Toys.com was purchased by Toys R Us in Feb 2009 for $5.1 million dollars. There was a great deal of talk between domainers and SEO people on what should be done with Toys.com as it ranked in the top 4 at Google at the time of purchase for the search term toys. It didn’t take long for Toys R Us to take action with the domain name and they simply used a 301 redirection to their main site ToysRUs.com . This is almost always a No No and will lose ranking in search engines.
Andrew of DomainNameWire.com pointed out on March 16th that this happened and Toys.com did lose it’s page 1 ranking spot for the Toys.com domain name. Before losing the ranking spot, Toys R Us held the # 1, # 2 and # 4 spots with sites they owned.
Each and every search engine ranking for a popular keyword like toys is vital. The more you have on page 1, the more likely you will get clicks from those searchers. Without you in one of those spots (toys.com), allows room for a likely competitor to step into your place…. like Amazon.com, Target.com or Walmart.com etc.
Fast forward several months and Toys R Us appears to have been busy getting Toys.com ranking it’s newly purchased $5.1 Million domain back to it’s import P1 ranking on Google it held before they used domain name forwarding with it.
Toys.com currently ranks # 6 on Page 1 on Google for the search term toys again!
The Toys.com website has a "blog" feel currently and appears to be offering "Deal of the day" type deals on the site. It doesn’t hurt to have strong links in place like ToysRUs.com, eToys.com and plenty more.
Making Toys.com it’s own site, with different content also helped get it to page # 1 again. Toys.com is being updated Daily with the deals of day and coupons, which search engines also like. New daily content is important! It appears Toys.com started it’s march back to page 1 around June of this year, as that is when data started arriving on the site.
ToysRUs.com has yet to use domain name forwarding for the domain name typo ToyRus.com (no S on toy) that they own, as it sits on a page that does not resolve. Andrew also pointed this out in his March posting above when that domain alone was getting around 60K monthly visitors. This is the kind of domain name they should be using a 301 redirection on and they currently are not.
