In light of the news that Toys.com lost it’s Google placement, DNN reached out to SEO consultant John Andrews to get his take on the Toys.com deal and his view on an effective strategy to take using this multi-million dollar domain name asset.
When Toys ‘R’ Us sought toys.com in a biding war with National A1 Advertising, pretty much everyone in domain world paid attention. Toys ‘R’ Us was the #1 player in the offline toy industry, and National A1 already controlled boys.com, girls.com, and babies.com. Toys R Us matched bids all the way up past $5 million before National A1 ran out of steam (or money).
Toys ‘R’ Us previously bought etoys.com, which it kept online as a unique toy web site. After this auction domainers and SEOs speculated on how Toys ‘R’ Us would execute online with the toys.com domain. Many noted that at the time of the auction, ToysRUs.com held the #1 spot in Google for the search query “toys”, while eToys.com appeared at #3. Toys.com held the #4 spot, which suggested that Toys R Us the corporation now controlled 3 of the top 4 ranking web sites in Google for “toys”. Walmart appeared at #3 on the day of the auction.
Certainly owning 3 of the top 4 results for toys represented considerable value to Toys ‘R’ Us.
We don’t have hard data on Google’s traffic numbers, but estimates based on leaked historical data suggest that those 3 spots represent 58% of the click traffic. If you consider the attractiveness of the results in the top 10, you noticed 3 domains with the word “toys” in them (all belonging to Toys ‘R’ Us), plus Walmart and a few toy manufacturers (like Fischer Price and Lego). I think it is safe to assume that consumers searching “toys” would be attracted to click on the “toy” domains, while those with brand affinity might prefer Walmart and Amazon.
Surprisingly, toys.com was redirected to toysrus.com. Within a few days, toys.com disappeared completely from Google’s index. The Google results for “toys” now show ToysRUs.com and etoys.com, with Walmart at 3 and Amazon higher up on the page than it was before. What happened? With a redirect in place on toys.com, Google would eventually drop the domain from the index since it was considered irrelevant. Was this a wise move by Toys ‘R’ Us, or a big mistake?
DomainNameWire said “big mistake” . InternetRetailing suggested Toys ‘R’ Us should have spent a few dollars on SEO consulting . StorefrontBackTalk blogger *Evan Schuman* said “Oops!” () But was redirecting toys.com really a mistake?
It’s clearly a shame that toys.com was redirected. Clearly Toys ‘R’ Us could have made better use of the toys.com web site. However, we can only play armchair SEO in this case. We don’t know what went on behind the scenes. The redirect appeared before the whois registry data was updated, which may suggest the domain was redirected by the seller side, without involving Toys ‘R’ Us in that process. So the question on our minds is… what would have been the best way to handle the acquisition of Toys.com?
Technical SEO best practice for redirecting a domain like toys.com to ToysRUs.com is to locate every existing URL and replace it with a 301 redirect to the equivalent destination on the surviving site. This is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. The 301 redirect ensures that existing links to Toys.com would continue to support the new location, once Google had processed the change, but it is not a flawless process nor does Google guarantee the link benefits will transfer. Practical SEO knowledge about this process differs from the Google recommendations: it is best to approach a large redirect project like this in chunks, keeping both new and old sites online during the transition, watching carefully to protect those valuable backlink assets. To properly redirect toys.com to toysrus.com and protect the link equity, an SEO would need access to both sites for weeks or a month or more. Given the existing strength of eToys.com and ToysRUs.com, however, the significant exact-match value of Toys.com is probably worth more to Toys ‘R’ Us than the existing backlinks. Could this redirect be temporary? Perhaps Toys ‘R’ Us sacrificed the link equity of the old Toys.com domain to conserve development resources, which are better dedicated to building a new site on Toys.com?
In the SEO world, those top ten spots in Google are golden. We would much rather have 3 of them than 2, for the traffic but also for the branding opportunity, the marketing opportunity, and to keep competitors one spot lower down the page. ToysRUs.com already represents the most recognized brand of toy stores, while eToys.com represents the most famous online toy store in history. Toys.com represents the defining generic “brand” for toys, and is the click of choice for unbranded consumers searching the Internet. Most SEO practitioners would publish on all 3 given the opportunity, and work to help toys.com and etoys.com serve variants of the online toy market instead of directly competing with each other. Design Toys.com to represent a welcomed alternative to eToys.com for part of the market, just as ToysRUs.com represents a shopping alternative to eToys.com or Amazon or WalMart. Own the top spots based on market acceptance, in addition to domain benefits from exact match or historical link equity.
How hard will it be for Toys ‘R’ Us to produce a new Toys.com and rank it in the top 5 of Google for searches related to toys? Not very, which is precisely why Toys ‘R’ Us had to pay $5.1 million to keep it out of the hands of competitors. How might Toys ‘R’ Us approach the “perfect” toys.com domain, given their existing portfolio of toy web sites? Since I am an SEO strategist, I’d recommend building a site that promotes toys, not just an ecommerce toy store. I’d develop a strategy for toy marketing, optimized to rank in Google for informational queries and brand queries. This would utilize the powerful toys.com domain authority in audience building, giving the worlds largest online toy retailer (ToysRUs.com) control of potentially the worlds most influential online toy marketer (toys.com). It also supports modern and upcoming monetization models, such as audience building, issue framing, and market shaping, ready to work for eToys.com and ToysRUs.com.
Design aspects would make this toys.com sufficiently different from eToys.com or ToysRUs.com. Properly designed, Toys.com could cross promote either of those sites for actual toy sales. Given the potential garnered by control of three major online toy domains, I would integrate Social Media components. I asked Rhea Drysdale of Outspoken Media to consider this issue, and she also recommended a strong Social Media component for Toys.com:
“They currently have reviews on ToysRUs.com, but there’s no way for users to interact with one another or get rewarded for their contributions. Meanwhile, the social arm of Toys ‘R’ Us seems to be entirely focused on deals with the blogs.toysrus.com subdomain, which has just a couple hundred backlinks, a small Facebook fan page, a half-hearted Twitter following @toysrus (though their widget page links to @toysrusonline!), a YouTube profile that posts toy commercials, two barely active web widgets and duplicate content issues with sites like http://toysrusblog.typepad.com/. They could transition their social strategy to the new domain with minimal impact.”
Rhea also agreed with me about the potential for creating a marketing site, saying “Toys.com should become the authority for all things toys, not the place to buy them.” She also assumed that Toys ‘R’ Us would have little difficulty ranking Toys.com after a re-launch, noting “The strength of both domains [ToysRUs.com and eToys.com] will quickly cement [the new Toys.com] in the top results on Google and give Toys ‘R’ Us a brand boost for building their community.”
So did Toys ‘R’ Us goof by redirecting Toys.com to ToysRUs.com and losing the existing Google rankings? I doubt it. There are simply bigger fish to fry at this time. It is important and usually profitable to consider SEO aspects of a site move or relaunch, but Toys ‘R’ Us must also pay attention to opportunity costs. We’ll know soon enough how effectively they execute on their “priceless” new generic dot com domain. Once they launch, we’ll be in a much better position to critique their execution.
John Andrews is an independent SEO consultant and a managing partner at UpperLeftPlacement.com, a Seattle SEO firm. John publishes an SEO insider blog at www.johnon.com.
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Original post by John Andrews