ok. I recently bought a nicely aged old domain name (4 characters and first registered in 1991 iirc)... I was hoping to use it to legitimately boost the rank of my main site? (2 year old domain name) Here are the ideas I came up with: 1: 301 redirect the domain name to my 'main site' (mysite.com)...but what then?? do I promote that URL in the serps with my link text? Will this generate Googles anger? 2: Build another site on the domain (3 or 4 pages of good focused content) and then promote that in the serps for my keywords and see if it gets top ranking? then 310 redirect to my main domain 3: Im stuck for ideas at this point Please help me out here folks.... THANKS
Redirect will be a bit of a waste of an old domain, unless it has good PR and links that will be forwarded to your main site. If it's just an old domain with few links and little/no PR i would build a site on it, that way you can put multiple links on it to your main site using the anchors you want.. And also deeplink your site, something you can't do by just 301ing it to your site.
Thanks sweetfunny. You make some good points there. The domain has few links and no pr at present, so I think I will indeed build a site on it and see how it goes. In fact, if I get chance, I may also build a sister site to it (near identical but no..so I dont get dupe content penalties) on a much newer domain, and see how they both fare in the search engines (ranking wise) using the same promotional techniques etc It will be interesting to know just 'how muc' of a difference using a really old domain makes
Yes it works well setting up a bunch of "feeder" sites or sister sites that send traffic to your main site, and also being able to add numerous links on these sites using your desired anchor text helps elevate SERP's. Another point is you can run Adsense on these sites and generate a bit of income on the side to cover their reg fee, which you can't do with a 301. I'd really only 301 it if: * The domain was getting a pile of traffic * The domain had alot more links than your main site with appropriate anchor Best of luck.