If you purchase an expired or expiring domain

[Lincoln]

Do you 301 redirect all the subpages it once had to your index page, or do you let it 404 to a custom page? I've heard different schools of thought where one school suggests redirecting everything to your main page to maximize any SEO benefit, to simply drawing up a custom 404 page with a link back to your home page, partly to avoid duplicate content issues and partly for prudence.

What do you all think?

[gwyneth]

Originally Posted by Lincoln

Do you 301 redirect all the subpages it once had to your index page, or do you let it 404 to a custom page? I've heard different schools of thought where one school suggests redirecting everything to your main page to maximize any SEO benefit, to simply drawing up a custom 404 page with a link back to your home page, partly to avoid duplicate content issues and partly for prudence.

What do you all think?

The answers could vary drastically, depending on what you plan to do with the purchased domain.

[Lincoln]

The only thing I would do with such domains is simply have them redirect to my primary site and hope the backlinks/PR they once had will now benefit my own website.

[slapshotw]

If you want to take advantage of the backlinks 301 redirect everything to the new domain's index page (unless there's a more accurate place to redirect certain subpages, like old "contact us" page --> new "contact us" page). The 301 will prevent the duplicate content penalty.

[Lincoln]

I've set up a redirect but I get 404s on pages that no longer existed under the old domain, so if there was an http://www.expiredomain.com/oldcontent.html page, it redirects to http://www.primarydomain.com/oldcontent.html, which results in a 404. Is there a way to fix this?

[Keith W]

.htaccess

 
Redirect 301 / http://www.new-site.com/

[Lincoln]

I already have Go Daddy forwarding the old domain to my site without any problems. Now I'm trying to figure out how to redirect all 404 errors to my main page as well. I put this in my htaccess:

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php


But my server is completely ignoring the command. Is there something else that could be overriding it?

[Keith W]

Originally Posted by Keith W

.htaccess

 
Redirect 301 / http://www.new-site.com/

If you put the above code in a .htaccess file on the old domain it should redirect all pages

[Lincoln]

ok, got it. Thanks!