Private Networks - Utilizing 301 Redirects

[mark@1to101]

If you have a bunch of sites in your network that are currently PR0, but which have "nice" domain names, such as being education or reference related, is it worthwhile to purchase some cheap random PR2+ expired domains and 301 redirect them to your preferred sites in your network?

I know that the domain names for sites in a private network aren't necessarily important, in that you're not trying to rank those sites for anything, but I feel that education and reference related domain names look more professional, which is important if you need to give link reports to people.

So, what do you think? Is it worth buying extra expired domains to boost up your existing ones?

[Chris Sweeney]

I'd be more concerned with the actual results that I'm getting as opposed to the domain names in the reports, but that's just me. If an off-topic domain is helping me rank, I wouldn't really mind because, well, it's helping me rank. 301-ing the expired high PR domain to your original site is a way of doing it, so if it makes you feel better doing it that way, go for it.

[gearmonkey]

@ sweeny

I like to buy domains that are somewhat relevant. So if your money site is about "herbal tea", I feel a domain (with backlinks) about "colombian coffee" is worth pursuing.

That said, I personally wouldn't 301 it. I'd make it into a blog, and add a high quality article with links/keywords phrase pointing back to your money site.

[Chris Sweeney]

Originally Posted by gearmonkey

@ sweeny

I like to buy domains that are somewhat relevant. So if your money site is about "herbal tea", I feel a domain (with backlinks) about "colombian coffee" is worth pursuing.

That said, I personally wouldn't 301 it. I'd make it into a blog, and add a high quality article with links/keywords phrase pointing back to your money site.

Relevancy is indeed a good way of doing it, especially if one's site comes under a manual review of Google; it will look a lot more natural. I'm pretty lazy though and have most of my links coming from irrelevant sources . But those irrelevant links have been working just fine, and when I look at competitors links (even for high competition keywords like "car insurance"), they are getting them from irrelevant sources as well, so, to be honest, I never really had a need to go the "relevancy" route. Perhaps I'll try testing it sometime.