Re-directing High PR Domains?

[Dentist]

Hi guys,

I recently stumbled upon a SEO question watching our competitors: They have bought some aged High PR domains (relevant or not) and they have re-directed those domains to their main domain. Let's assume I have a website with PR2, if I purchase an aged domain with PR 4 and re-direct it to my main domain does it make my domain increase to PR 4 or at least 3. Does it matter if the aged domain backlinks are relevant? Does it make a difference if instead of re-directing build another relevant website on PR 4 domain and then have one external link only to your main website (PR 2)?

Thank you,

[patrich]

Originally Posted by Dentist

Hi guys,

I recently stumbled upon a SEO question watching our competitors: They have bought some aged High PR domains (relevant or not) and they have re-directed those domains to their main domain. Let's assume I have a website with PR2, if I purchase an aged domain with PR 4 and re-direct it to my main domain does it make my domain increase to PR 4 or at least 3. Does it matter if the aged domain backlinks are relevant? Does it make a difference if instead of re-directing build another relevant website on PR 4 domain and then have one external link only to your main website (PR 2)?

Thank you,

99 percent of the time, if you see someone redirecting a domain, or several domains to their website, it is because they are using them as buffer sites to hit with backlinks.

So, they buy an aged/pr domain, redirect it to their main site and then blast that aged domain with a whole bunch of backlinks. This is usually done to avoid the main site from receiving any penalty or bad effect, because all of the backlinks are filtered through the redirected domain.

You can check if this is what your competition is doing, by simply running the redirected domain(s) through Yahoo Site Explorer or Seo Spyglass, etc., and see if there are a bunch of backlinks pointing to it.

In regards to the pr though, pr is generally not distributed on a 1 for 1 level. Meaning you are not going to get a pr4, because you have a pr4 backlink. It would take numerous pr4 backlinks to turn your site into a pr4 and there are a number of factors that would also have to be considered, like how many other sites does the pr4 page link to and so forth.

Hope that helps.

[Dentist]

That was interesting. I didn't think of penalizing aspect of it, though I checked one of the PR 3 domains they have re-directed to one of their sub-pages and it has no backlinks!
My assumption is if you have a PR 4 highly relevant domain and re-direct it to your domain (let's say PR 2 in this case), you should be getting 85% of re-directing link juice because you are the only outbound link for that, so your website should quickly jump to at least PR 3 but I want to verify this assumption.

Originally Posted by patrich

99 percent of the time, if you see someone redirecting a domain, or several domains to their website, it is because they are using them as buffer sites to hit with backlinks.

So, they buy an aged/pr domain, redirect it to their main site and then blast that aged domain with a whole bunch of backlinks. This is usually done to avoid the main site from receiving any penalty or bad effect, because all of the backlinks are filtered through the redirected domain.

You can check if this is what your competition is doing, by simply running the redirected domain(s) through Yahoo Site Explorer or Seo Spyglass, etc., and see if there are a bunch of backlinks pointing to it.

In regards to the pr though, pr is generally not distributed on a 1 for 1 level. Meaning you are not going to get a pr4, because you have a pr4 backlink. It would take numerous pr4 backlinks to turn your site into a pr4 and there are a number of factors that would also have to be considered, like how many other sites does the pr4 page link to and so forth.

Hope that helps.

[Dentist]

Ideas? Have you ever used this method? Does it work?

[patrich]

Originally Posted by Dentist

Ideas? Have you ever used this method? Does it work?

Redirecting a domain with pr to your website is going to pass some pagerank, how much I honestly have no idea. However, passing pagerank doesn't really matter, so I would have to question why you are concerned about the pr.

You don't rank for a search result because of the pr of your page. You rank because of your page relevancy and the backlinks to your page. So, by redirecting a domain you are just getting 1 backlink, which is probably not going to be enough to do anything for your rankings.

If I were going to even bother with a redirect of any sort, it would be to use it as a buffer for building backlinks and that is it.

[Dentist]

The field that we are going to rank well is very competitive. Most of the keywords have been identified as high competition by Google's keyword tool and just a few as medium competition. We have lot's of competitors (about 20 serious competitors) that mostly PR 3 or PR 4. They have different keyword strategies but most of the keywords everybody has targeted are similar. To me there a couple of reasons I want to increase our PR (currently at 2 and position of 16 in Google for the main keywords):
1- To me it's a leading indicator of how well we are doing. I don't see much chance to rank well for any of the main keywords before PR 3 or PR 4.
2- My understanding of the PR is, if you have a higher PR with relevant backlinks with right anchor texts then you will rank higher than the competitor with similar backlinks and lower PR. Also if your main page has high PR then it is a lot easier to target sub-pages for lower competitive keywords because some of the link juice goes from main page to sub-pages.
3- I think re-directing high PR domains or simply developing another relevant website on a high PR domain with one outbound link to our website may help us increase our PR and ranking dramatically.
I am using a bunch of different strategies (including relevant, high-PR, diverse backlinks) but I noticed one of our competitors that has one of the highest rankings has used the re-directing High PR domains as part of their strategy. It is hard to say for me how much it has contributed to their rank overall because they have 6000 backlinks and a lot of them are quality backlinks but these specific backlinks are some of the highest PR ones so I am wondering how much it works.

Originally Posted by patrich

Redirecting a domain with pr to your website is going to pass some pagerank, how much I honestly have no idea. However, passing pagerank doesn't really matter, so I would have to question why you are concerned about the pr.

You don't rank for a search result because of the pr of your page. You rank because of your page relevancy and the backlinks to your page. So, by redirecting a domain you are just getting 1 backlink, which is probably not going to be enough to do anything for your rankings.

If I were going to even bother with a redirect of any sort, it would be to use it as a buffer for building backlinks and that is it.

[patrich]

Originally Posted by Dentist

The field that we are going to rank well is very competitive. Most of the keywords have been identified as high competition by Google's keyword tool and just a few as medium competition. We have lot's of competitors (about 20 serious competitors) that mostly PR 3 or PR 4. They have different keyword strategies but most of the keywords everybody has targeted are similar. To me there a couple of reasons I want to increase our PR (currently at 2 and position of 16 in Google for the main keywords):
1- To me it's a leading indicator of how well we are doing. I don't see much chance to rank well for any of the main keywords before PR 3 or PR 4.
2- My understanding of the PR is, if you have a higher PR with relevant backlinks with right anchor texts then you will rank higher than the competitor with similar backlinks and lower PR. Also if your main page has high PR then it is a lot easier to target sub-pages for lower competitive keywords because some of the link juice goes from main page to sub-pages.
3- I think re-directing high PR domains or simply developing another relevant website on a high PR domain with one outbound link to our website may help us increase our PR and ranking dramatically.
I am using a bunch of different strategies (including relevant, high-PR, diverse backlinks) but I noticed one of our competitors that has one of the highest rankings has used the re-directing High PR domains as part of their strategy. It is hard to say for me how much it has contributed to their rank overall because they have 6000 backlinks and a lot of them are quality backlinks but these specific backlinks are some of the highest PR ones so I am wondering how much it works.

Again, I have never seen any direct correlation with a pages pr and their ability to rank for a designated search term. This is from experience in ranking hundreds of different search terms in nearly as many different niches.

I have pr0 pages that outrank pr6 pages and I have pr4+ pages that don't rank for their search terms. What really matters are the backlinks to the page, the pages onpage optimization and so forth.

This is what it comes down to, redirecting a higher pr domain to your site isn't going to hurt your rankings, but I don't think its going to give you the benefits that you think its going to.

Its hard to say exactly, because I don't know what your site or the competition looks like. What types of backlinks do they have? What does their onpage stuff look like, how old is the site, how many links do they have, how many links do you have, etc.

I am also not sure what you are referring to in regards to the competition in google's keyword tool. They do not show the competition for any search terms. If you are referring to the green competition bar in the Adwords keyword tool, that is showing the competition among adwords advertisers, not the search competition. In other words, if its completely green, or close to, its telling you that a lot of people are competing for that term via adwords ads. It is not an indicator of how competitive a search term is in the search results.

To determine competitiveness of a search term, you need to analyze the top 10 results, find their average number of backlinks for each page that is ranking, not the whole site, look at their optimization, etc.

If you want to shoot me a pm with the keyword in question, I would be happy to take a look, but it sounds like you might be going about this the wrong way all together.

[InternetMarketingIQ]

Domains do NOT have PR.

Page Rank ranks PAGES!

[Targeted Traffic]

why not simply concentrate on unique quality content and quality back links...

[C Rebecca]

Its true that redirecting a high PR domain to new domain will transfer the PR.

If you have bought a high PR domain, make sure it is relevant to your existind domain and to your business too.

[LifeIsGood]

Originally Posted by Dentist

The field that we are going to rank well is very competitive. Most of the keywords have been identified as high competition by Google's keyword tool and just a few as medium competition. We have lot's of competitors (about 20 serious competitors) that mostly PR 3 or PR 4. They have different keyword strategies but most of the keywords everybody has targeted are similar. To me there a couple of reasons I want to increase our PR (currently at 2 and position of 16 in Google for the main keywords):
1- To me it's a leading indicator of how well we are doing. I don't see much chance to rank well for any of the main keywords before PR 3 or PR 4.
2- My understanding of the PR is, if you have a higher PR with relevant backlinks with right anchor texts then you will rank higher than the competitor with similar backlinks and lower PR. Also if your main page has high PR then it is a lot easier to target sub-pages for lower competitive keywords because some of the link juice goes from main page to sub-pages.
3- I think re-directing high PR domains or simply developing another relevant website on a high PR domain with one outbound link to our website may help us increase our PR and ranking dramatically.
I am using a bunch of different strategies (including relevant, high-PR, diverse backlinks) but I noticed one of our competitors that has one of the highest rankings has used the re-directing High PR domains as part of their strategy. It is hard to say for me how much it has contributed to their rank overall because they have 6000 backlinks and a lot of them are quality backlinks but these specific backlinks are some of the highest PR ones so I am wondering how much it works.

All else being equal (relative to your competitors' sites), you would also consider the relevance of your domain name-to-keywords, on-page SEO, and the age of the domain(s).

Also, due to the recent blog network debacle (resulting in high PR domains being suddenly de-indexed), potentially tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of high PR sites (with backlinks) could be 'unloaded' by their current owners to unsuspecting buyers. Even Godaddy has begun reselling these de-indexed sites. Buyer, be careful. Best to do super due diligence.

Relative to your initial question as to your competitor's newly acquired high PR sites, and whether or not they can pass along page rank - I don't see why not. After all, it's a link (or two) and it follows the exact same premise as linking to any other site as long as it's hosted on a different IP class, etc.to minimize breadcrumbs.

[Edit]: It is my understanding that a site which has been penalized (when re-directed), may potentially 'pass along' those penalties. Best to check it out.

LifeIsGood ~ It's About To Get Even Better!

[gardenkeeper]

Here I think another important factor is that the purchased site should be theme-relevant with the target site.
Of course, this idea is feasible and useful.