4 replies to this topic

[designasp]

Hi everyone,

My client has decided to introduce a new product which is in addition to his already existing collection of 3 products which are hosted in sub-folders:

www.brand.com/car-maintenance
www.brand.com/car-buying-service
www.brand.com/car-reviews

(The actual product names are generic, I am only using these as examples)

He will be introducing the 4th product (for example: car-evaluations) to be hosted as.. you guessed it...

www.brand.com/car-evaluations

Since he has a few months to go before he can launch the product4 and to get a head start, I am thinking of a strategy to age the pages of product4. There are many keyword rich domains available for this particular product. I am looking at purchasing one domain, for example: www.car-evaluations.com

The content strategy is to add generic information about car evaluations on this domain and start a linking campaign and submit this site to directories etc. This information will be generic and not specific to the brand since the launch of the new product is a secret. The content will be useful to users who want to know more about car evaluations.

Once my client is ready to launch his product in the market at www.brand.com/car-evaluations, I will bring the pages from the domain: www.car-evaluations.com to my client's site and 301 redirect www.car-evaluations.com domain to www.brand.com/car-evaluations.

This way the pages will have aged and gained links and my client's new product will already have a good link popularity.

I have discussed this strategy with a few SEO folks and few think that it may be regarded as spammy. What do you think?

Thanks for your time!
designasp

[justicewhite]

Sounds like a lot of afford. I wouldn't personally do it for a few month's head start but if we're talking about a longer period, then it may be worth it.

[Christian_SEO]

While the 301s will tell search engines to update their index, that won't help any site that is linking to you. They will continue to have the old links to things that no longer exist unless you tell them or they notice the link has gone bad.

You could set up those pages you describe and then remove them later and add your client's content, but you will lose some ground because the content of those pages has then changed. I suppose if you leave the optimization the same it would be seen as a page update, but that will affect things to some extent.

I suggest building up the site content for the topics you want, but then leave that content on the site. Maybe have some type of product pre-announcement on a main page with the extra content linking to it. Then drop in the product content when it's ready.

I'm a big fan of building optimized content pages and submitting to as many search engines and directories as possible. I would also add links on different pages of the site to the product content when it's ready.

And if you have enough content to justify it, you could put each product on it's own domain and then link all the sites. That's not a bad option and allows you to have each site optimized in a more narrow fashion, but I don't know that you really gain much and then you have more to update and maintain.

[chrishirst]

actually it makes much more common sense to use the existing site which already has "aged", has links and "reputation" than to start over again with a "keyword domain" which will make precious little difference, but will means 9 to 12 months of work only to redirect it to the site that has had the process already completed.

[Jill]

And if you have enough content to justify it, you could put each product on it's own domain and then link all the sites.

Noooooo! I would strongly disagree with this. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book and not a smart way to do things in today's world.