PR 6 Redirect to a brand new domain name

[artdivision]

Hello all,

I checked a lot fo blog posts about 301 redirects but wanted to double check with you all.

I got an email from a potential client who want to do a re-brand of his business and decided to buy a new domain name.
His old domain name is PR 6 and his new domain obviously PR 0. I tried to check his old web site but it is too late as he has redirected everything to the new one. What it seems he has done though is redirect everything from his old domain (whether it is a sub category link, a blog link or a specific product) to the new domain index page.

So for example if someone linked to his old product page www.xxxxxx.com/product/product_1 or his blog post www.xxxxxx.com/blog/11-21-2013/xxxxxxxxx.com in both cases it will take em to the new domain index page www.xxxxxx.com as he has not created product pages, blogs or anything than just a 4 page web site.

I know that ideally he should have created same folders/subfolders, get his blog posts up and set up proper re-directs to the new pages but as I was not in charge of this process nor know if he has kept the old web site yet I wanted to know how bad is this for SEO and if his old PR 6 will pass value to his new domain.

Yiannis

[artdivision]

Thank you all for your replies. yes it was re branding. I advised what you both recommended but I am afraid it is a little too late. Oh well

[FedeEinhorn]

Why he decided to move domains? rebranding? penalty on the previous domain? As if it was a penalty, he better off NOT 301 the old pages to the new ones.

Rebranding? Take a look at SEOMoz - Moz transition (it may help): http://moz.com/blog/goodbye-seomoz-hello-moz

There's a podcast on the same subject but I can't find it right now.

Hope that helps.

[Anti-Alex]

This is a tough situation and one I've seen many many times. Basically your boss wiped out all of his backlinks. Depending on how long everything has been down, he might have a chance of recovering them by reverting everything back to the way it was. Generally, it's best to leave a domain as is and work on building the new brand alongside the old pages. Redirect relevant pages from the old site to the new site, and put up a banner or countdown from the old site's index to the new one. The new domain is PR0 and new so it has to get built up. The fastest way to do that is to leverage the old domain to boost the new one, then make the full redirect once the new one has picked up some steam.

[Chris.Menke]

Yiannis,

The client will lose the value those external links (if there were any) brought to the internal pages of the old site .  Those deep links helped those internal pages rank better against competitors.

Some may also say that the value that the 301'd links bring to the home page may not be as strong as the value they used to bring to the originally linked-to pages because the relevancy of the linking page and the linked-to page may not be as close as it used to be.

Indexation of the new pages may take longer than if the 301s had been created to those new pages.