301 Redirecting Bad Site to Good Site: Effects?

[pokerprop]

I fresh registered a domain I was surprised was available without giving it much though. After parking it i see the domain is getting 150 or so visitors per day at which point I realized it was a drop that returned to registry rather than a true fresh creation.

I've since discovered the domain has hundreds of backlinks all from low quality sites I assume were owned by the previous owner of this domain or he did bulk link buys from a junk network. This is getting the domain traffic, none of which is coming from google.

What are the risks of forwarding or redirecting this domain to an established trusted site? and, what is the best method to do this (301, redirect, frame redirect etc).

If the risk is really high I'll just forward it direct to an affiliate account. if the risk is mediocre an extra 4,500 or so visitors per month I'd love to have go to a larger portal.

This brings me to my next question. I have about a dozen domains parked that get 20-50 visitors per day for various reasons, mostly old links. Some good, some spammy like blog comments etc.

I'm considering also pointing all these at a large portal. I got to thinking though that maybe I should do something different:

Create a few fresh sites where I don't care about google rankings, design all for conversion and point strong traffic there. If it gets google rankings it gets them, if it doesn't I don't care as the main traffic is coming from outside Google to start.

Is what I mentioned above a smarter strategy than pointing a bunch of domains with traffic to sites already performing well in google?

Interested in hearing thoughts I have a ton of poker related traffic not being used even close to optimally simply because I don't understand the risks.

[Michael Martinez]

Most people don't share the results of these types of redirections. The two (2) instances of which I am aware resulted in both the destination sites being immediately penalized.

[pokerprop]

Thanks Michael. A follow up question:

Is there a way to direct traffic to a site without it doing anything at all (positive or negative) to google rankings? Frame Forward?

Thanks again.

[Michael Martinez]

Do you want people to stay on the old domain?

I mean, you could do a Javascript redirect where you embed a "rel='nofollow'" in the Javascript link. That should (in theory) send all visitors (with Javascript activated) to the new domain while telling crawlers NOT to try to pass any link value.

Somewhat stale statistics indicate something like 3-5% of visitors don't have Javascript activated in their browsers. Could be they are bots on today's Web but at one time that traffic would have been constituted by text-based browsers like Lynx.

[pokerprop]

I don't care about anything other than pointing the traffic somewhere better than a parking page. I have a few domains earning while parked but can't help think It would be more valuable to forward them to my actual websites rather than parking pages.

The java script sound like a solid idea.

The current traffic these domains are getting is not coming from google, so I think if I block google via robots.txt for the domain, then also do a a nofollow java script redirect I should be fine. I get the extra traffic where I want it and don't risk any google penalties.

Thanks for idea.

[PTC]

Surpisingly low in value from my experience. It will add PR and some benefits, but as far as any anchor text related value and ranking for specific phrases I think there is very little value here. If anyone disagrees, I have about 125 domains with backlinks that you are welcome to purchase for your 301 redirect needs because I gave up on trying to use them for anything besides autoblogs.

EDIT; just saw your last post, traffic value can be good here so I wouldnt advise against it, but I am still opting to go with autoblogs for # reasons.

[michal89]

It might be good to get traffic, but when it comes to get other values like PR, Ranking and all other then it's not so useful. I would suggest to use this only for traffic purpose. It might not effect you but will not give you benefits too much.

[pokerprop]

I should of been more clear in opening post. I could care less about PageRank, I do care about rankings but was looking at this from standpoint of not risking rankings as opposed to believing there was a potential gain.

All i want to do is better monetize traffic.

For now I'm going with the blocking Google via robots.txt and javascript with no follow to point the domains traffic to a higher quality relevant site. Seems to be best solution.

When I have time to mess around I'm going to attempt to do a large site with google blocked through out from day one just to learn again, as i think search traffic has made me so lazy there is probably a ton of money I'm missing out on by focusing only on Google. Of course once I reach whatever goal I set I'll unblock google and apply what I've learned to other sites as well.