301 to new domain - does age and trust transfer?

[flanok]

I have a site that is about 7 years old.
I have not had good rankings or any financial return from the site

It has however, recently started to gain in rankings for no seo work or input.
I am presuming that the age of the site, natural growth and its trustrank is kicking in.

However I was not carefull enough to secure the other variations of the URLs.
So I want to D301 the pages of the site to another URL, where I can buy all the variations.
I know if I do this the page rank transfers too, but does the age and trustrank of this site get transfered?

Do they see the new site as the old, even though the URL has changed?

Mark

[tedster]

Page Rank and backlink influence are supposed to transfer through a 301 redireect, and they usually do -- although it's not always quick. I've been assuming, but cannot prove, that 301 redirects are going through a trust check of sorts, before the older domain trust is transferred. For some domains this could make for a relatively quick process, and for others it might take quite a while, if it ever kicks in at all.

But the "document inception date" is what it is -- and a new domain means a new url. The age of backlinks will help out significantly by contributing a historical factor eventually, but there is always that one important data point that will not be "aged" - the date that the URL first was crawled.

Some applicable threads here about Google's historical data patents:

Four 2007 Patents [webmasterworld.com] - see "Document Scoring Based on Document Inception Date" from April 2007
History and Age Data [webmasterworld.com] - the 2005 patent

[errorsamac]

Is it possible to get revert back to old URLs to restore your document inception date? For example, lets say you switched your URLs from:

www.example.com/products/blue-widgets.htm

to:

www.example.com/blue-widgets.htm

The original URL (/products/blue-widgets.htm) you issued a 301 to the new URL (/blue-widgets.htm). Now to restore the document inception date, could you 301 the /blue-widgets.htm URL back to /products/blue-widgets.htm?

[frup]

I 301ed to a new domain. As far as I can tell, the age and trust transferred. Only in Google, though. Yahoo and MSN didn't transfer that, I don't rank well on those engines now, though I did in the past.

[tedster]

Is it possible to get revert back to old URLs to restore your document inception date?

Yes, apparently so, errorsamac. I've taken on clients and while studying their backlinks I found some that pointed to a URL that no longer existed. When I replaced the document at that url, it quickly became a powerhouse for it's content and link power.

However, note that the opening post, while using the word "URL" is actually talking about a new domain name (...another URL, where I can buy all the variations.) That's a different situation.

Glad to hear of your Google success with 301 to a new domain, frup. Not everyone who has done this has such a happy story to tell, but it's good to hear that it CAN still happen.

[edited by: tedster at 5:57 am (utc) on April 29, 2007]

[errorsamac]

Tedster - That's good to hear (I am about to restore some URLs). Do you know if your clients just removed the old pages (and gave 404 errors), or did they 301 the old pages to a new page, and then you just 301'd the new page back to the old?

[tedster]

The client had removed the old url completely during an earlier redesign and let it return 404. That was not a conscious decision, it "just happened". We reconstructed the content as best as we could, with care taken to support the inbound anchor text. It had 49 backlinks, and some were very strong.

[frup]

I need to clarify one thing about my success story. I had a secondary domain name pointing to the website, actually which predated slightly the one I had to abandon. I reverted to that older one. So it wasn't a fresh domain name I switched to, it was one Google already knew about. I was also able to get most important backlinks updated to the new domain name. However, I only had the 301 up for a short time. Anyway, that's the summary.