We've been working on getting some more links for one of our sites... currently has about 3,000 backlinks, many of which are recips. In pursuit of new link partners, we've found competitors with inactive sites, some of which have hundreds of backlinks... If we bought them out and then did a 302 (or is it a 301? I forget)... "Moved Permanently" to our existing domain, would we theoretically get the linkjuice passed on to us? Since these sites are in our current theme/area of business, we could get some good links this way... Would this work? Could it help our rankings? or is Google onto this one? --Mark
It could help, but would take some time. However, the best thing with this is that is someone wants to visit your competitor, he will end up at your site instead. I have already done that with a few of my sites, buy some competitor's sites and suck up their visitors. Totally recommended.
A 301 redirect would work great, it will take a bit to see the links translate to your site, but the traffic would be there right away.
We rank #3 for our target term, until recently we ranked #2... I was hoping that folding 1,000 more backlinks into our primary domain would get us back up to #2. The competitor we're looking at buying is on page 3 of the serps...
I'd go ahead, buy the site and then do an incoming link analysis for each pige of the site to find incoming links and the anchor text that they use. Do 301 (make sure it's not 302) redirect for each page of the site to a relevant page on your site depending on the anchor texts used to link to the purchased site and the terms used to optimise your pages. The pages on your site should then eventauly get credit for the old sites links.
From what I have heard, Google handles 301's very well. The other SE's are said to be a little slower with it, but if you give it some time there is no negative side to gaining backlinks...