and Google won’t answer that. It’s a closely-held SEO secret, lol, despite all the SEO “articles” speaking with authority on the topic.
What does your test network tell you?
I guess the question that you want Matt to answer is if I do purchase my competitors domain(s), am I purchasing the link equity or not? If I am, do I pass it along by using a 301 redirect under current industry understandings?
Right on the money. This is such a common situation, in fact it’s unavoidable if you’re trying to protect your domain by registering variations.
Hey Michael! If you buy typos, I’d 301 them to your main site. Even things that you win in UDRP arbitration can be 301′ed. For example, if someone bought porngoogle.com and Google won it in UDRP, it would make sense to 301 it to your main domain.
What I *wouldn’t* recommend is try to register unrelated expired domains in an attempt to get those pre-existing links to count toward your domain. I would also avoid registering-and-301′ing typos of competitors’ domains or other completely unrelated domains.
See for example my dialog with Jeffrey on this page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html#c9006371411647145471 where I talk about a concrete example. In fact, I’ll include just a little bit of one comment:
“If you look at it from a search engine’s point of view, we don’t just see avivadirectory.com. We see that plus the other 9-10 directories. And 10 directories, one of which is an expired domain, starts to look a little more serious to us than just the one directory.
And then if you dig a little deeper on the expired domains aspect, we start to see things like concordmachamber.org. That used to be the Concord Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce, but now it does a 301 redirect to avivadirectory.com. Or fresnoearthday.org, which used to be about an Earth Day, but now does a 301 redirect to a section of avivadirectory.com. Or thingymabobber.com, which used to be… well, you get the idea.”
You can tell from that discussion that I wasn’t thrilled to see offtopic expired domains doing a 301 to another domain owned by the same person. I suspect no search engine would be thrilled in that case.
Hey Matt, Ok I get the logic on the off topic ones, but what about the somewhat related ones, like the topiary one I mentioned. It’s easy to deal with both ends of the spectrum which are extreme, but the fuzzy middle ground is where the problems come in.
A good example was your googledashboard.com one; that’s related to Google, but we don’t have anything like a dashboard. Something like that you could still do a 301 redirect. My advice would be to ask a few non-SEO people, and if they feel like the domains are pretty far apart, then I’d leave them un-301′ed until you decide to develop the less related domains. Or you could park it. But I’d be careful about 301′ing domains that are pretty far afield from the original domain to the original domain.
Multiple domains with unique content are fine. Redirects are not. What value are search results filled with various url extensions of the same content. Multiple urls and websites publishing duplicate content become clutter.
Marisa, “The underlying question is, “Why are we seeking permission from Google to do webmaster things when it’s Google’s responsibility to make their search engine work according to our typical practices?—
Certainly a fair question, but I suspect you know the answer. Because most people want every last user they can get and managing your sites so the most popular search engine ranks them the highest is still the easiest method.
Is that a good thing? Probably not, but that’s the way it is at the moment.
Seriously i don’t like get monopoly by this big player. And i think having multiple domain display the same content will create problem in future if they upgrade their mechanism in judging PR.
Google just adding more and more restriction to web marketer
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