Getting out of the sandbox

Using an old "seasoned" domain name

[meingallsphp]

Hello, I am an SEO newbie, so if this has been addressed, please refer me onto the post. We are starting a holiday home listing service with some very unique features, in a non US country. It is far to competitive in the US to even try such a venture. We have had a .com website up for about 4 years, with very basic optimization for some relevant keywords ie vacation rentals, etc, but no links to it. It is a pagerank of 2 and is showing up in the Yahoo and Google crawl but not in the ODP directory. We are thinking of using the url and optimizing it, doing a links campaign, social networking etc on it, so we don't have to wait forever to get it to show up in the search engines. Our client base of "eyes" is in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. We are going to purchase the relevant country domain and 301 redirect it to the .com site.

Any thoughts on this decision?

Thanks,

Jenica

[Quadrille]

If the site has been there four years, then sandbox should not be a problem.

However, rather than totally rebuild the site, you'd do a little better by adding new content first, then removing the old after a few weeks; continuity cannot hurt and may help. In fact, you may consider keeping some of the old content. Every bit helps. Even if you have not done well in the US does not mean that you'll never do anything!

Whatever you decide, DO NOT totally rebuild the navigation system. Renaming a file or folder appears to SEs as removing one and placing another. Do that right around the site, and the SEs see a totally new site, and treat it that way.

Also, be careful of duplicate content issues. A few weeks of overlapping new pages and old is unlikely to do any long term damage, whereas quick change may well hurt you.

[meingallsphp]

I wonder if it would be best to use this .com site in combination with a co.nz site. The .com site has been out there as an active site for years and is in the yahoo and google directory but not under New Zealand holiday homes obviously.

One concern is that part of our client base, holiday home owners ( kiwis in this case) will find objection with the url, grand vacation rentals, and the fact that it is not a co.nz site.

Kiwis are notoriously anti- anything that seems to be putting on airs. The word "grand" could be a big turn-off to them.

However, the audience we market to via the search engines-ie, holiday home renters, is mostly Europeans and Australians.

They identify with the term holiday homes and also vacation rentals, and probably don't object to the word "grand". So we are thinking of using our affordableholidayhomes.co.nz for our holiday home owners to use as a way to sign up for the service, and grandvacationrentals.com for our holiday home seekers.

Any thoughts?

Mel

[Quadrille]

If you are catering to different visitor needs, then having two sites may be the answer.

You'll need to weigh up the advantages of the .nz name in NZ - and I'd agree it may be significant - with the extra effort and demands of parallel web sites, and the risks of duplicate content issues if you are not careful!

You may find a similar situation with Aistralia; I doubt .com is a problem in English-speakers in Europe.

In SEO terms, you are going to be dividing effort, visitors and ranking between three sites - but being 'local' and getting into key local directories and guides may more than compensate.

Either way, it'll not hurt to buy all the domain names and 301 where you don't need to use them.

[meingallsphp]

Thanks that was very helpful. I will take your comments into consideration and would certainly make sure that we had different content on both sites so it does not appear spammy.

Mel