Consequences from redirecting competitor's domain name

[evotsi]

A competitor of ours recently went out of business and we purchased a few things from them including their inventory and their domain name. We are a very reputable business and have had a good content oriented website for the over the last 10 years. Our competitors website was not as clean as ours, has alot of non related backlinks, however has a higher PR. We are mainly looking to gain their customer base, the PR would be secondary. If I do a 301 redirect from their domain are there any negative consequences? Would a gateway page be better? I looked through the forums, however couldn't find anything that applied to this specific situation.

[tedster]

I understand the concern that you've bought past "sins" along with the business and they might contaminate your efforts. In a similar situation, I recommended a 301 from the acquired domain to a dedicated landing page that welcomes the previous customers. We're about 8 months into the effort, and no problems.

If the domain you acquired is clearly under a penalty, then I'd go a different route and clear that up, first.

[evotsi]

Thanks, that was exactly what I was looking for and sounds like the most logical solution.

The domain is not under penalty, however from looking at Yahoo site explorer it has some strange things going on. I found backlinks from pages under the domain linking to the homepage with spam filled keywords. The DNS information and IP of the old site changed so I can't go the page listed, however after looking at Yahoos cache it seems that there was a message board that received a lot of spam. There are links to various gambling/pharmacy sites and the titles of the SPAM posts link to the main page.

Given that the domain has a decent PR of 4 and obviously isn't under a penalty should I even be worried about this?

[edited by: tedster at 2:32 am (utc) on July 27, 2008]
[edit reason] remove some specifics [/edit]

[evotsi]

Also just wanted to verify that the landing page would be under the current domain and not the purchased one. By the way Googles link:example.com doesn't show any of the links from the spam on the forums to the main page.