Recently I got an interesting offer from a popular site. They offered me a partnership, they want to sell all the advertising on my site in exchange for a page eCPM payment to me based on my traffic. I'm talking about full time money/salary. Tricky part is, they want to redirect my domain and move website database. My whole website is focused on SEO for getting traffic. To explain it better: now : mywebsite DOT COM after: mywebsite.popular DOT COM Now I'm not sure how this will affect my SE rankings and how can I reduce "damage"? The website I'm redirecting has millions of backlinks, me - hundred thousand at best (Yahoo). If someday deal breaks, they will redirect back to my website so I'm not in danger of loosing my domain and returning visitors. Any advice? Is it possible to redirect website without loosing rankings? Thank you
I hope they're paying you a good amount. All of your existing traffic and customers will become theirs, you will be starting all over again from scratch.
As you said, " Now I'm not sure how this will affect my SE rankings and how can I reduce "damage"? The website I'm redirecting has millions of backlinks, me - hundred thousand at best (Yahoo)." Many sites and directories don't accept redirect link, if you link is listed in some directory and that directories script will automatic put your site in error listing so when owner will remove your link as "error on site". Also, Google don't like if you post redirect link so owner don't want to effect their "Page Rank" by listing your link so they will drop your link. These way you will loose lots of links and after that PR, ranking, traffic, etc... one day once your contract is over with person you are dealing with he/she will tell you buy..buy and you are done. You rather find out what is benefit for them by getting redirect traffic from your site so you do the same thing on your own rather than give him/her business. You already have traffic, some business and use his/her idea to increase your business. It is better than getting buy.. buy from him/her after few months or years. (unless they are paying millions) If they pay millions and you don't mind keep working than you should get his/her idea and more than millions. Good Luck
@cm2010 It's news website, no customers. I'm in niche where you can make good money only if you're working with big brands and networks, sort of like car industry. Affiliating with big websites makes it possible because they can sell ads. It's not exactly like that, I will still be the owner of website and I can break partnership whenever I want - redirecting back to my original domain. The question is, how to avoid rankings drop?
@cm2010 I don't have backlinks in directories or similar websites. All links I got were from natural backlinking and link exchange. It's news/entertainment website with good traffic. I'm interested in this only because they can sell relevant ads by 20x more higher eCPM. Their benefit is that we have very similar topics and they want to sell more relevant ads. It's not a product niche where I can sell something or use their strategy. They're able to sell ads because they're multi million dollar company with sales team. I can use Adsense and at best other ad companies. People, is there redirect strategy which won't cause my rankings to drop. I saw that in Google webmaster tools you can notify Google on domain change. How much that helps?