Forum Moderators: phranque
A client of mine just purchased a premium geo-domain site, www.sample.com. The site was pretty big and had many pages with good ranking.
Well now he wants to take all the previous site's links (from previous owner) and preserve them for his new site. This I assume would be done via a few 301 redirects.
Well I have a GIGANTIC excel list of URLS from the old site(approx 1000). Some are just www.sample.com/test1.html -> www.sample.com and there are some which involve www.sample.com/folder/test1.html.
Now I assume for the most part I'm going to have a 301 redirect so when Google hits these old URLS (that are no longer there) it will be forwarded to the www.sample.com home page. Does that actually save the rank or help the site? Forgive my ignorance on this, I'm a designer by trade making a transition here!
Any help is much appreciated.
If you truly cannot support the old URL-naming conventions for at least a few years, then you can 301 redirect from the old URL to a new on-topic URL on the site.
The next-least-effective step is to 301-redirect each old URL to a new 'category' page, so that old URLs at least point to a page which covers similar categories to the original page. So for example, you might redirect "1967-Ford-Mustang.html" to "classic-cars.html".
Lacking an appropriate category page, you could redirect to a page that helps the visitor find related information, such as a site map and/or site search page.
Finally, the least-effective method is to redirect all old links to the new home page. I would urge caution here, since the only time this should have to be done is if the new site has no material whatsoever that is on-topic to the old. If this is the case, the search engines will figure this out quickly enough, and the domain purchase will become just that -- a domain purchase; The ranking of the old site will fade away, and you will be left with an essentially-new domain.
Remember, visitors want their old bookmarks to keep working. Webmasters of other sites that linked to the previous site on this domain will want their links to to remain relevant. The visitors to those other sites will want to find what they were expecting when they click on one of those links. Editors of directories (for example, ODP/DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory) want their directory listings to remain accurate and up-to-date. Search engines want to deliver relevant content to searchers. Any attempt to 'fool' any of them will have negative consequences.
If you're fighting the client on this, refer him to the Google Quality Guidelines, and explain them to him.
Jim
