How to put holes in your SEO
ToysRus bought the very powerful domain name www.toys.com for a rather reasonable, considering the purchase of www.poker.com for $9 million, $5.1 million. Problem is they should have thrown some of this money towards procuring for themselves an SEO consultant or two.
Domain Name Wire reports that because ToysRUs forwarded the domain name using a 301 redirect rather than transfer it. the site was re-indexed by Google, thereby losing out on its ranking as one of the top results for the search term "toys." Everything that it used to rank for was lost as those links no longer existed.
The news provider notes that with the purchase of Toys.com last month, ToysRUS briefly ranked first, third and fourth under the search term. "Now the value of ToysRUs’ $5.1M purchase of Toys.com has been relegated to type-in traffic and potentially some of the inbound links to Toys.com," writes Domain Name Wire.
On purchasing this domain, many in the SEO field felt that ToysRUs had struck a killer blow for their SEO rankings with their purchase of the www.toys.com domain.
"We call it a 'category killer' - the best name in any given market," said DomainNameNews.com editor, Adam Strong. "We applaud them on the purchase; it is a singular property."
The apparent oversight by ToysRUs falls in line with a recent report from Conductor which found that most Fortune 500 companies are failing at search engine optimization (SEO).
However ToyRUs unintentionally reduced the value, both monetary and in terms of inherent search rankings, significiantly by choosing the straight redirect. Oh well at least they are not alone in the Fortune 500 world of SEO. From recent reports, many of the Fortune 500 companies are not quite up to speed with their SEO and are in need of an SEO consultant or two.