Hi I am currently starting a new ecommerce site and there is a domain for sale which is doing pretty well for my intended keywords. How could I set up forwarding from that domain to my site without losing ranking? Are there any major issues that need to be considered with forwarding, I a bit worried about any spamming penalties G might apply. Cheers
If you're not going to use it as your 'main' domain then just 301 all 'spare' domains you have to the real one.
.. and if you don't know what the hell a 301 is (like I didn't!) then follow this link; http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=301+redirect&meta=
So if I do a 301 from the well ranked domain to my site, the well ranked domain I just spent a fortune on will not lose ranking? Also, will the purchased domain show up in Google as before or will it now show up as my actual site to which the 301 goes?
Depends on whether that ranking is due to on-page or off-page factors. If it's due to links, it will stay. If it's mainly based on content it is aiming at now, it will drop. It won't be associated with the old iste anymore (after a while). Only with your main domain.
The first thing you should do is assess dependancies before buying a domain. Know how IBL's are established.. could be the coop, could be regular pings (updates to site content), could be paid advertising, could be affilliate programs etc.. You get the point.. IBL's need to be sustainable. Next, BE AWARE that a 301 will effectively reduce the ranking of said page/site to that of the page/site bearing the content to which you redirect. This isn't an absolute, because IBL's obviously factor into it, but remember.. dependancies. I use the above as rule of thumb. If you're going to pay out decent bikkies for it, you need to understand the risks. As for how best to leverage the the traffic, that's up to you, but I'd retain both sites. Cheers, JL
You lost me there, what are IBLs and what do you mean by dependencies? Basically the value of the domain I want to buy comes from having many BLs which bring in some traffic and most importantly a near top-10 ranking for my desired KWs, overall they generate about 100,000 visitors. At the moment the site has barely any content so I am not afraid of losing ranking due to on-page factors. Does that mean that the Google ranking of the purchased domain will be transfered to mine, if there is no loss of on-page optimisation. Also, is there any point in getting more and relevant named domains to forward to the main one? Are they likely to provide any ranking boost to the destination domain?