Best way to handle traffic from links brought in from old domain.

[modulusman]

I've seen many versions of answers to this question both in the forum, and throughout the internet...  However, none of them seem to specifically address this particular situation.

Here goes:

I work for a company that has a website (www.example.com) but has also operated under a few different names in the past.  I discovered that a friend of the company was still holding onto one of the domains that belonged to one of the older versions of the company (www.asample.com) and he was kind enough to transfer it into our account.

My first reaction was to simply 301 redirect the older to the newer.  After I did this, I discovered that there were still quite a few active and very relevant links to that domain, upon reporting this to the company owners they were suddenly concerned that a customer may feel misdirected by clicking www.asample.com and having www.example.com pop up.  So I constructed a single page on the old domain that explained that www.asample.com was now called www.example.com and provided a link.

We recently did a little house cleaning and moved all of our online holdings "under one roof" so to speak, and when the rep was going over things with the owners began to exclaim that this was a horrible idea, and that domain should instead be linked to it's own hosting account, and wordpress (or some other CMS) should be installed, and a few pages of content about the companies/subject should be posted.

So the question:  Which one of these is the most beneficial to the site and the business that are currently operating (www.example.com?)   I don't see a real problem with any of these answers, but I do see a potentially un-needed expense in the third solution if a simple 301 will bring about the most value.  Anyone else dealt with a situation like this?

[modulusman]

Thanks Oleg,

There is no site on the old domain, and I'm not positive that there ever was.   I have attempted to reach out the site owners that currently hold the links in question, and have yet to receive any sort of reply.  But thinking about it now, I did not try from an email on the same domain.  So I may create one and try that in the near future.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

301 Redirect is the way to go. To make a whole new site for the purpose to getting visitors to the new site is a waste of time and resources.

Instead of doing a sitewide redirect, see if you can match up relevant pages and have them 301 to their equivalents.

For bonus points, have an outreach campaign and contact the webmasters who are linking to asample.com and tell them you've changed domains to example.com and offer them a new page they should replace the link with.