So during the Matt Cutts in Hotseat presentation at Pubcon Brett gave me the mic to ask a question (heh dangerous I know). While I did get my question out and Matt did kinda answered I think it’s a topic that could use a little enlightenment, especially considering there has been some back room chatter about it recently.
Let’s say I own Really-Great-Chia-Pets.com and to protect my assets I want to go out and register some variations with/without the hyphens, possibly a few misspellings and the .net and .org versions. From Google’s point of view are there any things I should worry about doing so I don’t get myself in trouble.
Let’s say I want to eliminate my competition and I buy their website Super-Duper-Chia-Pets.com . How should I integrate the existing content and redirect the existing link equity? What other factors would Google consider questionable?
What if I wanted to buy a somewhat related topic website like Mikey-Mikes-House-of-Topiary.com . From Google’s point of view what would be a best practice for integrating and redirecting the existing links?
Lastly let’s look at unrelated domains, what’s Googles opinion of me redirecting Celestial-Folk-Ballerinas.com into my chia-pet website? How close or far apart do the subjects have to be before I make the transition from good to bad?