Take it on a site by site basis. Most of these sites have nofollowed all self-created links because of spammers and people trying to use the platform for link building. Shoot, I just did that on my own site

I completely agree with Linda about exposure and referral traffic. If it's a targeted audience, you can definitely drive a lot of traffic from these sorts of sites. I've seen some sites where if you get mentioned, it can literally drive thousands of visits per month to your site.

Hi there. Good question and one that comes up a lot.

You need to do the following:

• Put the noindex on those pages
• Remove the block in robots.txt
• Monitor these pages falling out of the index
• Once they are all out, then put the block back in place

You both want them to a) drop out and b) then not be crawled, so the above will take care of that for you.

Hope that helps!

John

Hey there -

Great question. If that's what's happening, then someone definitely bought the old domain with links to it and redirected it. I've also seen this done TO people in order to pass an algorithmic penalty onto a competitor. Nasty stuff.

That said, while this isn't strictly whitehat, it can be super effective to buy old dead domains with links and redirect them into your own site. It actually works very well for SEO purposes! But, it comes with its risks as you have to do a lot of due diligence on the domain you want to redirect as there could have been some dodgy things going on and you don't want to risk passing along a penalty to your own site.

That said, I wouldn't undo the redirect unless you think it's hurting you. Move on and focus on other things to build new links.

The better thing to do, IMO, is to find these dead sites and pull their backlink profiles, then go and do outreach offering your site as a replacement for that site that is now dead. It's called broken link building and it works really well!

Hope that helps.

John