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Pointing expired or other domains to your website – Is it OK?

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This is a topic that we get asked about quite often. The SEO world is burdened by terrible paranoia, that the wrong move can destroy rankings and traffic in an instant. From building the wrong types of links to your website, having low quality content or Google thinking that your website is not as helpful as you think it is. We’ve seen many types of spam techniques over the years, many of which still work today, but one that seems to be considered “spam” may not be spam at all.

Say you come across a competitor that has gone out of business and you think it would be a good idea to buy their domain name and repoint it to yours because they had some half decent rankings and some branded traffic. Is it wrong to do this?

The reality is that it’s not and there is nothing wrong with “merging” two websites. In the real world it’s quite normal for a business to buy another and merge them into one bigger business. The same is true online. The best thing would be to merge the new domain on a page level basis, so that you redirect each page to its nearest equivalent on your website, as this will maximise the effect of the merger. It’s best not to just redirect everything to your home page.

Where you do need to take care is when you want to repoint multiple domains to your website. This can trip a filter in Google’s algorithm as this can appear unnatural. In reality, in the worst case Google may not apply any benefit of those domains to your website. Everything is fine in moderation, just don’t overdo it!

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