301 vs Landing page w/ links

[Turbosho]

Hey all,
I know this has been covered before but I wanted to see if anyone had any advice under current conditions of Google.

I just bought a domain that is similar to mine.. Mine is Widgets.com, the one I got is wigeter.com. So wigeter was a business a couple years ago but is no longer around. It has lots of backlinks (forums, lists, etc). For the past year or so it has been on one of the domain resale sites with adwords links.

Another interesting thing is a decent percentage of our customers that buy from us regularly continually refer to us as wigeter..

Is it better to make a nice landing page with links to widgets.com? Or 301 redirect?
Thanks in advance for any advice!
Turbosho

[g1smd]

Yes. It has been covered before - there's several threads in the last week.

[aristotle]

you might check the Wayback Machine to see if you can find the URLs of the pages on the old version of the site and then check whether they still have any backlinks. I'm not sure if it's advisable to redirect to a page that doesn't have related content.

[Turbosho]

g1, Yeah I saw the ones last week and many of the others, didn't seem to be the same thing though.
Also there is a lot of conflicting thoughts so I guess there is no set way to do there where you don't get any penalties but still get to keep the traffic.
From what I gather it might be best to just have a splash landing page they can click on that leads to my current site and do 301 redirects on all .asp pages to that single splash page..

[g1smd]

If there's content on the new site that matches stuff that was on the old site, a page-by-page 301 redirect is certainly in order.

Point all domains at your new server. Set up a internal rewrite that detects all .asp requests and internally rewrites them to a PHP script loaded with an array detailing old and new URL pairs. Have the PHP script send the 301 redirect or send a 404 header and show a useful HTML error page.

[Metapilot]

Think about a rel="canonical" tag on wigeter.com. With that, you can keep wigeter.com up and effectively redirect any back link strength it may have to your Widgets.com domain.

[1script]

I would approach this with a lot of caution and do a research on why a domain with "lots of backlinks" went dark. They usually don't, not if they have considerable backlinks (which means a lot of effort on the owners' part).

If you feel confident it's not problematic in any way, just put a 301 for everything from that name to yours. Then, after a week or two, take a look at your 404 errors and see if there's an old URL that deserves a direct destination on your site and setup a specific redirect. Sometimes you can even do wildcards but most of the time you're probably going to have to treat each valuable URL redirect separately.

I'm on a fence myself about redirecting homepages though. Just in case there's some problem I wasn't able to identify, I prefer to redirect homepages of old sites to root pages of categories or other valuable destinations on new sites but NOT their home pages. It's not always possible but I always look for an opportunity like this.