Backlinks Redirected Temporarily (New to Old)
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I have a website of which we are being forced to change the domain name and soon after give the control of the domain name to the corporate office. The corporate office will eventually put a new website up on it.
We would like to build more backlinks without the threat of losing all of these backlinks to the corporate site. We were considering to start building backlinks to the new domain with temporary redirects to the old domain but have recently been advised against doing this (threat of Google looking down on this technique). Should we continue to build back links to the old domain, or should we 302 redirect the links to the old domain?
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
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That is exactly what we decided to do, the only thought (in my mind) is we'll working on two sites now (the switch will be approx Jan 2014) which seems a little redundant.
Thanks a bunch for everyones input!
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If I understand correctly, you want to build links to the new domain, and then possibly 302 (or 301 redirect) them to the new domain.
Without knowing all the variables of your situation, it would seem to me that the best thing you could do is what Adam suggested. That is, build up content/links to the new domain as soon as possible to build up your domain authority, trust and traffic.That way when you make the switch, you won't be starting from scratch.
Theoretically, you could 301 those links from the new domain to the old, but this could send potentially confusing signals to search engines when you stop the redirects, and it's not something I would recommend. 302 (temporary) redirects could send the same potentially confusing signals.
If the corporate office is putting a new site on the old domain, they will retain that authority and you won't have anything to fall back on. Best to start building up something now that you can rely on later.
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I don't know how Google would view links to a 302 redirected domain. It would definitely be a bit unusual.
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Thanks for your reply! So do you believe that Google will see the 302 redirects negatively? We were hoping to create links to specific product pages.
Your solution is viable, but we wont get the advantages of the link on the current site in the mean time? Maybe this is just something we can't do?
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If possible, I would set up a several page site with good content on the new domain and start building links to it. I think that would look less strange than a 302 redirect.
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