Another 301 Redirect SEO Question -- Should I just Start Over?

5 replies
  • SEO
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I think I made a mistake and am just seeing how to best fix it...

I researched a niche and found the two best keywords for the niche are words where one is just plural of another.... waco restaurant and waco restaurant s. The plural had about double the searches. However, someone typing in the name of the website "waco restaurant guide" would not type the plural.

So I bought the singular name wacorestaurantguide dot com and built a site around it of 20+ pages already. I now see I am missing traffic by not pursuing the waco restaurants keyword though.

The question is this: If I purchase wacorestaurantsguide dot com and do a 301 redirect from wacorestaurantsguide dot com to wacorestaurantguide dot com, without building any content at all on the plural site, will I receive any SEO value just from having the plural name?

Or should I build another site with different content for the new site?

I am a little confused about what I should do...

Thanks in advance for the help.
#301 #question #redirect #seo #start
  • Profile picture of the author butters
    My question is, why didn't you go target the plural in the first place? Google would then pick up on both phrases, plural and non plural. Anyways, I wouldn't buy a new domain, I would just adjust my content and back links to suit both keywords and on site SEO of course. Thats just my opinion though.
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    • Profile picture of the author centextkt
      My question is, why didn't you go target the plural in the first place?
      The main reason is I didn't think it was a common name for "...Restaurants Guide" for branding purposes. I know it sounds stupid and just a beginner's mistake I guess, but that is what I did.
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      • Profile picture of the author butters
        I would of done the same thing for the URL, if the plural doesn't make sense, then leave it, if you can optimize content for a plural and still make sense, do it.
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  • Profile picture of the author MarkAse
    I think you'll be better off leaving your URL alone and worrying about building links. You've only got 13 links right now.

    Neither one looks like it should be exceedingly hard to rank for, although you've got the same competitors in the restaurant niche that we all run into-trip advisor etc
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  • Profile picture of the author mloveridge17
    Now, in regards to your concern about the 301 redirect, Matt Cutts from Google has come out and said that 301's will not hurt your rankings. That's why so many people recommend them. If you create a backlinking campain to the plural domain, you should see some SEO benefit (since the 301 is perfectly designed for this purpose).

    If you ask me, you are confusing the issue by adding an extra keyword - "guide" that you didn't research (from what I can tell). Given the limited amount of information provided in your post, it sounds like you found a specific set of keywords that you want to target, turned the phrase around and added the word "guide" to it.

    If you are purchasing a new domain, I would recommend going for something like "guidetowacorestaurants.com" or better yet, just "wacorestaurants.com" because they are a closer match to the exact keyword you are targeting. Of course, I haven't searched those domains to see if they are available.

    Good luck!
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