Old Domain Redirection

[RuchiPardal]

Hi,

Recently we have purchased a domain (example www.test.com) with very good Page Rank , Domain Authority and back links. Here my question is should we do 301 redirection from www.test.com to my domain www.test1.com, and if we do that what we will be the impact of seo on www.test1.com.

Kindly elaborate.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Ruchi, thanks for your question! Did any of these responses answer it? If so, please mark them as "good responses." Thanks!

Christy

[DougRoberts]

Agree with the other posters. It's important to review your backlink profile before proceeding. You can also check for other reputation issues like presence on email black-lists etc.

As we as checking the backlink profile of the domain you've purchased you may also be able to take a look at the historical content on the site using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine: http://archive.org/web/

Assuming that the domain you purchased was targeting the same audience as your website or operating in the same niche:

You can redirect the entire site to your home page. But be aware that if you do this the old site content that's currently indexed in the search engines will decay and vanish over time. If you've got ownership of the old site content as well as the domain it may be worth looking at how you can incorporate any good content, high ranking pages onto your own site and then re-direct to them.

You can redirect specific pages to the relevant page on your new site. You can direct visitors to the content on your site that is most relevant to them which may improve the user experience and engagement. Even if you decide not to do a blanket re-direct, you may still be able to redirect those pages that you're really interested in.

Use this as an opportunity to do outreach to the sites that are currently linking to the domain you've purchased and see if there is an opportunity to link directly to your main site. (a direct link may be worth more than just the re-directed link.)

You can also look for citations on the web for the domain that doesn't have a link and see if there's an opportunity for outreach there too.

[MickEdwards]

Absolutely agree with Frederico.  I've had first hand experience of infected domains poisoning when coming in as 301's.  Always make sure the link profile is clean before redirecting.

[FedeEinhorn]

Yes, basically you will get the juice from the new domain to your old domain. However, have you made your research? As the domain may have a penalty that an also be passed to your old domain by 301 the new one.

I would suggest you do a backlink assessment, add the domain to your Webmaster Tools and look for any manual actions that the domain might have.

If your research results in a bad backlink profile, or a manual penalty, I'll suggest you don't make the 301.

Hope that helps.