Should I keep a website which is outdated or close it down? It has a few links. If I keep it can I redirect people to our newer site?

[dcostigan]

We are in the process of buying some intellectual property, and it's websites are very dated and only have around 5 external links each.  What's the best course of action? Do we close down the sites; then redirect the urls to our current website, or do we leave the sites up, but redirect people to our new site.

Reference: current website: www.psychometrics.com

Old sites that come with the intellectual property: http://www.eri.com/  plus http://www.hrpq.com/

Thanks,

Dan Costigan

[dcostigan]

Thank you very much Ruth.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Dan,

If the sites don't have many links, you probably won't get much SEO value from redirecting them to your site. However, if they're getting traffic right now from the users of the intellectual property, you'll want to signal to those users (and to search engines) that they need to come to your site now, instead of the old sites. So I would recommend shutting the sites down, and 301 redirecting the old sites to the new site for at least 6 months to a year, at least until the URLs for the old sites are no longer in Google's index and all of the old sites' users know where to go from now on. I hope that helps!