Redirect old domains

[johnblack]

This has probably been covered before and I know Page Rank is soooo yesterday, but ....

If I purchase an expired domain and redirect it to my site, will the Page Rank/Link Juice be passed through to my site?

Sorry if it's a dumb question, but this side of SEO is a bit new to me.

[sundaridevi]

If you use Apache's mod rewrite engine to do it all the links PR will be transferred to the url you redirect it to. But it takes about six months for everything to be fully redirected/juiced

[johnblack]

Thanks for that, as long as the concept is good that's OK. Not too worried about the time span.

[tedster]

The concept is correct, but there is no guarantee that you will still keep all the previous ranking power when you purchase an expired domain. Google reserves the right to "reset everything to zero" when a domain's old content disappears and the domain transfers ro a new owner - and that often happens.

[sundaridevi]

@tedster: I think you are right. I mostly use mod rewrite to redirect internal links when the website architecture changes or when we started with a .org or ".net" and purchased a ".com" . In those cases, when we directed the ".net" to the ".com" there was a really hairy period where SERPs went down, not a lot, but some and it took six months to fully digest it. I think part of the problem is that if you have thousands of incoming links, you don't acquire the link juice from those really outliers that don't get spidered very often, until they actually do get spidered and the PR is transferred over.

So all our incomings were pointing to .net and we had to wait til they got attached to the appropriate .com url

On the topic of buying domains, we bought a dead ".com" website that was from a competitor so 100% of the links were relevant on the general subject and about 75% of the links were still relevant on the detailed subject although the information was just found on a new site. So I think we more or less got the full advantage of it.

A good example of what you are talking about, i saw once when a hotel and vacation rental reservation website bought a PR6 study abroad domain. They went up to top 5 for all relevant searches for about 6 months, then went down below where they had been before!