If I bought a site for the sole purpose of shutting it down and 301 redirecting all the links to another domain is there any SEO benifit to doing this?
Yeah there can be an seo benefit, but doing it can be risky. Some factors that add to the risk: Sites not being in same niche Other changes made in same timeframe (url structure, hosting, etc) site already has a spammy backlink profile If the domain being 301'd expired (rather than being bought while still live) Also, the more domains you 301 into a domain, the more you are adding to the risk of burning it all.
There likely wouldn't be much benefit in Google. In Google's latest patent they mentioned that if a site's content changes drastically, they may ignore any links that domain may have previously attained. The redirection landing pages would be much different than the original pages. So this would likely fall into this scenario. It seems like Google is now also fighting against webmasters who buy an older domain in an attempt to skip the sandbox 'penalty'.
Vic hit the nail on the head, if the sites are not in the same niche and they see a hosting change or even domain name ownership change (if it is not privately registered) google will take that into consideration and more then likely not list all of the pages you are redirecting from. They might use a few of them, depending on the type of site it is redirecting to, but there is no guarantee on that. That could be the next form of link buying, instead of buying text links you just buy older websites and redirect all of the pages to your site. By google looking into the above factors, they are essentially preventing this from happening.
I will tell you what really stinks about G's policy on this is the fact that I have a couple of domains with a little traffic and want to simply legitimately send that traffic to my new site. I mean, in the end, it's all about getting traffic. So now, I can get penalized for trying to maximize my traffic. Seems really unfair if you ask me. And yeah, the two sites I want to redirect are completely different from my new site, however, even if I could make 1 sale per month from that traffic, I don't want to lose it. Right now, I'm trying to figure out what the best thing I can do is. I don't want to thread jack, so I will stop now.
Thanks you for sharing this information. I must be very careful if I want to do a major update for my website next time.
If you really only care about the traffic, just put a 1 page site up on that domain, with a link on it saying "click here to enter". Use a nofollow link to your other site.
That's pretty much what I'm working on right now, but I didn't think to make it no follow. I think that's a pretty good piece of advice. Thanks for that.
What if you used a juicy anchor text in the link? Would there be more benefit to the link vs. a 301 redirect? I was thinking of buying a site within my niche for the sole purpose of shutting it down and redirecting. With all the possible things that can backfire I think the link idea may possibly be better.
You are risking being seen as deliberately setting up "gateways" to act as links - you multiply this risk if you use "juicy anchor text" If the site you are buying is an old site with good trust in google and nice backlinks, I wouldn't shut it down. I'd buy it and keep it on its own host, and keep the whois different. Then go through the site, removing any outgoing links you don't like. Then give yourself a real nice homepage, incontent, anchor text rich link.
That ok, its SEO but the hosting not support .htaccess, If not working with redirect link, you should have a ticket to hosting support turn on Mod rewrite ext...