Buying Competitor Site

Best way to redirect their traffic?

[Phil_C]

Hi,

I'm in the process of buyer my competitor's website traffic. Their current setup is a number of domains all redirecting to their main shop domain. I will want to have all the traffic arriving at this domain, further redirected to my own. One of the domains pointing their shop domain has a superb position in google and I wouldn't want this to disappear as a result of bad redirection.

What's the best method to use here? I guess I could either have their ISP redirect their main shop domain to me, or have them alter their index page to do a redirect.

Any thoughts on this appreciated!

[PSilver]

The best redirect for search engines are 301 permanent redirects, as Google will then transfer the Page Rank from the original page to your new pages and drop the old pages from it's index.

Make sure the new pages are relevant for the same terms as the ones you're replacing, or they'll just get dropped again on the next major update.

When you have the redirects set up, which can be through the web server, or via individual pages using a server-side language (PHP, ASP, whatever) submit the home page of the original website again to the engines through their normal Add URL pages and you should get re-spidered and rank transferred a little quicker than if you waited for the spider to come around normally.

[Phil_C]

Excellent, thanks very much, that's exactly what I needed to know :)