The Search blog · SEO Cornwall · · 2 min read

How to perform Switchbait

I have a fictional client residing in the pet supplies market who wishes to dominate the dog collar market.

I have been thinking about a technique called switchbait and whether it would work for such a client. Here is the process:

Buy a domain containing the keyword you wish to target. In this case is will be, www.big-dog-collar.com

After a few times on the front page of Digg, Reddit and Delicious etc. You should have a few thousand backlinks. Most of the links will use the Title of the story for anchor text of the link, but some links will contain the domain name of www.big-dog-collar.com

Let the domain age a little, then 301 redirect the domain to the official Pet Supplies website. Keep the original content but integrate the ecomerce part of Pet Supplies to the posts.

You now have thousands of links linking to your main site with relevant anchor text 301 redirected to it.

Now this is theoretical, I have not done this yet. But I have had success with getting links with specific anchor text and I have succesfully 301 redirected a domain and benefitted from the added juice.

But I have never mixed the two and so am not totally sure this would work. Obviously the links would still be pointing to the old domain, although the 301 would take care of that.

The question is, would this give the Pet Supplies website a boost in the SERPS for "big dog collar"?
Would the return on investment be enough to make it worthwhile.

I suspect it would, the next question would be what is the ROI? How effective would the bump be.

I will be setting up a test domain and report back, although if it's wildly successful I will probably only pass the results to friends.

Discussion welcome, if you think this is pie in the sky thinking let me know.

Lyndon Antcliff has worked in SEO, copywriting and content strategy for twenty years. He runs CornwallSEO from Falmouth, Cornwall. Book a free visibility audit.