301 Redirects on Aged Domain Which had a Different Site on it?

[GrindingTo10K]

I bought an aged domain recently from TB Solutions. The domain was from a related industry to my niches, and had some good backlinks from high DA sites. But it had a store on a subdomain.

So, should I just 301 redirect the 2 subdomain urls that are still indexed in Google because they have strong links? Or create a subdomain and try to recreate the 2 urls? One is like store.mydomain.com and the other is something like store.mydomain.com/folder/item-2/ so I can probably go to archive.org and find those pages and recreate them?

The links to those pages are not amazing or anything, but they are good enough to keep those URLs indexed even though the pages do not exist anymore (the indexed URLs actually say "SEDO: this domain is for sale... etc".

Any risk in just finding every URL on mydomain.com that had backlinks to the OLD site and just doing a 301 to the homepage?

Luckily most of the links to this domain are the brand name/URL which does not contain any keywords or niche specific anchors. It is like a general business name like Nike or Martha Stewart.

 

[propipper]

Did you purchase the domain to act as a PBN domain - which it sounds like since you're thinking about 301ing it. Do you sell the product/service yourself? If you do, then I would just recreate the site with the main 2 pages and then redirect all other URLs to the home page. If you're using Wordpress, you can use the plugin Simple 301 redirects here.

It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish though.

 

[GrindingTo10K]

No this domain is being used for my money site. But there is a sub-domain which was an online store which has some links to it. I was wondering if I should leave it alone, or 301 redirect those 2 urls only, to somewhere.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Never, ever take the short cut of mass-301-ing all pages to the homepage. That's an old PBN juice trick that Google put an end to years ago. That's a good way to have all of the juice reset to zero.

Those two subdomain URLs... sure. 301 them to the homepage, or better yet to the closest inner page you have in terms of content. One or two is fine. Ten can be fine, if there are 100's of others in place. If ten is all there is and they all go to the homepage, it's bad.

The best move you can make is to recreate the same content (it doesn't need to be at the same URL as long as you 301 it). Then you can clean it up and add pictures or whatever. The second best move is to map each URL to it's closest possible content cousin so the relevancy is as tight as possible.

Also, while you're in there, you might as well map About -> About, Contact -> Contact, etc. Do all of the things a big brand with traffic and non-search related traffic would do.

If there are pages with no links out there, I would let them fall away and die before I mass 301'd them to the homepage. Even ones with one or two crappy links... if I'm not prepared to create or find a page for them, I'd let them die before I set up a catch-all 301. I'm being vehement about it for a reason. It's one of the most obvious ways to find manipulators. What you're doing is above-ground and fine. But why lower your "red flag" threshold at all on an above-ground project.

 

[Golan]

I was going to reply, but Ryuzaki said it all ^^ already.

 

[jäger]

Never, ever take the short cut of mass-301-ing all pages to the homepage. That's an old PBN juice trick that Google put an end to years ago. That's a good way to have all of the juice reset to zero.

Came to post this

EDIT:

I was going to reply, but Ryuzaki said it all ^^ already.

Not even the first, for being second. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride

I'll see myself out

 

[GrindingTo10K]

Thanks guys. The 2 urls in Google's index are Sedo pages, as I clicked on "Cache" in the search results. I think I will just leave it as is now as I do not want to break anything.