SEO Battle: New KW-Rich Domain VS Aged Non-KW Rich Domain

[Brad Campbell]

Guys and gals,

What are your thoughts on this:

For ranking organically both fast and for the long term (and when targeting longer tail keywords)...

... have you found it better to buy a new domain with the exact kw in it and build a smaller "sniper-like" site that's totally SEO'd for this target kw...

Or, is it better to make a page off an older, more authoritative domain (let's say one several years old with thousands of indexed pages and over 10k links to the domain in total)... even if this new page has nothing to do with the content of this site or the domain name of this site...

I'm in the early stages of testing this, but as I assumed, I've been finding it much quicker/easier to get ranked for completely unrelated kw's off the back end of my 3 year old weight loss site, as compared to buying a new kw-rich domain and starting from scratch...

It's interesting since I blogged about nothing but weight loss for the past 2 years... and now I can throw up a page on "Yamaha XYZ receiver" and with some strategic link building, achieve a top ranking in no time.

I mean, if you think about it -- what's Wikipedia about? What's eHow about? What's About.com about...

... Oh yeah, EVERYTHING ;-)

So why couldn't my weight loss site now become a big fat authority site that's now about EVERYTHING as well?

Thoughts?

Anyone tested this?

My point is: I think a lot of people are sitting on gold and they don't even realize it. Lots of ppl have old sites that don't get much traffic, but have lots of indexed pages, a decent amount of incoming links and lots of trust built up...

... but b/c they aren't producing money, the owner may think it's worthless.

I say throw up some product review pages off the back end, sprinkle in some smart linking to those pages and 'shock' that old site back to life ;-)

Curious to hear your thoughts...

-B

[Dellco]

Originally Posted by Brad Campbell

Guys and gals,

What are your thoughts on this:

For ranking organically both fast and for the long term (and when targeting longer tail keywords)...

... have you found it better to buy a new domain with the exact kw in it and build a smaller "sniper-like" site that's totally SEO'd for this target kw...

Or, is it better to make a page off an older, more authoritative domain (let's say one several years old with thousands of indexed pages and over 10k links to the domain in total)... even if this new page has nothing to do with the content of this site or the domain name of this site...

I'm in the early stages of testing this, but as I assumed, I've been finding it much quicker/easier to get ranked for completely unrelated kw's off the back end of my 3 year old weight loss site, as compared to buying a new kw-rich domain and starting from scratch...

It's interesting since I blogged about nothing but weight loss for the past 2 years... and now I can throw up a page on "Yamaha XYZ receiver" and with some strategic link building, achieve a top ranking in no time.

I mean, if you think about it -- what's Wikipedia about? What's eHow about? What's About.com about...

... Oh yeah, EVERYTHING ;-)

So why couldn't my weight loss site now become a big fat authority site that's now about EVERYTHING as well?

Thoughts?

Anyone tested this?

My point is: I think a lot of people are sitting on gold and they don't even realize it. Lots of ppl have old sites that don't get much traffic, but have lots of indexed pages, a decent amount of incoming links and lots of trust built up...

... but b/c they aren't producing money, the owner may think it's worthless.

I say throw up some product review pages off the back end, sprinkle in some smart linking to those pages and 'shock' that old site back to life ;-)

Curious to hear your thoughts...

-B

I don't think this would work unless the keyword has something to do with your subject matter.

But more importantly, how would your visitors perceive you? Say you have a strong 5 year old PR 5 religious website, well regarded in the community, and then you go make new pages promoting the latest swimsuit model calenders - All your carefully cultivated reputation will evaporate in that instant.

Of course, it's not that drastic usually, but.... you get the gist.

I suspect Google is taking a similar approach. Remember that LSI is programmed into the algorithm. That is why 5 page EMD sites are still relevant in their algo, and can often beat out far more authoritative sites, if the algo thinks the small EMD site is more relevant.

This is one of the instances.

[Brad Campbell]

Yeah I see both sides of it, which is why I never thought to try it for the longest time. But the pages I've been putting up are getting ranked just fine, despite not having anything to do with my primary topic of weight loss.

About the community, I agree totally, which is why these are pages (not posts) that are in no way linked up to any other page or post on the site. Therefore, the only way you'd even know it existed is if you knew the exact url or were doing a Google search for the long tail kw the page is on.

I guess this is why it's impt to test things...

[Dellco]

Just to share with you as I recall, I have observed a site doing this before, their main business was selling some kids stuff, but they tried putting up pages for selling some health products (as an affiliate). As you can imagine, it has no relation with their core theme, and they also buried it within their site.

They were actually ranking well for a while, until one fine day, that page got dumped several pages down and never recovered since.

I suspect a manual penalty was applied. It could be because such pages are regarded as "doorway pages". Maybe all sites are placed into categories once the algo establishes you as such, like a directory would.

[Brad Campbell]

Originally Posted by Dellco

Just to share with you as I recall, I have observed a site doing this before, their main business was selling some kids stuff, but they tried putting up pages for selling some health products (as an affiliate). As you can imagine, it has no relation with their core theme, and they also buried it within their site.

They were actually ranking well for a while, until one fine day, that page got dumped several pages down and never recovered since.

I suspect a manual penalty was applied. It could be because such pages are regarded as "doorway pages".

That's what I was wondering -- I know from a short term perspective, it seems to work great, but for long term... you have to wonder if the rankings will last.

I'd think as long as it was still high quality and honest, pages like this would do fine... I mean, I'm not "hiding" them b/c I'm ashamed of them... they're actually very well written and very honest reviews... it's just that they don't all have much to do with weight loss ;-)

I'll keep ya updated if I notice anything crazy in the coming weeks.

Thanks for feedback.