Purchased domain with links - redirect page by page or entire domain?

[ninel_P]

Hi,

I purchased an old domain with a lot of links that I'm redirecting to my site. I want all of their links to redirect to the same page on my site so I can approach this two different ways:

Entire site
1.) RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com

or

Page by page
2). Redirect 301 /retiredpage.html http://www.xyz.com/newpage.html

Is there a better option I should go with in regards to SEO effectiveness?

Thanks in advance!

[ninel_P]

they don't all point to the homepage but they do all point to the same directory on my site. Pointing them elsewhere would mean they'd point to unrelevant pages.

[benesmartin]

Just for sure, try to use other tools as well. Register for the free trial and try if they find any additional links. But I think Moz should do a great job. But if you have redirected the 20 links, it should be alright. The important thing is that they all don't point to homepage. That'd be unnatural.

[ninel_P]

There are only about 20 links on the old site that I researched on open site explorer. I don't know how many pages they had on their site prior to my purchase.  I'd only redirect the links. However, I've seen that open site explorer doesn't always show ALL the links so I'm a bit worried about that.

[benesmartin]

Hey Christopher,

I'd suggest 2) page by page. It'll take you more time but it's worth it. If you would redirect all pages to homepage, it might look unnatural to Google.

However, it depends how many pages are on the site. If there are thousands of pages, just redirect the categories. I believe there's value in dividing the redirects in "smaller pieces".

If you have no time, just redirect the site to the most relevant page of your web. It doesn't need to be necessarily the homepage.

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin