Toys ‘R’ Us Relaunches Toys.com Without Search Rankings
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Toys ‘R’ Us domain name forwarding mistake back in the picture.
Oh brother.
A few months ago I wrote about Toys ‘R’ Us forwarding its newly purchased ($5.1M) domain name Toys.com to ToysRUs.com. This resulted in the company losing its search rankings for Toys.com. The story was viewed 30,000 times.
Some people hypothesized that Toys ‘R’ Us didn’t care about the search rankings and only bought the domain name to keep it away from competitors. It turns out this isn’t the case — Toys ‘R’ Us has relaunched Toys.com, sans search rankings. The new site is a hub for all of the company’s brands, including eToys (which it purchased around the same time it bought Toys.com).
It looks more and more like someone at Toys ‘R’ Us made a decision to forward the site without realizing the search repercussions. Surely, if the company planned to create a new site at Toys.com and thought about search engines, it would have done something to preserve its search rankings. That’s a big mistake to make with one of the most expensive domain purchases of all time.
Further Reading:
Google knew toys r us bought the domain, and no matter what they had done I would have been very surprised if they had been able to keep those rankings long term.
I agree it was a mistake to do the forward and “lose” the rankings it already had… but I would bet it ranks well, pretty fast fully developed.
Toys ?R? Us Relaunches Toys.com Without Search Rankings – http://tinyurl.com/lglxql
I think it’s a great that they listened to the PR and turned this into a deals site when all of their other properties such as etoys & babyuniverse are copies are the bigger sites such as Toys”R”Us and Babies”R”Us – and we know a lot of ecommerce sites are poorly optimized for search terms.
They should continue to grow their SEO terms for Toys, baby coupons, babies if they keep up with this. Who knows what the site will turn into – I think it’s also impressive that they came up with the strategy of the creating a deals site. What will the black friday page looks like, it could generate huge amounts of traffic to all of their domains.
Just visited their site. I like how they have tabs on the top of page for each of their divisions (Toy R Us, Babies R US, Etoys & Baby Universe).
But when you click on any tab it takes you to a blog for that specific subsite. They have no direct link other than text links within body of the blogs to get to the main sites. Sure “Toys R Us” is highlighted in blue and is a link in body of text but they don’t have an obvious “Enter Toys R Us” button.
I don’t know who does their web development or if it’s in-house or outsourced but they seem to mess up on very elementary design basics in addition to their SEO issues.
Congrats to the ‘domainer’, who had the vision to register or buy the generic domain name ‘Toys.com’ in the aftermarket to later re-sell to an end-user- ‘Toys R’ Us’ for $5.1 million. No different than speculating on buying direct waterfront real estate with a private dock or raw land in a prime location for development. Domainers are professional investors. Speculative Internet real estate investing at its best!
Steve – it was bought in a bankruptcy auction.
Andrew,
I stand corrected. Regardless, the domain name- ‘Toys.com’ is a valuable domain name asset and somebody had the foresight to acquire it. Not all names are developed properly with a well executed domain development strategy. Better example is Candy.com bought from a domainer for $3 million to reiterate my point that domain investing can be worthy and credible.
Perception is everything.
I think it’s great the a company like this is doing something different with it. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to this site.
it doesn’t look like much of a website to me. Really just a mini-site in my opinion reaching to get those search rankings back. I hope they’ve got lots of links going to it from toysrus.com and their other sites with high page rank.
Minkcoats.com of course is such a huge runaway success. blah blah weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Well at least I already made back what I paid for it between parking parking it for a while and selling some coats so I can’t complain. Gotta thank my wife for that idea. Not like it changed my life or anything. Eager for the cold season to come back to see how christmas goes on it. Check out the google trends on the term “Mink Coats” it pretty much mirrors what is going on with the traffic to the site for the summer time, very dramatic. I should probably park it again for the summer, CTR on that domain is 300% for some reason, but don’t want to lose search rankings, on the 1st page for all 3 engines.
You think ToysRUs has made back their $5.1M yet?
@ JP
Oh, minkcoats.com… so blasé!
My domain, RabbitFurCoat.com, is raking in the dough in these tough economic times!!! lol
Oh Stevo, I just knew it was you on that last comment
Email me if RabbitFurCoat.com gets any traffic and you want to sell it.