302 redirects - redirecting numerous domains into main primary domain

[Seanbain]

302 Redirects - We are a digital agency carrying out some SEO analysis for a potential client. The client has bought over 150 different domains and redirected (302) them into his main domain. The domains were bought up based on relevant industry keywords and protection.

On first instance this seems like a Black hat technique that Google would most definitely punish - buying up domains and redirecting them to main website.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Thanks...

[BeardoCo]

Im in favor of buying domains that are close to your brand and redirecting, but buying over 100+ domains to redirect isn't smart.  Unless they have a strategy built around populating unique content around them - its not a good move.

[Doc_Sheldon]

I'd agree that it's a bad idea, particularly at that scale. If relevance of the redirected domains is high, and it's just a couple of domains, I imagine it wouldn't be a problem. The fact that they're using a 302 will afford them some protection, but how long are they planning to leave that "temporary" redirect in place?

[bradwayland]

This is pretty dangerous business.  Not sure what they spent on all those domains but I could quickly see Google stripping out all the value if this isn't handled properly.

I recently acquired a small competitor.  There were good business reasons for the acquisition but we still wanted to tread carefully with the new domain.  Here is what we are doing.

The domain was actually a website that we did not want to maintain so we 301 redirected all the urls up to the homepage and then placed an announcement on that page of our acquisition.  The announcement is an image that clicks through to our website.  We intentionally did not include any anchor text.  Next we issued a press release of the acquisition.  The press release is a good line in the stand in case Google did anything crazy to us.  We would be able to point back to the date and let them know this was a business move.  Next we started reaching out to all the backlinks and making a friendly request to move their links from the previous name to ours.  In our eyes any site that moves it to us is a long term win because the risk of the value being stripped out goes way down.  Next we sent an email to the customer base informing them of the acquisition and a discount code for trying out our services.  Finally, once the outreach to change links is done and the smoke clears (3,6, 12 months down the road) we will place the 301 redirect on the domain to our site.

This is the only way I would suggest buying domains and redirecting.  Buying domains for search purposes is blackhat, period.  Buying competitors or other sites that help your business but also could help you in search is not.  We have decided to take a safer approach to maximize value and mitigate risk.

[Doc_Sheldon]

I'd say you covered all the bases, Brad. I don't know what you could have done to protect yourself any more. Sean, I think your client is playing a dangerous game. My advice would be to first cull any of those additional sites that aren't highly relevant to their own. Write them off as a bad investment. One thought that occurs to me is that rather than setting a 302 from all the remaining sites to the client's site, maybe you could redirect them to a selected site from their recent acquisitions. Then redirect THAT site to the client's site. Using 302s is still safer, IMO, while you go through the process of requesting changes on link destinations. Relevance is obviously the key... stretching that is treading on thin ice. My approach to that is, if it needs any statement of justification.... it's not justifiable.

[Seanbain]

Thanks for for your feedback guys! It's greatly appreciated

As I mentioned on first instance this strategy screamed Black Hat at us. We decided to carry out some research in to 302 redirects to see if anything cropped up. The general consensus was that 302 redirects were not harmful for SEO and did not pass any link juice. So this planted a tiny seed of doubt in our minds to completely categorizing this as black hat. So I came to the SEOmoz community to get some concrete answers and you guys confirmed our initial thoughts.

At the moment based on your feedback I think we wil recommend culling the irrelevant domains and redirecting a couple of the relevant domains to an affiliate site and then redirecting that site to the main site (just like you suggested Shledon). I completely agree with you when you say relevancy is key.

Any more thoughts on the issue are more than welcome..

Thanks again

[Carson-Ward]

Hi Sean,

If these are just domains they bought that never had any content, there's nothing to worry about here. Lots of brands buy their .net/.co/.etc versions, spelling variations, and any branded/product terms to prevent squatters from moving in. Redirects of any sort are fine in this case.

If they're buying companies along with their domains, also don't worry about it. In fact, I'd say use a 301 redirect in those cases. Google does a decent job of understanding formal purchases and looking for official proof, and they're not going to penalize someone who redirects the site of a company they've purchased to their own.

Finally, if they're buying domains based on the link profile, i/.e. just for the sake of links, then you need to start worrying. It's less problematic with 302 redirects, but I would recommend against this type of domain buying altogether. Some people use expired domains as a method of indirect link buying.

Here's a still-relevant piece from Danny:

http://searchengineland.com/do-links-from-expired-domains-count-with-google-17811