I have a site on a subdomain (lets say widgets.mydomain.tld) and I've just managed to get "widgets.tld". Now I am going to close my old site but I'm taking this opportunity to rewrite my site from scratch (new custom written forums, chat room, etc. etc.) so I don't want to just move the old site but I am planning to port over some of the content and close the old site. Now, my question is am I better off setting up my old site so that I use a custom 404 that serves up a 301 redirect to the homepage of the new site or am I better off doing 301 redirects to the homepage of the old site and then just have one big old link from there to the new domain with some good keywords in it?
If you want to keep the full advantage gained with the old site, you should 301 redirect every single page URL of the old location to the corresponding new site/page URLs.
Yeah the problem is that the new site won't have the same pages or structure generally. There will be a few pages that are similar but apart from that I'm really going to be starting most of the site from scratch.. I suppose I could move the old site over to a new "archive" section but I'm more inclined to just start fresh for most of it
If you want to full benefit of u r old website also so do 1think, You have to do 301 redirect with old one...
In that case this is a good solution: I have done that in the past with smaller sites where all pages had been ranking well - works fine. I never used keywords or any text on those pages just wwwyourdomain as anchor - the new sites ranked fast and astonishing well for the targeted terms, including the terms the old site was ranking for. Don't forget to set the robots meta tag to "noindex noarchive follow"
Since you are going to create "new content", I would move the old site to a different IP / server. And keep it in tact. The new site should be placed into the sandbox. The new content and format should not create the Duplicate Content issue. Then slowly, place a link on the high PR pages of the old site to the new site. (Use it for solid SEOed links) For pages that have IBLs associated with them, do a 301 to the new sites corresponding page. (Transfer existing links to the new page). When the new site comes out of the sandbox, make the decision at that time to bring down the old site. But I would keep it up.
DO NOT USE A 301 REDIRECT You will get heavy penalities. Use a java onmouseover redirect with a large transparent image covering entire page. Here is example: http://www.xcelltech.com/
What ? can you back up your statement with any proof ? such kind of statements are not healthy as there are lot of newbies here. @Original Poster - Avoid custom 404 and stick to 301 only. its hard to comment on the site without looking at it. Do whatever but avoid content duplication at all costs.