Need 301 Advice with a Recovered URL from a Domain Typosquatter
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I am new to a SMB and someone bought the plural version of our domain back in 2005 and has yet to let it expire. The domain was just renewed for another year so we finally decided to contact a lawyer and go through the domain name dispute process. This seems like a pretty cut an dry case and the lawyer is very confident that we'll have the domain within 30-40 days.
Currently the plural version domain 303s to spammy web pages, shows shady ads and is just a malicious looking page in general. I am not savvy enough to know the exact complexities of what's happening on the backend but it's spammy.
Knowing the history of the plural version domain, how would you treat it after we acquire it? Obviously, I wouldn't want to put our site in jeopardy by 301ing the plural version of our URL to our current healthy site but at the same time many customers might go to that domain by accident so eventually I'd like to 301 it. If it's any help, the plural version has a robots.txt that prevent G from crawling it..thank you in advance for your guidance!
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Thanks so much for the insight Dirk, that seems like a good course of action for us
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Hi,
I wouldn't worry too much about redirecting it to the normal site. It has lousy content at the moment, but the moment you take ownership, you'll redirect it to your site with quality content. Anyhow, Google will see that the ownership has changed as the DNS records are changing, there will be a new owner in webmastertools, the content is changing etc.
As it is a typosquatter, he will probably not have put the effort to build (cheap & spammy) links to this domain, and will not have done many efforts regarding SEO - so probably from an SEO perspective this is probably a quite clean site.
You could put the domain a few months in quarantaine to be sure- putting a static html page like 'did you want to visit mydomain.com - click here', activate webmastertools, check the linkprofile, see if any warnings from Google are coming.
If everything looks ok after a few months, you just activate the redirect
rgds,
Dirk
Update: noticed to late that the robots.txt is blocking googlebot - so Google officially isn't aware that the site is linking to low quality site - so would not have too many doubts on redirecting
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