I'm just curious. I have a site that, in all honesty, just sits on the web and serves up old content. But it does well, especially for certain keyphrases. So I was wondering, do you think it would be worth offering the traffic via a 301 redirect to a site that could benefit from the top spot more than me? Does this even happen? I've never heard of it. To give you an idea, the search term returns well over 2 million results. The others on the first page (below me) include Mozilla and Computing.net. What do you think?
I think it's a great idea - I've actually written about a similar topic before as a business model, which I called traffic siphoning - I envisioned it working with less competitive terms, even - provided they are high conversion terms (end of the buying cycle or localized search). If you are able to strike a deal with someone to do this, please post about it here (or elsewhere) as I would love to see how it works out for you. I'd also be curious to hear Google's take on this. I'm sure they'd throw a fit if this were done openly in a large scale. At any rate, I'm anxious for follow-up on the matter.
Thanks for your input. Any ideas where you would advertise such a thing? Obviously it's sub-niche specific. Maybe even contacting those lower down the rankings, but I wouldn't be that bothered myself.
I would run the search query and see who the top 5 or 6 PPC ads are for the term and try to sell the spot to those guys. They're already willing to pay for the traffic - you should be able to quantify the value quite easily. Pull your traffic logs to show the traffic you get for natural search and multiply that by the average cpc to rank at the top of the sponsored listings. Value should be at least around that point (in reality, it's higher as organic placement garners more clicks than sponsored). I'd make the agreement out to be a monthly fee based on that data for a period of x months. That's just how I'd go about it.