A little background:
I have a site that was hit hard by panda.
The site had a mixture of quality content and thin content. The thin content was wiped out by panda. The quality stuff was largely unaffected.
I have replaced some of the thin content with much higher quality content. Google has ignored the improved pages for the last three months. The improved pages use the same url as the old thin pages.
I have a significant number of new and improved articles that I can post at any time. I was lucky enough to find some talented writers that product very good articles.
I happen upon a much better domain name that is both keyword rich and brandable.
The only problem is that it is the dot net version.
The dot com is owned by someone else (he has 7,000 domains) and I have zero chance of getting it at a price I can afford.
The dot com version has a place holder site up but is nowhere to be found in Google. Interestingly the site doesn’t have any ads. It is basically a mashup of rss feeds. He has a bunch of other sites that are templated exactly the same with different rss feeds. I have no idea how the sites are paying for themselves.
My questions:
Would you develop the new domain knowing that you would probably never get the dot com version?
Or would you continue to improve the original domain and hope Google recognizes your efforts?
I am inclined to move to the new domain because of the better keywords and brandability. I also like the idea of starting over with a quality site from the start. However, I am concerned about type in traffic and the possibility of the dot com owner developing his site to funnel off some of my traffic.
