What will happen if I redirect two DA 70 domains to my website?

[sleepysentry]

I recently had the good fortune of identifying two DR 70 domains with ~15k referring domains and ~5 million million backlinks. The domains used to be reputable free web hosts in the early Internet days and used to host thousands of websites, including many government and educational sites. The domains were parked for about 5 years before I bought them. These two names are for two specific non-English language markets.

My money site is a multimedia stock search site with 100,000+ pages of images, videos, and more. The site is available in the languages of the two domains.

I could build separate money sites around these domains, but would prefer to do the following:

1. Redirect each domain to mysite.com/language1 and mysite.com/language2
2. Make sure the redirects are topically relevant. For example icecream.domain.com would redirect to moneysite.com/language1/ice-cream
3. Build topical relevance in these markets and hope it spills over to my English pages

Is this a smart strategy, or is 301 directing this many domains too risky? My money site is a year old and already has one domain 301ing to it.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Having three 301'd domains redirected in isn't too many, in my experience. Business acquire and merge in way more than that fairly often and completely legitimately. And if you're pushing each inner page on the redirected domain to a relevant page on the existing site, even better. You don't want to be lazy about it or you'll lose the links to "soft 404's" when the content doesn't match or you got lazy and pushed it all to the homepage.

If things went as expected without hiccups, you'd think 15k referring domains would make a huge splash for your site.

But there's also the question of why the domains remained available for 5 years without someone else scooping them up, even for a PBN. I'd check the wayback machine (sounds like you have) to make sure they aren't burnt.

Another issues is if nothing is really indexed on them any more, whether or not those backlinks can be "reactivated and recounted". Some people say yes, immediately. Some say you can regain trust over time to start getting credit for them. Others say they're toast. I've personally avoided these scenarios and only acquire domains where most of everything is still indexed, so I can't tell you from first hand experience, but I'd think the case is "regaining trust".

I don't think it's a risk for your main site. The risk is whether or not you get your money's worth out of it and if you can afford the loss if they're duds (or resell them).

 

[secretagentdad]

Shit man. This sounds like mad money or a big whiff depending on if the domains have any nonsense associated with them.
I’ve had quite a bit of luck with 301s.
You might have some serious firepower on your hands a
Would love to see if u want my blow hard opinion.

 

[sleepysentry]

Shit man. This sounds like mad money or a big whiff depending on if the domains have any nonsense associated with them.
I’ve had quite a bit of luck with 301s.
You might have some serious firepower on your hands a
Would love to see if u want my blow hard opinion.

PM me and I will send them over if you are curious. I can't PM yet because I'm a new user.

Domain 1 was available at the registry for a premium price (but low in my eyes)-- it was in a place no one would think to look. Domain 2 never expired and was acquired from the owner.

Having three 301'd domains redirected in isn't too many, in my experience. Business acquire and merge in way more than that fairly often and completely legitimately. And if you're pushing each inner page on the redirected domain to a relevant page on the existing site, even better. You don't want to be lazy about it or you'll lose the links to "soft 404's" when the content doesn't match or you got lazy and pushed it all to the homepage.

If things went as expected without hiccups, you'd think 15k referring domains would make a huge splash for your site.

But there's also the question of why the domains remained available for 5 years without someone else scooping them up, even for a PBN. I'd check the wayback machine (sounds like you have) to make sure they aren't burnt.

Another issues is if nothing is really indexed on them any more, whether or not those backlinks can be "reactivated and recounted". Some people say yes, immediately. Some say you can regain trust over time to start getting credit for them. Others say they're toast. I've personally avoided these scenarios and only acquire domains where most of everything is still indexed, so I can't tell you from first hand experience, but I'd think the case is "regaining trust".

I don't think it's a risk for your main site. The risk is whether or not you get your money's worth out of it and if you can afford the loss if they're duds (or resell them).

Thanks for this detailed reponse-- this is along the lines of what I'm thinking. I think in SEO we tend to make things too complicated when in reality, Google needs to consider the real world where businesses make decisions without even considering the SEO implications.

I think the added benefit here is type-in traffic. It may not be much and may not be relevant, but an extra 400 visitors a day for free never hurts.

One thing I forgot to ask-- does it matter if the redirects are subdomains? I know Google treats subdomains as domains. Since these domains were web hosts, most links follow the syntax memberwebsite.domain.com. I'm a bit afraid Google might treat this as a large domain redirect but since doubt it will since websites change from subdomain structure to domain directory structure all the time.

 

[Ryuzaki]

One thing I forgot to ask-- does it matter if the redirects are subdomains? I know Google treats subdomains as domains. Since these domains were web hosts, most links follow the syntax memberwebsite.domain.com. I'm a bit afraid Google might treat this as a large domain redirect but since doubt it will since websites change from subdomain structure to domain directory structure all the time.

I do have experience redirecting subdomains but only one or two, not dozens or hundreds, so I can only go on gut feeling, and this gave me a pause and some hesitancy. Because I agree with you that this will no longer be two 301's but will "technically" be dozens or hundreds of "separate" domains (in the eyes of Google).

But at the same time, surely they have some kind of exceptions or understanding that the subdomains belong to the parent domain. Otherwise, if that webhost later 301'd all their subdomains to themselves on a .com/memberwebsite/ sub-folder they could be in trouble.

I'd say that if the expense isn't so great that it would hurt you big time by experimenting to go for it. You can always remove the 301 in a heartbeat if needed.

My main concern is that you don't take all the subdomains and point them straight to the homepage or whatever. One thing I used to do was make either a parent "acquisitions" page listing out all the companies I "bought" and 301 to that so there would be relevance. You could also do a fake press release blog post and 301 a bunch of it to that.

It's just that a mass innerpage 301 to a homepage is how Google pops lazy PBNs and otherwise if the relevance doesn't match they'll be considered soft 404's and you'll lose the links, possibly without knowing. I'm not sure if they report soft 404's in Search Console yet.

 

[sleepysentry]

I do have experience redirecting subdomains but only one or two, not dozens or hundreds, so I can only go on gut feeling, and this gave me a pause and some hesitancy. Because I agree with you that this will no longer be two 301's but will "technically" be dozens or hundreds of "separate" domains (in the eyes of Google).

But at the same time, surely they have some kind of exceptions or understanding that the subdomains belong to the parent domain. Otherwise, if that webhost later 301'd all their subdomains to themselves on a .com/memberwebsite/ sub-folder they could be in trouble.

I'd say that if the expense isn't so great that it would hurt you big time by experimenting to go for it. You can always remove the 301 in a heartbeat if needed.

My main concern is that you don't take all the subdomains and point them straight to the homepage or whatever. One thing I used to do was make either a parent "acquisitions" page listing out all the companies I "bought" and 301 to that so there would be relevance. You could also do a fake press release blog post and 301 a bunch of it to that.

It's just that a mass innerpage 301 to a homepage is how Google pops lazy PBNs and otherwise if the relevance doesn't match they'll be considered soft 404's and you'll lose the links, possibly without knowing. I'm not sure if they report soft 404's in Search Console yet.

Thanks for this insight. I can report that I saw a pretty large increase in URLs ranked for long-tail keywords. I recently removed one of the two subdomains out of concern for link quality, and several weeks later I have lost half my keywords.

Now I'm a bit lost about whether I should
1. Take this to mean that the redirect worked and re-add the redirect I removed
2. Assume there is a penalty and remove the remaining redirect

These domains used to be free blog hosts and I wonder if Google at some point put a manual penalty on sites with too many links from them. I would imagine that in Google's eyes, suddenly getting thousands of links from blogspot.com blogs for example would be a massive red flag.

 

[Prose]

I would imagine that in Google's eyes, suddenly getting thousands of links from blogspot.com blogs for example would be a massive red flag.

If it was, we could use it to harm our competitors. So I don't believe it is anything negative.