301 Redirect Internal Pages of a Negative SEO Domain

[SerpsGuy]

I have posted previously about my primary domain name being spammed to death with over 1 million bad links.

So, 90% of these bad links are to my homepage. What would happen if I 301 all internal pages to a new site, but left the homepage there.

Would that result in a possible recovery for the internal page content? I would leave the homepage there, and just 301 the internals. That way all the spam links remain on the original domain.

Is this something anyone has tried? I will likely test this regardless of the replies - but I would like to get replies sharing experiences and predictions!

[Planet13]

I haven't tried it but...

Another thought is to 401 the index page and then just create a new "home" page such as:

example.com/home

That is, if it is actually possible to 401 the home page... haven't tried it.

Also, wonder if noindexing the home page would also be a possibility? Or maybe "noindex,nofollow" ?

[lucy24]

if it is actually possible to 401 the home page

You can manually return any response you like to any request you like (for example, serving a 404 to select visitors for a page that's perfectly accessible to everyone else). Details obviously depend on your server; in Apache it's done by attaching a non-3xx number to a redirect.