I’ve been doing a series of posts on what to do after you purchase a site. The SitePoint Marketplace has become THE place for anyone looking to buy or sell their small online businesses – especially ‘make money online’ blogs. When purchasing a site a fast transaction and transition period is of the utmost importance, which is where this post comes in.

If you haven’t already read them, please take a look at Part 1 and Part 2 of this series:

- Part I – The Checklist
- Part II – Analysis of “What’s Hot

This third piece initially made me think of Mr. Miyagi from one of my favorite ’80s movies The Karate Kid. Discipline, precision, execution, and well placed drop kicks are all an essential piece of this step. Ok drop kicks won’t really help, but the rest of them will.

.htaccess (redirection mastery)

As I mentioned in the checklist, you will need to do for your htaccess file what Mr. Miyagi did for the Karate Kid. Unless you are going to keep publishing at your newly acquired site, you’re going to need to migrate the content over.

What is a .htaccess file?

When a visitor/spider requests a web page via any means, your web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.

If you’re still not sure what an .htaccess file is, give this a read first. Assuming both yours, and the newly acquired blog are powered by Wordpress, you should be able to import all the “Hot” Items (identified in Part II) in a few minutes using the Wordpress automated import feature.

What the Search Engines Will Think

At this point you have a bunch of duplicate content.

In order to reap the benefits of your newly acquired content you’ll need to teach the search engines that these pages have permanently moved (status code 301 in tech-talk) to a new location. If you built a great list in part two this next step is pretty easy. A few weeks ago we purchased a great blog called ShylockBlogging. If you click around you’ll see much of the content now points to the same page on WhyDoWork.

To the search engines, this content has found a new permanent home, and we let them know by doing a 301 redirect to their new location on WhyDoWork. This has tremendous benefits:

• all the backlinks for those pages are now credited to WhyDoWork
• any accumulated Google PageRank is now spread across the WhyDoWork.com domain
• any visitors that find these pages via search results are redirected to their location on WhyDoWork, increasing traffic and advertising conversions
• assuming you purchased a great site, the quality of your unique content should go way up

Take a look at a few lines from our .htaccess file for ShylockBlogging:

redirect 301 /shylock-adsense-plugin/ http://www.whydowork.com/blog/whydowork-adsense-plugin/
redirect 301 /advertise/ http://www.whydowork.com/advertise.php
redirect 301 /about/ http://www.whydowork.com/about.php
redirect 301 /contact/ http://www.whydowork.com/contact.php
redirect 301 /free-wordpress-themes/ http://www.whydowork.com/blog/free-wordpress-themes/

All thats involved is writing the code redirect 301 [oldpagelocation] [newpagelocation]. Keep in mind when doing the old page location that you need to use relative path (i.e. don’t use http://www.). When search engines visit your site they will read this file (which you need to place in your root directory), understand that because it is a 301 the pages have permenently moved, and update their rankings and indexes accordingly.

Counterintuitive but Effective

You might be wondering; why buy a site if you’re just going to shut it down? Time and value are the biggest issues in my opinion. Finding the extra time to maintain a second blog for many can almost be as expensive as running it. The value, really comes from the benefit of growing your existing site from a search engine and traffic perspective. Next up in the series, we’ll look at another great benefit – You also get the old sites’ RSS readers.

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