Hello, I want to buy a domain which used to host a blog. For some reasons (which I'm familiar and happy with) current owner moved the entire website to the new domain (around June 2009) and put "301 moved permanently" on the old one. I want to buy this domain, add my own content etc. and obviously remove HTTP 301. How will the current HTTP 301 impact future websites hosted on this domain from SERP perspective? Do Google & other SEs visit this domain at all or they know it's been moved and will never ever crawl it again? How does it work? I'm struggling to find information about it so any help and advise will be much appreciated. S.
The 301 redirect won't impact your rankings. BUT! Since the redirect was put on a site, this means there are some amount of links pointing to that site, that the previous owner decided to redirect. This is rather beneficial for you, since you get some link juice for free (and some PR too). You can act in two ways: 1. Ethical. Catch all of the old links and show a redirect page ("The old site resided here has moved to this new location. If that is what you needed, click here"). 2. Unethical. Simply remove the redirect.
I don't think #2 is unethical at all... I'd be willing to bet that if they moved a site from a blog to a traditional web site on another domain that they implemented a 301 for ALL page requests for the old blog to redirect to the home page of the new site. Regardless, there is nothing wrong or unethical if you buy a domain from someone to take advantage of the pre-existing inbound links to the purchased domain UNLESS you agreed as part of the deal to redirect to the guy's other site. But doing so would also mean that you could not have URLs that matched URLs on the old blog like example.com/about-us/. So personally I would NEVER agree to continuing to redirect their old URLs to them because it will limit what YOU can do on the domain that YOU purchased. Such is life... When you sell something, you give up all interest in said asset. I would 301 redirect all of the old blog's URLs to the page on my new site whose content most closely resembled that of the old blog's content (using archive.org's wayback machine). If I can't find a page that resembles it then I would redirect it to my home page. And call it a day. Nothing unethical about it. It's business, not personal.