This tip is probably one of the simplest ways to gain links through conservation. A lot of SEO advice talks about double-checking links that point to 404 pages, as these are lost potential. If a link points to a page that doesn't resolve, it's generally accepted wisdom that the engines won't give any benefit to the domain or any particular page. Certainly, with something around 7% of all pages on the web being 404 pages (and the only way to reach them is through links), there's a lot of opportunity here.
But... There's also opportunity on the domain level. Take a look at queries like linkdomain:wikpedia.org -site:wikpedia.org - there's 600+ lost links. How about links that point to seomoz.com (which, thankfully, we own and redirect) - 50+ links. Or those pointing to yutube.com (300+)?
Simply by purchasing common misspellings, mistypings and alternative TLD extensions, you can earn links the easy way - by conserving them. Just grab these domains and 301 redirect them to the right site. If you're seeing a number of links point to internal pages, you'd probably want to create a 301 rule (so that misspelleddomain.com/* redirects to yourdomain.com/*). It's not a huge amount of links, but I'd venture to say that depending on the size of your domain (& how hard it is to spell) and link profile, it could be anything from 0.05% - 0.1% of your links. There's probably no cheaper or easier way to add some high quality links to your site.
Now for the gray & black hat angles (which you asked us to disclose, but which we don't recommend). Taking this advice one extra tip further, you can easily see how & why domainers prize and might gain SEO value from owning misspellings/mistyped URLs and how these could potentially be leveraged against you or your competitors. Technically, it's legal to buy common misspellings of existing brands/domains, but it's not a practice we endorse. I should also mention that although I consider this gray hat, I don't see it specified in any of the webmaster guidelines, though certainly it violates their spirit.
BTW - My personal opinion is that when it comes to search engines, you'd probably need to own the domain ahead of time to get any SEO value from those links (or from 301 re-directing it). Buying a domain that's never been registered before or from a domain broker simply to get its erroneous, unintentional backlink profile is likely to have virtually no value. The engines appear to do a good job of "re-setting" a site's link profile to near-0 when domain ownership changes hands.
I had an affiliate sending out 100's of emails for one of the accounts I work with, asking people to link to him pretending to be the real website (he had a misspelling)... Funny enough evilgreenmonkey received one of these as well...
Ok - clarification - the affiliate was of my client and I am NOT advocating that strategy... simply providing a real life example - we ended up penalising the dude.
man i love the new black hat technique disclaimer already and it hasn't been a month
I would think more people buy misspelled domains for type in traffic than the hopes of misspelled link juice.
Keep the link building ideas coming... thats the hardest part for me.
I think this tip is especially valuable when your company name involves numbers (like mine does). The difference between '2' and 'two' simply cannot possible be heard. Every now and then I notice emails that arrived at alternatively spelled addresses, which I would have missed hadn't I registered the misspellings.
I have to deal with number '4' a lot, aka 'four', 'fore' or 'for'.
I have the same issue here with 9 and 'nine'. This helps really.
I love the wikipedia example... that's significant!
Im relatively new to SEO, but like collecting domains. I bought a small city dot com from a Namejet auction a while ago and parked it while I made a mini site for it. It did not rank while parked, but as soon as the mini site was up, I moved to #2 in Yahoo and #5 in Google. It had around 80 backlinks when I purchased it and I have not done any real marketing for it. This is my inexperienced two cents on domains changing owners.
Love this tip. This kind of polish on a project can be the difference of first and second page! Great attention to detail Rand, thanks for the tip!
Hi Rand, just curious how search engines find out or how you think they find a domain has switched ownership?
Over time I update the whois information, change hosts or even change the design of a site? Recently and within about a month of each other I've changed the whois, switched servers and updated the design of the site, as well as combining a number of my other sites into 1.
I assume that if a search engine find a whois update that they confirm the contents haven't changed or the host sits on the same ip as before? The same going for the other factors.
Yeah - I think you're correct in that it's a multi-step process that involves looking at content, links, whois records, etc. That's why those who do buy domains recommend being very slow and deliberate about any potential changes to any of these. I know lots of people who buy domains nowadays will have multi-year contracts that keep the whois information in the original owner's name, but legally transfer ownership through other agreements to themselves. Weird that they have to hide from the engines, but that's just the way it is, I guess :)
Hey so I have a related question. Besides changing my email password, I have a drunken late-night habit of purchasing way too many domain names.
I was thinking of creating a little link farm with these, wait for it to get tracked for a while, then take it down and 301 redirect everything, hopefully retaining at least the SERP boost from the domain names.
Does this make any sense at all?
Do you mean create websites on each domain name and then cross link them together?
If so, one of the many things you'd have to look out for is hosting. Multiple sites linking to one another on the same C-class IP block will be looked at very carefully by Google.
I don't think you would get a huge boost from that. Sounds like a time waster :)
Have to say, Jonny, as far as late-night drunken habbits go... thats not all that bad. :)
What do you mean by link farm though? Inter-linking between them?
IF thats the case, the amount of work it would take to ensure they are all completely seperated from each other (hosts, whois, etc) and linking in a way that doesn't suggest any type of relation... might be more work than it is really worth.
Not to mention, this isn't what I would consider a white hat practice so by default I'd say its not a good idea.
Cool thanks for the tips guys, I won't waste my time. (Geez you guys act so white-hat sometimes.....you never jaywalked? :P)
Also, I didn't know about the IP block/whois thing, that's interesting and good to keep in mind...
I've been at it with this technique for a while now. Although I employ it for clients who have names that are often mispelt. Registering similar domain name iterations makes absolute sense for domains like www.questrade.com which was also smart enough to pick up www.questtrade.com ;)
Link building tips all over the place :) Good tip. Thanks Rand.
I don't condider this grey hat at all. I look at it in the same way I would - building up a real estate portfolio.
A critical mass of links - relevant or not to the toipic at hand (better if relevant), is going to help a site rank better for targeted keywords.
One suggestion I would make is that if you're going to buy domains that have links on a specific topic, go ahead and develop content that's relevant to those links and keep it at a subdomain level off the main navigation.
It will still help the overall site rank. In this manner, whether the links are relevant to the tld or not, they will still be considered white hat if they link to relevant content.
Think link acquisition first and and boost the entire site's ability to rank for desired keywords.
Sean - I think it might be grey hat if, for example, SEOmoz bought saerchengineland.com and seobok.com and 301 re-directed those to our domain. That's the issue I was addressing.
I do like your "keep it relevant" strategy, though - smart thinking :)
I recently discovered that a major and much larger competitor has purchased a misspelling of our domain name and has it pointing to their own. When we registered we purchased all the misspelled versions of our domain name that we could think of but we didn't think that our potential customers were quite this bad at spelling. We were wrong. I haven't done anything about it yet but am pondering the course of action. On one hand it is flattering that our much larger competitor actually knows we exist but we do get a lot of new customers that come in looking for our domain name as it is on the footer of every email that our customers send. They could just click through but many search in google for the domain or company name and misspell it.
Any ideas on how to approach our competitor? We do have a registered mark on the key word in question that is misspelled and part of our domain name. Do we have any potential legal ground? We certainly do not have the deep pockets our competitor has so I hesitate to attempt legal action. I would bet that they would just laugh at me if I 'asked them nicely' if I could just have my traffic back.
PS - I feel like a poster child for what can happen if you don't know enough about SEO or hire someone who does know.
Use the obvious misspellings you already have to determine if it's even worth a second thought. Unless you have done a significant amount of branding in the real world, my guess is it probably isn't. On the other hand, most lawyers (I'm not one BTW) would tell you it's important to defend your intellectual property. If they are clearly in the wrong, a simple cease and desist letter and an offer of transferring the domain to you for a nominal fee should be sufficient. They know they are doing something shady and the domain probably isn' t worth their effort to fight for either.
Thanks for the response. I am not sure the current misspellings are comparable. We have the double t issue and our domain is plural ending with an s so we have all combinations with double t and without and with s on the end and without. This involves a misspelling of relevant as relevent. People misspell it far more often than I would think but I of course don't have the exact traffic as our competitor has it.
There is also a body that handles these kind of disputes. If the typo is based around a trademark you would have a good chance of getting the name transfered without having to pay the registrant.
In situations like this (in my experience) money talks. Sarah may, however, have a legal way to go about doing this if the URL is close enough to be considered intellectual property.
It also depends on how dirty you're willing to let the situation get. With a big name like your competitor, and depending on the industry, you could probably use PR to publicly persuade them. Careful though. These are dangerous waters to play in, especially for smaller companies.
Nice tip Rand ... another great one for the toolbelt!
Great suggestion Rand.
I also agree with Sean about keeping it relevant. I don't think that it is grey at all until you divert the relevance of your content.
When looking for these domains, I see a lot of misspelingz for URLs with plural words. God help you if you have 2 too two to plural words in your domain name. ugh.
Ya know, you could probably look for international spellings as well. As Jane has shown us time and time again, the same word can be spelled differently in another country. So blogger Joe Schmoe in england could very easily link to a brit version of your domain without even considering the difference.
This may be a stupid question, but when you give examples of linking sites why do you link to a Yahoo results page as opposed to Google?
Is it just because they both do exactly the same thing or does Yahoo provide better linking results?
I ask as i obviously pray to Google each morning that it looks favourably upon my URLs but neglect to pray to Yahoo. I also notice that Yahoo provides more results for link:www.myurl.com than Google does.
Sexteta, Read the post from yesterday on yahoo's link tool. That should answer a lot of your questions and more.
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-much-do-you-know-about-use-yahoos-site-explorer-and-link-research
Hey Rizzy...WHO DEY Baby! Love the profile pick, I was getting ready to switch mine over to a Bengals theme for the upcoming season
Sexteta - it's really important to understand that Google's link command shows an insignificat, non-scaling sample of links (and not even important ones). It's virtually useless (perhaps worse than useless because it actually provides misinformation to those who use it).
Notice that through Google, even a site like SEOmoz has ~2,000 links. When I first started checking our links through Google in 2005, we had about 1,500. Have we only gained 500 new links in 3.5 years? Nope. Go to Yahoo! and you can see there's nearly 1.5 million inbounds to SEOmoz. Google surely knows about all of these, they simply don't display any meaningful information via the link command (and haven't since about 2004).
Rand, I just stumbled upon this comment. Thanks for the reminder to go to yahoo for the whole story. Its easy to get it the google only habit
I have another perspective of SEO for blogs. This article might be very helpful and interesting to read.https://www.hurricanesoftwares......o-success/I have written this article for the bloggers looking for SEO Success.Hope it helps!Cheers