I believe they do get indexed, don't have any physical proof as of the moment. The easy way is to simply set it up on a test landing page, then request manual recrawl through Google Search Console of that page. and see if it gets indexed.

Oh my!

This is surely the most ridiculous way to do it I've heard of. There are APIs, plugins and other much easier ways to do it. Do they know about it?

Here: http://bfy.tw/4AqJ - first three links.

Hi there.

In short, Yes, iframes will pass link juice, but to the page, which is a source of iframe, not to pages, which are linked inside the iframe. And no, javascript created links are not passing rank flow.

When using iframe, basically what you are doing is you are pointing to the container on another website, and whatever is inside that container, it's hosted on that another website. That's why rank flows only to src link.

As for JS created links - they are considered hidden, devalued or obfuscated. Refer to this page on MOZ - https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

Hope this helps.

Hi there.

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. Are tweets copied and pasted into each page separately? Then I don't understand the "populate a twitter feed" part.

Can you explain a little more?

Couple ways you can go about it.

1. Is any of the traffic going to the old spammy domain any good? Does it convert? If not, then don't worry about redirecting,  there wouldn't be any point, only spam signals

2. If there is some good traffic, then do IP limitations, hostnames limitations etc. That can be done in htaccess or on the server itself. There are other more elaborate ways to filter out spam traffic as well, but that depends on how you or your IT guy is familiar with it. One of the simplest solutions is to route all traffic through CloudFlare, it has quite nice spam filtering, and it's free.

Hope this helps.

"... maybe a lot of traffic will convert. "

WILL convert? so it's not converting now? If so, it's kind of optimistic that will change, no?

Since you don't own old domain, you can't really reliably do anything about it anyway.

At this point, I would say not to forward at all, start from scratch.

Yeah, your suggestion makes sense.

Keep the old one while the new one is ranking up.

Now, here is perfect scenario for you - keep working on the new site, and get full ownership of the old one. Then through IP blocks, cloudflare, removing all spammy backlinks etc, get rid of all or most of the spammy traffic and signals. And then redirect.

Hard to say who and why is putting you on those websites.

The only way to truly get rid of those backlinks is to reach out to those websites' owners. You'd have to obviously find someone who speaks the language.

Now, what you can do though is this:

1. Disavow all those crappy links - that'll get Google to lower the "spam score" of your website;
2. Block all traffic by IPs, geolocation and/or hostnames/referrers (that'll prevent from actual unrelated traffic)

That should clean it up pretty good.
Of course, that requires full control and ownership of that domain and website code. If you can't get that - again, my suggestion is just to part ways.

You are always welcome.

If you got more questions, you can always hit me up on my Twitter @DigitalSpaceman