Should I buy my competitor's domain name?

URL does well in Google search . . .

[Wonderstuff]

Some advice please. My site is based on a local city in The UK, and is about 18 months old (.com)

A competing site owner has asked me to make an offer on his domain name (same as mine but .co.uk). It is amateurish, and not optimised.

As far as I can see it does not have many back links, but ranks on page 2 of a G search for the city name (i.e. main keyword), and page 1 for Yahoo/AOL.

Mine is stuck in the sandbox (okay, if it exists). It ranks page 1 for MSN, and nowhere in any of the other search engines.

Should I consider an offer (leaving price on one side)? If I buy the .co.uk, should I make it the main URL or stick with the .com?

Many thanks.

[irishaff]

if the price is right. I bought a domain that was doing well in my area , but the owner i dont think realised its potential. If i were to guess i would say given hes a competitor he knows more about what its worth. It was a good back up to have in the event my main domain went tits up.

[jimbeetle]

Sure, make an offer. If you only want to develop one of the names, I'd choose to stick with the older.

However, you might want to consider developing both of them if you can. The content can be similar, but directed at different audiences (local vs. tourist, younger vs. older), using different "voices"; or you can split content between the domains depending on the audiences.

[etechsupport]

I think its good idea to buy it but why you want to leave the offer one side (if it is to your competitor side), I think you should keep it open to negotiate.

[stu2]

I think you should buy it for a number reasons,

1) Eliminate a direct competitor
2) Remove the badly designed website from being associated with yours.
3) If your doing business primarily in the uk I think the .co.uk name would be highly desireable for you because it's the "local" tld which most locals would accept and maybe even type into their browser. Giving you more traffic.
4) It's not sandboxed.

I would tend to redirect the .com to the .co.uk because of 3 and 4 above.

[4string]

I would buy it just so no one else does. You don't want someone else to get a head start on competing with you.

[Raymond]

I'd think twice before doing this.

There are more competitors than most of us are able to purchase. If your mindset is to "getrid" of a competitor, you are heading to a wrong direction. This is not true if you are one of the few dominant player in the field, and are fighting over market shares with other major dominant players.

If you are to buy his site, you should get a balance sheet or some form of P/L statement from him. Sites that make little to no money are a dime a dozen. There are ALOT of these sites out there that you can buy. Never over offer for them.

It sounds like your site is quite new, at least newer than the site you would like to purchase. If his site does better than yours (SEO, traffic, client base), I'd suggest you to just develop on his site. Don't waste time trying to transfer PR, redirect clients, merge contents. Just redirect your site to his. You might save yourself from alot of headaches and diasters.