WARNING: Misleading title.
Now that I got your attention I’d like to point out just how smart Google has become over the years. It seems they’re able to understand when a site has been moved and consolidate their signals accordingly without any canonicalisation or 301 redirects.
Background
A while ago we bought a domain name for a campaign which never saw the light of the day. It existed there for a few years unused and then we decided to strip it all down and say “Site moved to dejanmarketing.com” with a logo link back to our main site. I’d imagine that’s a pretty common thing to do for webmasters not familiar with 301 redirects.
Results
Shortly after that, Google picked up the change and replicated our PageRank value to this domain. This is normal behaviour typically seen when redirecting your domains.
SEO Trivia: This used to be a popular method of PageRank hijacking (e.g. link to Google.com for a while, get PageRank 10, break the redirect, sell links to a naive webmaster, rinse and repeat). Note: Don’t do that!
What’s interesting here is that there was no redirect in place and Google has picked up enough signals to consolidate PageRank regardless. That’s pretty cool.
Related, info and cache commands are all showing information for Dejan SEO as well:
– related:seoco.com.au
– info:seoco.com.au
– cache:seoco.com.au
The most interesting part to me though is the fact that our website’s +1’s were also reflected on this parked domain. This shows how deeply Google+ is integrated with Google’s organic search.
And then I though “oh no… Google Webmaster Tools will reveal the links for the target website to whoever is verified to see link of the parked domain, should I even write about this?” but the good new is that it doesn’t. Webmaster Tools show only links specific to the parked domain and it doesn’t show any information from the domain it has borrowed its PageRank and social signals from.
Follow-Up Experiment
We thought it’d be pretty cool to test this again and repeat the results so we set up a subdomain on a newly registered domain and repeated the conditions using slightly different text. It didn’t work.
At this point we’re unsure why but if I was running a search engine I’d look at factors such as domain registration, age of the parked domain, previous content, brand mentions, previous links and server details. Perhaps a number of conditions need to “click” before Google’s domain consolidation is triggered for “parked domains” like this.
Dan Petrovic, the managing director of DEJAN, is Australia’s best-known name in the field of search engine optimisation. Dan is a web author, innovator and a highly regarded search industry event speaker.
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6886-3211
What are the plans for the domain dejan.com.au I notice some activity on this domain as well.
We’ll probably switch to that at some point when we grow up.
I’ll try it out myself, good experiment Dan!
p.s. “parked doman” spelled wrong above.
Thanks. Fixed!
Interesting post 🙂
I think using a sub domain the second time may be the reason it didn’t work, or are you sure there has been a second update by Google as I haven’t seen a Page Rank update since the 4th of Feb 2013 which must be required to make this work. Did you launch seoco.com.au before the 4th of Feb 2013?
Wow, good I have got something in this, good one Dan!
Well this experiment was effect on ranking as well for seoco.com.au ??
Most definitely not.
Thanks Joel.
PageRank in these cases jumps ahead of the regular update. You can test that by 301.
Better than dejaninboundmarketing lol
Dejan this solution is better than 301 redirect?
your headline left a bad taste in my mouth. Its good for getting clicks but if its really not anyway relevant to the article this makes me think that your are desperate for readers to click thru and read your blog
the heading is great
lol… yes.
I’m sorry to disappoint man. I seriously never considered that people would find this title to be anything but humor.
Thanks Conor.
No way.
Good to hear 🙂
i’m sorry too did not wanted to sound like too negative in my comment but somehow it just came out like it did. There is so much misinformation and desperation in seo right now that when I read about getting 25k+1 and pr7 in one week from a gr8 blog like yours funny never came into my mind. Peace
maybe sometimes its pure luck
No worries. All good 🙂
It’s a tongue n cheek heading, it would be different were he to repeatedly create headlines like this 🙂
good information like it Dan
Maybe… try to repeat it.
Dan I love the way Google consolidates plus ones when shifting pages and domains as well. They’re smart enough to do that, whereas Facebook obviously isn’t or, they just don’t find it high priority.
I recently migrated a site from a custom CMS to WP, and lost all of my social signals for 9 month period. On the surface this doesn’t look good (as it looks as if I have no social signals or visitor engagement) – but at least thankfully, I retained my +1’s.
Thanks for the article. I’m going to test this out right now! Got some old domains that need to be put to good use 🙂