[Advice] Can a premium URL be pointed to a site to drive traffic?

Hey guys, just answered a question over on Quora

This question was asked:

"I have a premium url which i bought in the hope of gaining more online visibility. The idea was to build a site that will be linked back to my current site (to increase its traffic) But i wanted to know what would be the best strategy to get traffic with this url - doing a redirect to current site or build a site that links back to current one? Advice?"

Assuming that you are hoping the “premium domain” gets ranking because it is an exact match or has popular search keywords, then a redirect is not the way to go.



You need that page to rank. You can’t just rank a domain that is redirected. It just doesn’t work that way. Eventually Google just replaces the search results with the new url. So you would lose any benefit of the domain name itself.



An EMD (exact match domain) for instance, is a great thing to have when ranking a site. However it is only 1 factor. So even if Google would still give it the same weight as a redirect, it is probably not enough to rank it. You need content on that page as well as links and social signals.



Best bet is to rank the domain by building a site that will rank well. Then have that site point traffic to the “money site”.



So use the domain as a landing page that has calls to action sending the customer to the page you want them to end up at.



Hope that helps,



- JR

JRGriggs.com || RedWallMarketing.com