Acquiring a Competitor for Link Juice Rankings

Is it possible to acquire a competitor with better organic ranking and traffic to push the link juice to the primary site? What would be the best practice to handle this acquisition?

Option 1: You can do 301 redirects for every page from the acquired site to the new site (but I was told that doing too many redirects can cause penalties.. Anyone know how many?) The difficulty with this is that if you redirect the home page, essentially all of the subfolders and content will go with it, ruining the ability to properly redirect, especially if the root domain is one of the key pages for link juice.

Option 2: You can take the existing site acquired, and replace the content with new content (not duplicate from the original site though), and essentially you are white labeling your brand with that link juice. Will this actually work? You may ask, is it worth it? Well if we're talking about millions of hits per month, the key is to not lose any of the link juice or as very little as possible.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I don't really understand your query here. Are you talking about getting your competitors links to your site or you are trying to move your site to a new one.

And 301 redirects doesn't effect. No matter how many you create them. Its your site so its your choice and if you are moving your site then you have to make all the 301 redirects those are necessary anyway.

seomotionz said:

I don't really understand your query here. Are you talking about getting your competitors links to your site or you are trying to move your site to a new one.

And 301 redirects doesn't effect. No matter how many you create them. Its your site so its your choice and if you are moving your site then you have to make all the 301 redirects those are necessary anyway.

Click to expand...

Yes, I'm talking about purchasing a competitors site that sells the exact category of products. The idea is to either keep the company branding / domain and host the website with the same products from the original site, just re-wording all of the content (but with the same photos).

Someone quoted me that Matt Cutts stating in 2008 that when a website domain gets transferred over to someone, it gets reset to 0; so I'm a little curious about how they would find this out if the Whois changes to private.

This is the ideal strategy instead of redirecting to the original site...

Take new site and put it on a better platform but keeping the top level menu items / categories, tags.
Add products from original site, but re-name the product titles, descriptions.

This way, to avoid any issue with losing Google rankings, the site will have the same organic rankings, we just need to continue to handle any 301 redirect errors that may occur.

Seems like an option that would work, right?

If you bought a second website you wouldn't simply 301 it to your site or link it over... you'd keep and PROMOTE both sites. This way you can own two top 10 SERP results potentially. The more sites you own in the SERPS the more traffic you get. Killing a ranking site just to TRY to boost your SEO is a waste in my book.

-ThopHayt

There was a thread here on BHW about a certain method where the guy talks about building two sites with varied footprints. One being the money site and the other like a normal looking affiliate site. He then uses the second site to recommend products sold on site #1, as a way to build trust (not just SEO-wise) but also for his website visitors.

Moral of the story: If competitor site links to other products, you can change those links, just run it as it was and link/recommend products/pages to your main site. Simple as that. You might have to run 2 different sites, but if the traffic is good, you could monetize site #2 with whatever ads so that they money can pay for supporting the site itself.

Buying a competitor site, deleting content and 301'ing to your site is silly and I bet a year or two later the link juice will dry out.