Legacy domains

[clarkovitch]

Hi all,

A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well.

Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was?

Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com.

What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains?

Many thanks,

Dan

[clarkovitch]

Thanks both for responding - EGOL's response was a really straight answer, although I appreciate the detail from Ruth.

[EGOL]

All of my 301 redirects will still be in place when I attend my own funeral and my business succession plan orders the new owners to maintain them.

If you don't redirect and there are still links out there on other websites, Google spiders will not follow them to your site.  Human visitors who find these links and click them will discover air instead of your website.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Dan,

It's important to remember that Domain Authority is a Moz-specific metric, measuring the power that inbound links to a domain are passing to it. It's based on a lot of research and information about how Google measures links, but isn't necessarily a reflection of how Google is actually perceiving and rating the inbound links to your site (since no outside party knows for sure exactly how Google is measuring link signals at any given time). Since those links still point to the legacy domains, they are still coming up in the Moz tools as having high DA. It's probable that Google is interpreting those signals passing through your redirects correctly and passing that link value on to your main domain, but if those redirects go away, that may change.

URLs will often remain in the index when they have links pointing to them, because Google is indexing the presence of that link - but a URL showing up in a site: search doesn't necessarily mean that it's ever showing up for any query. Is your main domain still getting a lot/much/any traffic from your legacy domains through those redirects? How much traffic is still getting to those legacy domains (whether via organic search traffic to still-indexed pages or, more likely, from people clicking on inbound links to the old pages) will dictate whether or not you need to keep the redirects live.

One thing I would recommend doing, that I always recommend when a domain is moved, is reaching out to the sites that link to your old domain and seeing if you can get them to update the links to the new domain. You won't have anywhere close to a 100% success rate with this, but it can decrease the number of links that are passing value through redirects and increase the number that pass value directly.

If you do decide to decommission the server and not re-host the redirects elsewhere, I would recommend planning that move in conjunction with a link building and promotion campaign for the new site, to attract new links to make up for any link juice that is lost from the old domains' redirects. I hope that helps!