I've operated blue-widgets.com successfully for the last 4 years or so. I recently purchased the bluewidgets.com domain, which is an active website with 165 IBL's, originally registered in 2002.
My question is how to maximize the value of the newly purchased domain -- redirect? Keep it as separate domain, and link to the dashed version? Other options?
Thanks in advance.
You're only going to derive (SEO) value from the new name if you maintain the existing content that the previous owner had on his site.
Of course, you may not even be able to do that. Did you buy the content as well as the domain name?
If you simply want to move your content to the new domain, without being penalized, then keep the old site up for a time while doing a 301 redirect to the new domain.
Depending on your agreement with the seller, you can put an announcement up saying you've bought the site and hope to continue to serve existing users (to help retain loyal users). You can maintain pages for the URLs with in-bound links, but you can expect your ranking to change (up or down) if you change the content.
With only 165 inbound links, it sounds like the site may not have been SEO'd and these are natural inbound links. If so, perhaps you got yourself a deal. Don't worry so much about SEO, but concern yourself with not p*ssing off users who follow those links. If you do that, you'll probably also do the right thing for SEO.
Be honest. If your site is very similar to the one you bought - and your sales agreement permits it - tell your users that the site has changed hands, and tell them what will be changing.
If the site is much different, then you should be equally honest - let users know that they are landing on a different site than they have been using, and that it's on a different topic. I'd even go so far as to contact the sites linking to you to ask them to REMOVE the links. Links that are inappropriate will ultimately hurt you rather than help you.
What I WOULDN'T do is to try to maintain landing pages for inbound links, with the original content, in hopes of maintaining search engine "karma", if the rest of your site is off-topic. This could easily get you penalized for trying to game the system.
thanks for the reply. I bought just the domain, not the content, which is thin and poor. The links in also are pretty much seo'd garbage, but the site does have some decent rankings in msn and yahoo for a couple of key terms.
the reason i bought it is for the type-in traffic and to remove confusion, anything beyond that is a bonus. want to keep everything as "above board" as possible.
