Case Study: The Redirect Website Project (Episode 1)

Case Study: The Redirect Website Project (Episode 1)

No one’s reading this blog but me. So, buck it!

I’ve reached a point where I no longer worship the SEO gurus (guy from The Proper PBN, you know I’m looking at you) and take whatever they say with a grain of salt. You see, only one person or a select group of people can be on a pedestal. So, most of these so-called “gurus” don’t tell it all. I mean, they give some tid-bits here and there but they never really tell the full story.

Why I’m I even writing this? Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

I wanted to do a domain redirect project. One of the competitors I’m tracking did a redirected and he got great results. I’ve never done a domain redirect so this is kind of scary. But buck it, how long will I stay scared. I’m at that point in my life where scary is just another word.

I have a couple of niche sites and I wanted to do a redirect for one of them. But after checking the domains, I decided I will do it the other way round i.e. instead of redirecting an expired domain to the site, I would redirect my existing niche site to the expired domain. Basically, I will be building a new niche site based off the content on my current niche site, and links.

For starters, my current niche site is ranking mostly on page 1 and 2 of Google for most of the products I am targeting. Here is a snapshot of some of the rankings.

My new domain is already indexed but like is expected, not ranking.

Below is the image of the ranking of the new domain:

I am now going to experiment redirecting my current niche site to an expired domain. Here are the Ahrefs metrics of the current niche and expired domains.

Old Site Ahrefs Metrics

 

New Site Ahrefs Metrics

If it helps, here are the Majestic metrics of the current niche and expired domains

Old Site Majestic Metrics

 

New Site Majestic Metrics

Here are the current rankings of the expired domains’s current rankings for the specific keywords I am targeting with my niche site. As expected, the site does not rank anywhere since it has no articles. However, the domain is already indexed.

So, today 3rd Dec, 2016, I’ll start transferring content from the current to the expired domain. I will also be redirecting the links for the current niche site to the expired domain. I will also be indexing the in Google through Webmaster Index Tools.

UPDATE: My new site got hacked during the initial transfer. As a result, I am late with this project. Today, 12th Dec, 2016, I have managed to transfer all the content from the old to the new site. From today, I will be going through the articles individually (they are approximately 200 pages) and checking to ensure the links, images, videos, etc are linking correctly.

I will also be redirecting individual URLs from the old domain to individual URLs of the new site. I anticipate this should take me about 20 days given that I plan to go through about 10 pages a day. .Shh, don’t beat me on  taking too long. Have some chill. I got other things I’m busy with 🙂

Why Change Domains?

Well, my current niche site is an EMD (Exact Match Domain). The domain is not really brandable. I am looking to sell the site for six figures and I figured the branding will be a little off for potential buyers. This is why I am changing the domain name. Moreover, the expired domain is more brandable than the currrent niche site.

Another reason why I’m changing the domain from an EMD to a brandable domain is the scope of content I can cover. With my current niche site, its potential is a little bit capped due to the domain name. With the new brandable domain name, I will be able to venture into many more different topics and make the site an authority in the space.

That’s all folks. You can keep track of the timelines for this project on this page.

 

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