New domain purchase 301 and 404 issues. Please help!

[JamesPursey]

We recently purchased www.carwow.com and 301 redirected the site to www.carwow.co.uk (our main domain). The problem is that carwow.com had URLs indexed like www.carwow.com/a-b-c the 301 sends them to carwow.co.uk/a-b-c which obviously doesn't exist so is a 404!

What should be done in this situation? Should it be ignored and not re-directed at all, or is there a way to delete/disavow these dead pages? An SEO has advised we redirect all pages to the homepage, but won't that mess up the link profile?

Any advice would be great!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

This is what scares me about some 'SEO's'...

"An SEO has advised we redirect all pages to the homepage, but won't that mess up the link profile?"

Terrible advice!

I hope you have all sorted out now James.

-Andy

[GPainter]

Essentially you would be which is the problem, you could redirect homepage links and go through some of the sub pages find any that may be helpful to your new site but 404 may be better for keeping a high quality site, you could also disavow links from the old domain if you're worried about the cost but Google will remove 404 after a period of time anyhow.

I hope you know have a good idea and can make a better choice now anyway.

[JamesPursey]

Hi Chris,

Not really bothered with a BR as you'd expect that to be high given traffic would be expecting a completely different site.

I can't help but feel that redirecting thousands of pages to the homepage would incredibly counteractive to SEO, isn't that the equivalent of 4,000 really low quality rubbish irrelevant links?

[GPainter]

Hi James,

A homepage redirection would best. If you don't have similar content you would loose a lot of the link juice though and users looking for older content may end up as a bounce on your site so it may be worth letting them 404 depending on what you want from the redirect.

You may find the following blog post helpful -

http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

[JamesPursey]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the rapid response!

The problem is that the URLs are related to the old domain, we recently purchased it so the content is completely irrelevant to all carwow content! There simply isn't a 'nearest case' scenario.

[GPainter]

301 them to the nearest page not the homepage.

If you don't have a page that matches try to do the best you can - e.g if its a eCommerce you could 301 it to a similar product.

301 everything to a home page will not only loose a lot of link juice, it will annoy any users trying to find a product via old links and Google isn't keen on a 301 to a homepage if its not necessary.

Take the time to 301 all the links to the nearest page to what the old link used to point to and it will save you time in the long run.