Converting a purchased site...

[xpertadvice4u]

Let's say you bought an established site that has good page ranking, and lots of traffic...maybe it has a good forum, with established membership and participation....

But you want to incorporate that site into your own ideas, and will want a different domain name.

You want to keep the forums, and the traffic.....

how do you go about rolling this existent site into a new project/entity?

For example, let's say I bought PAW, and I wanted to take advantage of the traffic and PR and incorporate PAW into a new site with multiple affiliation interests.

PAW would be one element/subdomain of that new site, the forums would still exist, with the same topics/categories but also some new ones. And there would be other subdomains...you know, like plumbing and electrical fixtures affiliate opportunities....

If I just incorporated the PAW architecture within a new Domain name, I would lose all the value of the PAW page rankings....right??? or?????

Can you boost a brand new domain by swallowing an established one?
How could it be done?

[edmc]

301 redirect will keep the traffic smooth & your PR should transfer in a couple of months

[losercore]

Yea doing a the right re-direct would keep some things intact. Changing a domain for a very establsihed website is risky though.

What about all the sites that link to that site? I know a redirect will get them there but for SEO it's a mine-field for getting everything back to normal. You also have to keep the old domain forever for the redirect.

Yes it is done all the time but I'm not a fan of it.

One site years ago called webttack.com was a software download website and was very popular. They needed to compete with sites like Cnet and Tucows though. They figured that name was hurting them though. What does legitimate software have to do with webattack? Nothing right? So they changed their domian and image and design and added all sorts of tools and options. They were non-exsistent for about a year. Then they came back and are now finally getting back up to where they were. This was lmost 4 years ago and I still think they hurt from this. Although they had kept the original webattack domain and let it land on a page them to change their bookmarks, they still suffered for years. Now they are better. At one time though they were a hot site for geeks. Even though they kept all the same software and even made it esier to find it hurt them for awhile.

[xpertadvice4u]

Originally Posted by losercore

Yea doing a the right re-direct would keep some things intact. Changing a domain for a very establsihed website is risky though.

What about all the sites that link to that site? I know a redirect will get them there but for SEO it's a mine-field for getting everything back to normal. You also have to keep the old domain forever for the redirect.

.

What about contacting all the sites that link to the site and getting them to change the URL of the links?

To bad you couldn't write a script that would do it for you!