I decided to run a test and forward one of my keyword rich domains to my New Orleans website.  My goal was to transfer the “link  juice” to my New Orleans website.

Let the Domain Test Begin….

I bought the domain http://www.web-design-new-orleans.com . I built a basic website, did the normal on page optimization and I got a few back links to get some page rank. I waited a few weeks and….

Here are the results:

1. Web Design New Orleans.Com receives the identical page rank as my New Orleans website whether it goes up or down.

2. Google Webmaster Tools shows http://www.web-design-new-orleans.com as a back link.

This tells me that forwarding a domain is like having  a “mirror” backlink.

Here are the instructions on how to forward a domain:

1. If you do not have one, create a htaccess file
2. Open the htaccess file and insert the following command:

RedirectMatch 301 (.*) http://www.phlashwebsitedesign.com (replace the URL with the domain you are forwarding to).

3. Save htaccess file
4. Upload htaccess file to the root of of the server you want to forward.

If you already have a htaccess file, just open it and add the above command then save and upload.

For those who do not know, Spyfu and KeywordSpy are tools to allow you to spy on your competitions Pay Per Click advertisements. Both give data such as how much your competition is paying per click, how much they are spending monthly and most importantly which keywords they are using in their PPC campaigns. They have more features, but this is what I mainly use these handy little tools for.
Before I begin, I am NOT affiliated with either one of these companies. These are just my personal observations. So lets get started!

I began my venture with Spyfu.com because you can try their tool for free right from their homepage. The first thing I noticed is that Spyfu is inaccurate with some of its data. I noticed that how much a website spends per month is inaccurate on some of the queries I ran for my PPC clients. This kinda disappointed me, but the tool is still very useful.  Now, the first thing I noticed with KeywordSpy is that the monthy subscription is very high. They price is around $90.00 bucks per month while Spyfu is only around $40.00 bucks. The upside is that their data is pretty accurate and they have a much better looking visual interface, nice charts and graphs, and seems to be better organized than SpyFu.

Overall, I went with SpyFu because I am a cheap SOB and I really just wanted to gather data on which keywords my competition is using and how much they are spending per click. Spyfu does that job just fine.