I was busy Googling my name the other day - ensuring that unlike Joost my stolen sex tape remains buried deep in the nether regions of the SERPS - when I stumbled across the story of Toys R Us purchasing the Toys.com site for a crisp $5.1 million dollars.
At the time Toys.com had a strong presence on the SERPS, ranking for thousands of terms (including sitting at #4 on Google for the term “toys”). It made sense for Toys R Us to make this strategic acquisition. There were essentially three major benefits to this sale:
- Eliminating a competitor
- Purchasing a strong domain that other competitors could not use
- Benefiting from the strong brand and latching on to the direct and search traffic this should surely lead to
Unfortunately the third point seems to have been lost on them. Instead of making use of Toys.com’s strong position on the SERPs they merely forwarded the entire site to the home page of Toys R Us. As an example, anyone searching for “cuddly teddy bears” on Google, who then clicked on the applicable Toys.com result on the SERPS, would not be taken to a page about those lovable cuddly teddy bears. They would find themselves at the Toys R Us home page instead.
Obviously search engines take a rather dim view on this. In a matter of weeks Toys.com had been re-indexed on the SERPs and had lost all their hard-earned and valuable rankings.
Sure, the guys at Toys R Us will argue that the purchase was still a sound one based on the strength of the Toys.com brand, the fact that many people would directly type in the URL in the address bar as well as the incoming links that the site would still benefit from (21,000 incoming links to Toys.com according to Google).
The fact remains that they dropped the ball from a search perspective though. The way I see it, they could have benefited more by doing one of the following:
- Amending Toys.com’s existing site, replacing the branding, and replacing the products with their equivalents. ie: replacing Toys.com’s cuddly teddy bears with their own line.
- Doing an extensive audit, identifying the top pages on Toys.com from a traffic perspective, and setting up 301 redirects to Toys R Us equivalent pages.
Both these methods would have seen greater gains on the part of Toys R Us, rather then the wholesale redirect that was used.
Redirects are always a tricky kettle of fish, and it’s important that a lot of thought goes into the process. If not, things can quickly go awry, and in the case of Toys R Us, millions of dollars can be quickly flushed away.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not check out:
Muti
