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01.08.10 Gaining A High Rank By Buying Established Sites  By Patrick HareIf you're in a competitive sector, an SEO project can be hard work, and take a long time. It can also be very expensive. However, if you aren't tied to a domain name, you can buy your way into the search engines. How do you do this? Actually, it is pretty simple. First, identify your top keyword, or one that gets profitable results. Next, do a search in Google (or your preferred engine) and see what the top results are. Look at the actual sites and you should be able to determine whether they're ones you could go out and buy. (Hint: You'll probably find Wikipedia in the top 10 for most searches, but you can't buy Wikipedia.) Third, do a little digging to see who owns the site, and if it's already for sale. If not, you can always make an offer. Usually you can find out the domain owner by looking at the website and getting a phone number or email address. If these aren't readily apparent, you can do a Whois search by going to domaintools.com and entering the name of the site. Normally you will see contact info for the site. If you see that the domain is held privately, you can usually email through the agency that holds the domain. For instance, if Domains By Proxy (a Godaddy Company) holds the domain, you can email the owner through the address listed, which looks like example.com@domainsbyproxy.com. Make sure you are direct in saying you want to buy the site, and provide your email address in the body of your message. There are always some caveats to buying a ranking site. First of all, you would want to preserve the site content for several months following the acquisition, because search engines can react negatively to an ownership change that accompanies a radical shift in site content or architecture. One of the reasons that the site got its position is that the search engine identified the site as a trusted resource, by way of its content and links from other websites. This doesn't mean you can't make minor modifications, or additions, to the site, but a change of ownership should not immediately be accompanied by major alterations to the site, or else you will lose the very rankings you went out and bought. You will also want to have an SEO strategy going forward, since any competitive sector is going to also come with competing SEO experts who are jockeying for top spots. Furthermore, you probably want to push your new site as close to the #1 spot as it can get, which requires competent SEO advice. What kind of company is best suited to buying an existing site? In most cases, it would be a company that is looking to take advantage of the traffic that goes to the site, without looking to build a brand with it, except in those cases where the URL makes for a good brand. For example, if you're looking to get leads online, you may not care where your visitors land as long as they fill out a form. You can often buy a ranking site, incorporate the form, and preserve many of the site's other features. Depending on the site, you may also be purchasing the services of the people who built and maintained it, or you may be able to get a semi-defunct site that still holds good search engine rankings. There are quite a few people in the internet world who maintain a diverse portfolio of sites that make money by showing or converting traffic on an empire of otherwise autonomous sites. Companies often buy ranking sites because of the positions they hold in the search engines. Having spot in the top 10 is akin to having a great "location," but savvy people in the SEO field may even buy a site on the second page which has good potential, as a kind of "fixer upper." In many cases there are sites that have good positions that could be popped into the top 10 with a little work. Sometimes the site owners will even let the sites go for a bargain price, since they were working off a different business model. Other sites may fetch a premium, but would still be worth the price depending on the value of the keyword traffic. For people who want to get fast results in the SEO game without the time and expense of standard optimization (which is still worth it) a timely site purchase can be a quick solution for people who are looking for traffic. Comments About the Author: Patrick Hare has been managing online and offline marketing projects since 1999. From 2005 to present, he has been with Scottsdale Arizona's Web.com Search Agency (formerly Submitawebsite). Patrick provides Search Engine Optimization and Marketing advice to in-house customers and Web.com Jacksonville’s web design group. |
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