Disabling a website - What to do with "link juice"?

[yousayjump]

Hi

I built a website for a client a long time ago now and for a number of reasons I have decided to shut down the website. None payment being one of the reasons!

My question to all you SEO guru's out there is, what should I do with 301 redirects. The site is an e-commerce based website and my personal website is simply advertising my services and portfolio.  If I 301 redirect all the traffic from the customer website, will there be any issue with Google (or any search engine) seeing that my website is receiving traffic for search phrases such as "Coffee Mugs"? I.e. abolutely no relevance at all to my website content! My worry is my site could be penalised for a flurry of thousands of redirected links.

Also, if I redirect everything to my site and the customer decides to pay the bill in due course, I will then remove the redirects -  I guess this will have a massive impact on the rankings of the site?

Thanks for reading and any advice.

[William.Lau]

That's not cool. Both nonpaying customer and redirecting to your own site.

You should find a way to resolve this issue instead of taking control of another person's business. When doing SEO, hosting, design, etc, it is just part of the business. You will have to do better in collecting payment for future projects.

Plus redirecting their site to your site will not help you anyway. If anything it will hurt you with such a large amount of links.

[yousayjump]

Thanks William.

The customer has not paid for nearly 10 months now and will not respond to any communication.  I am left with no choice after being very reasonable and paying for hosting in addition to th development however, I guess this is not the platform to discuss those kind of business issues.

Onto SEO and regarding redirecting his site to mine - would this definately hurt my site?

The alternatiive is to not do any redirecting at all and let the customer see a default browser error page?

Thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[William.Lau]

You should've took down the site after 1 month.

No one can predict Google but cloaking is extremely frowned upon. Like you said "Coffee Mugs" don't relate to your site at all.

I'd say you take the site down and let it show an error until the customer responds. If the site is making any money, I don't see why your customer won't pay.

[yousayjump]

Many Thanks for the prompt advice.

[irvingw]

Make the site a homepage only site that says "website account has been suspended due to nonpayment" hehe that would probably be effective

I would not redirect it to your site for legal and ethical reasons.