301 Redirects - SEO Benefit?

[airnwater]

Hello,

Years ago, our company started out as a Yahoo store.  We've since moved onto another website with its own shopping cart but since the Yahoo store is almost 10 years old, there's a lot of history there and it still exists with the occasional order.

We currently use it for reputation management purposes with links to our real ecommerce site but we're thinking of just redirecting the Yahoo store to our ecommerce site.  Is there any SEO benefit in doing this?

We were also kind of penalized by Panda.  Would this help us out at all (the descriptions on both sites could be considered duplicate content).

[Thos003]

From what I understand of Panda is that Panda is an algorithm update therefore the same exact site built on a different domain will most likely suffer the same fate. Google rarely delivers reviewed penalties. Human hands are rarely involved. You are playing a video game against a machine. The machine will react about the same way every single time.

301s only help push forward some link juice. They don't seem to pass all of the link juice forward. They will pass all of the traffic forward.

[EGOL]

**Is there any SEO benefit in doing this? **

If the pages on this old Yahoo! Store have any links from outside your network of sites then the value of those links would pass to your new store.

Before abandoning, I would look at the traffic pattern of the site to see where you have traffic coming in.  You might learn something useful.

We were also kind of penalized by Panda.  Would this help us out at all

I doubt that it will help.  If both of these domains have same content I would try to do a page-by-page redirect so that a page on the old site hits the dupe content page on the new site.  This would only be valuable if the old site has some viable links..