Is buying a domain with a high PR and redirecting it to your site considered black hat?

[Carla_Dawson]

I want to buy a domain that has clean backlinks and then redirect it to my new domain to bump up my PR. Is this considered a black hat technique?

Thanks

Carla

[AgentsofValue]

Carla - the answer is .... it depends!

There are various different strategies for buying domains, and attempting to use them for SEO purposes.

The best case would be to negotiate privately with the owner of an existing website, and purchasing the domain and all of the contents of the domain from them.  Businesses merge all the time,  This is regular thing, and Google won't punish or look down on anyone for doing this.  It will be clear that the domain changed hands, probably by updates to the name servers, and whois information, but since the website never expired or dropped from the registry, Google would probably assume this was a merger.

Also, if you do this, one of the best strategies for dealing with the domain would be to redirect individual pages to the most analogous page on your site, to take greatest advantage of the merged site.

It's also possible to buy up expired or expiring domains.  There are different stages in the life cycle of domain name expiration where you can buy names.  If you buy them in what's called 'pre-release' status, the domains will be transferred to your own account before the name dropped out of the registry, so it will maintain it's original creation date.  You won't get the content with the domain, but this kind of domain purchase 'might' have some more life to it.

Finally, there are domains that have completely dropped out of the registry.  The links from these won't have much more life to them.

But in general, if you can buy the domain and website content directly from the original owner, it should show up as a business merger (or even as 'rebranding' in your case, since your website is new), and should be a relatively safe tactic.

[donford]

By definition, if the purpose of buying the domain is to manipulate your search rankings then that is black hat. Ryan laid out the only case I can think of that would be an exception to this rule, that is buying a domain that is in your industry or field and redirecting the traffic would be more of a business acquisition then manipulation.

I think there are a lot of people who get tripped up trying to understand the differences between various SEO practices. Why is putting keywords in your title tag, and h1 tags considered white hat when one can argue that you are purposely doing this to manipulate search results, but participating in a link ring considered black hat?

The difference are subtle, the big thing being anything that is done with the sol purpose to trick a search engine into ranking you higher then your site naturally warrants is black hat. Making changes to your site that make it easier for search engines to understand, crawl, or attribute credit to is white hat.

A good analogy would be putting on a nice suit for an interview, this would be considered white hat since you are just trying to present yourself in the best possible manner. (Proper Title Tags, H1 Tags and Page Content, Link Structure, Anchor Text)

However, stealing a new suit, or bribing somebody at the company to say good things about you is considered black hat. (Link Exchange Rings, Buying Links, Buying Social Media, Spamming Forums ect..)

In the end both practices may get you the job so to speak, but more then likely, eventually, the company will find out about it and which practice will you be more proud of? Putting on a nice suit? or paying somebody to say good things about you?

[RyanKent]

Is buying a domain with a high PR and redirecting it to your site considered black hat?

Yes

At this point I sense an angry mob is waiting for me with their fingers hovered over the thumbs down button.

In brief, when you take actions to improve the user experience, you are practicing white hat SEO. When you are taking actions to manipulate search engine rankings, you are practicing black hat SEO.

If you own the site "chocolate.com" and you decide to purchase "fudge.com", "whitechocolate.net" or any site related to your niche, then redirect the traffic, that is perfectly fine. You have a legitimate business reason for doing such. When you purchase "acme-comics.com" and redirect the domain to your chocolate site in an effort to raise PR and manipulate your rankings, that is black hat SEO.

A debate can begin on what Google can and cannot detect, but that is irrelevant. Even if Google does not enforce a particular policy does not make it any less black hat.

As a final note, the effectiveness of such tactics has greatly diminished over time. Many sites have a great deal of spam links which have been devalued by Google. If you redirect a site from another niche, those links will not offer you a lot of value since the links are not relevant to your site. Some things to think about.