Purchase of old domain and 301 redirect

[Andreas8]

Hi, I am currently building a portal in a fairly competitive niche market and targeting relevant keywords, as you do. I have a number of backlinks to my new portal and am at number 11 for one of my big keywords, almost page one :-).

The thing is I have just found an old portal (same niche) Page Rank 6, that has about 200ish backlinks, old backlinks, some from Yahoo directory and it has a PR of 6. I have bought this old domain and it is being transferred to me. The old domain and the backlinks are entirely relevant to my new portal. Infact it is an old portal in the same niche market. But I don't know if I should set up the old portal as a website (grab the content from wayback machine) and just create a whole bunch of links to my new portal site from it. Or do I do a 301 redirect of the old domain and link juice to the new portal. There are things that concern me like: What if Yahoo see that the links from their directory listing (old domain)are now redirected to another site(still same topic) will they just remove them. What is the best way to use the old domain and not be penalised? What will happen with a PR 6 going to a PR 4?

Thanks in advance.

[tedster]

This can be a tricky area - Google is on the lookout for 301s used to manipulate rankings, so if what you do looks like manipulation to their algo, then it won't get you very far, and it might brong about a penalty.

My personal feeling, since the domain has been dormant/expired for a while, is that you will do best by creating real value on that domain rather than using a domain level 301. You might consider reusing old internal urls that still have backlinks, but make the new content precisely relevant to those backlinks.

Google reserves the right to reset everything to zero when a domain changes hands - so that may happen unless you preserve the user value that used to be there. Even then, there's no saying for sure, but it does give you a chance of hanging on to something.