The impact of pointing domain names

[Ride45]

What is the impact of having multiple domain names pointing to a single website. We had one site that we ended up taking down (with 200 pages indexed in Google already) and then simply pointing that domain to another site, yet maintaining a custom 404 page for the site we took down so that if anyone hit our indexed links they would arrive at this custom 404 page with links directing visitors to our other site. Is this considered a good practice? Thanks

[millie]

I'm just getting to grips with this so I'm no expert, but ...

There's nothing wrong with the way you did it except that you killed off your own traffic when you took the old site down. You could have kept benefiting from the traffic to the pages indexed on the old domain if you had used a 301 permanent redirect.

Try searching for "301 moved permanently" and you'll find some great resources.

A 301 would also be more satisfying for your users as you could point them to comparable content for what they were looking for when they searched.