Multiple domains expiring that have 301 redirects to my primary domain. Am I in trouble?

[ballanrk]

I recently took on the SEO of a large website with http://example.com. My predecessor bought 40 plus domains for specific cities like Jacksonvilleexample.com, Miamiexample.com, etc.  ZERO of the additional domains linked to our main website.

The domains that were bought basically had our exact same website in terms of content, links etc that mirrored our main http://example.com.  I added 301 redirects to help problems that may be a result of this type of structure.

Some of the additional domains were indexed and some were not but all have 301's and as far as traffic is concerned I'm not worried about loosing short term traffic.

My question:

All the domains are set to expire in June and I don't want to continue to have them 301 redirected to my main domain (example.com).  I'm not trying to avoid the additional cost of all the domains but I don't see an advantage to having them so CAN letting all these domains expire hurt me from a long term SEO position if I don't renew them?

[DeptAgency]

Yes it can. Whether or not this will in fact hurt your SEO position depends on the backlinks these websites are receiving.

All the links that point to your domains pass linkjuice. This linkjuice is sent to you primary domain because of the redirects. This means that you will lose all backlinks currently pointing at these domains. My advice is to try and figure out how many links we are talking about, and how much link juice they pass to your current site. You could use opensiteexplorer.org or your webmaster tools for that.

However, If you really don´t mind the cost of keeping the domains at all, i´d say just keep it like it is.

Good luck!

Sven Witteveen
Expand Online

[absoauto]

I'd say check each site for incoming links, you may find some do not have any in which case it can't hurt to lose them and others have accumulated several. In that case keep those 301's or try and change the incoming links to point directly to your new domain "example.com" than you could drop the domain.