Question About Expired Domains & Google Webmaster Tools

Hello everyone,

I have recently launched a website using an non-dropped expired domain with a lot of old pages indexed. I do not need the content from those pages so I 301 redirect them on homepage to get the link juice benefits. However, Google sent an email regarding indexing issues. I am noticing that in Google Webmaster tools there are a lot of indexing issues regarding those redirected pages. In most of those pages the 301 redirect works and on those it didn't work I disallowed indexing those pages from robot.txt file.

The question is: Is this the proper way of dealing with this issue? I should not worry since the 301 redirect works, right?

I 301-redirect all 404 pages to the homepage. Once google re-indexes them, messages will disappear.

tolg said:

so I 301 redirect them on homepage to get the link juice benefits

Click to expand...

You will not get any benefits this way. You are basically killing the backlinks pointing to the internal pages.

You have to either recreate the old pages and let the domain rest for a while. Or you can create new content targeting the same keywords and topics on those old URLs.

For all the irrelevant internal URLs that have no backlinks pointing to them you can do the homepage redirect or use a plugin that redirects them to a similar page somewhere on your site.

This is a fairly decent guide on how to go about the process. Even though I do not agree with everything written there, it's still 100x better than just doing homepage redirect and kill the benefit. - https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/guide-how-to-use-expired-domains-effectively.1223248/

I also do not understand what kind of issue you are having. Google takes a while to notice and properly count and show the redirects in GSC. The redirect either is there or isn't there. No idea why you would go around blocking them in robots.

If you want to make the process faster, then put the old URLs into sitemap and that will help sort out the redirects faster.

Generally 301 are not a great idea as @Nargil has suggested, unless they shall be redirected this way because the content from the original page and the content from the destination page matches.

Personally I prefer to be more selective on 404 redirections and know which 404 are being provoked.

If the site had like hundreds or thousands of pages (like a forum) this will be a real issue. Personally I purchased Domrecovery some months ago, for an scenario like that (recovering a whole forum, generating static pages and redirecting with a regex 1:1) and then managing those specific static subpages the way I want and need (for example, if there is one specific subforum page that is specifically great because it has some wikipedia links, I will manage directly with a Wordpress page, instead of poiting to the static version.

I understand that this could be challenging but from my point of view, it's the best and cleanest way to proceed.

PS: I'm still having some issues with another forum with really weird URLs I have not been able to sort out. I will contact @loopline or the Domrecovery team soon to have this sorted out, and maybe I will write here on how I solved it so it may help someone.

tolg said:

Hello everyone,

I have recently launched a website using an non-dropped expired domain with a lot of old pages indexed. I do not need the content from those pages so I 301 redirect them on homepage to get the link juice benefits. However, Google sent an email regarding indexing issues. I am noticing that in Google Webmaster tools there are a lot of indexing issues regarding those redirected pages. In most of those pages the 301 redirect works and on those it didn't work I disallowed indexing those pages from robot.txt file.

The question is: Is this the proper way of dealing with this issue? I should not worry since the 301 redirect works, right?

Click to expand...

Hi,

It's good that you are taking the steps to fix the indexing issues on your website. However, redirecting a large number of pages to the homepage using 301 redirects may not always be the best solution.
In some cases, it can result in the loss of page authority and rankings, as well as user experience issues. If a user is looking for information that was previously available on a specific page and is now redirected to the homepage, they may have trouble finding what they are looking for and may leave the site.
Instead, you can consider the following steps to handle the indexed pages:
1. Remove unnecessary pages: If the pages have no value, it's best to remove them completely.
2. Redirect to a relevant page: If there is a relevant page on your website that the content can be redirected to, it's better to redirect to that page instead of the homepage.
3. No index, Follow: If the pages are not valuable and can't be redirected to a relevant page, you can use the "no index, follow" meta tag to prevent them from being indexed by search engines. This allows the links to still pass link equity to the rest of your site.
4. Canonic Alize: If you have similar pages, you can use the canonical tag to indicate the preferred version of the page to be indexed.

Thank you everyone, I appreciate it and the time you took to write such great answers to my problem.