I was looking at a competitors backlinks and i couldn't figure out why they had so many in the first place and secondly why most of them seemed to be off topic. It suddenly hit me that they had bought an old domain and rebuilt with a new theme. So my question is as many webmasters do we have loads of old abandoned sites that at the moment provide a link from the homepage to the current site, but would it be more beneficial to put in a 301 redirect from the old domains to the new one? The benefits would be 1000 or so backlinks to the new site. My reservations are that the SEs might see this as spam due to so many at one time and also the anchor text of these backlinks would be unrelated - would this dilute so to speak our overall postioning? Any thoughts on this or are just links from homepages better?
I would suggest doing link building on your domain opposed to redirecting to a new domains. Good luck...
It depends on whether the old links are related to the new site. If they are related then do a 301 redirect. Its the same as if a company takes over another company. There is no point keeping 2 sites running sometimes so they may just choose the best site and redirect the other one to it. As long as the sites are related there is no problem.
Thanks for the advice - I'm not going to do it mayself as the two sites are unrelated. It seemed to work for the competitor though but i'm not that daring!