Potential Damage From Old Broken Links On a Dropped Domain

pennymarketer said:

The best way to do this is to look for the old links pointing to the domain and find the target pages/posts URLs of the domain so you can create new pages/posts with similar content using the same URL, or you can simply create 301 redirects to new pages/posts. You can use Wayback Machine to help you do that.

If you do not want to re-create or redirect the old URLs to new specific pages/posts, you can simply use a plugin (Wordpress) like WP 404 Auto Redirect to Similar Post to automatically create a 301 redirect of all old links to your homepage.

The first approach will help you keep a higher amount of link juice and land your referral visitors on a relevant piece of content. The second one is the lazy approach, and it will not have any adverse effects other than maybe Google treating all or some of those homepage 301 redirects as soft 404’s.

A third option could be to set up a custom 404 page so that all broken links land on that page where you could have some enticing content, special offer or something of the sort to take advantage of any potential traffic coming from referrers.

Hope this helps.

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