Buying For SEO

This was an interesting one touted as ‘My Secret Weapon’ on the conference agenda. The main focus was buying sites and domains to give your own efforts a boost in the rankings. First up was Richard Kershaw of qualitynonsense.com. He presented his case in a list:

Why does he do it?

• To Gain Links
• Be on topic
• Deals with competition
• Grow your links faster

The good news is that all the tools to by sites are in the public domain and expensive ones are only optional. He noted that quality sites rarely change hands but warned that it is best to buy undervalued sites rather than the cheap sites. Owners will tend to overvalue their property when dealing with them so be prepared to haggle.

 

How to find the right sites?

There are plenty of ways to find sites on the market. Look at bankruptcy notices. Locate sites in DMOZ and find those hub sites. Look at your competitor’s back links and use paid tools like Syntryx.

 

The approach will not be easy…

Like with link building in general, most of it involve relationship building. Use the phone to make a call directly to the owner otherwise the primary method of communications would have to be done via email. Try not to mention about money straight away but be tenacious. The objective at the start of a conversation would be gain trust with the owner. Make sure you get to see traffic data. When the time comes make the deal make a firm offer and make it easy to do business.

 

Don’t get scammed

Move quickly once the deal is in its closing stages. You should make sure that a trusted doamin registrar is involved. Be careful not to get influenced by the more colourful characters – you can use escrow.com as an intermediate. It is best not to trust anybody untill the domain is in your hands.

 

How important is a domain?

You can raise the sales by 30% just by buying an old domain. Think about the legacy of a domain if you are buying. URLs could have been banned or be associated with negativity (ex-porn URLs)

 

Dave Naylor

Naylor seems to disagree with Kershaw in that emails are not the suitable for contacting. Contacting should be done through telephone. He states that traffic and on theme topicality are much more important than PageRank.

 

Be aware of the following:-

• Age of Site

• Quailty of site

• Traffic

• Rankings

• Price

Beaware that Google algorithms will look out for the passing of WHOis information. It will reset you very quickly if you leave tracks.

 

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 1:17 pm and is filed under SEO Blog News, SMX London Expo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.