Redirecting one site to another for link juice

[bestone]

I have two sites with same theme - buying cars.  I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain  OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?

[KarlBantleman]

Hi pert,

I would recommend you 301 each URL to a relevant one on the new website rather than just redirect all to the homepage. As well as being the best way to do it from an SEO point of view, it is also the best for users as they will still go to a relevant page. Also if anyone has links to the old website they will be sent to a relevant page.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Well you can do a 301 but also be sure to 301 all the deep links...

So 301 junkthecars.com to sellthecars.com/about-us and also junkthecars.com/about-us to sellthecars.com/about-us

Be sure to also do this in your webmaster tools. You will need to have both versions verified in this account.

[MikeTek]

Hi Pert,

Karl and Bryan are right here - "domain forwarding" sounds to me like the common web hosting account feature, and this is generally a global 301 of all URLs of one domain to the home page of the new domain. You want to achieve page-to-page 301 redirects if possible (and if there are external links to deep pages you don't want to lose).

The problem with domain-level forwarding is any deep links you've built end up pointing to the new home page, and you lose that nice deep inbound link structure that helps your deeper pages rank. Deep pages are the hardest to build links to, so that can often be a tall price to pay.

The Open Site Explorer "Top Pages" tab is a great way to check out which deep pages have inbound links.

As for additional concerns, I'd keep in mind that 301 redirects for SEO purposes are a pretty old school trick, and definitely one that Google is wise to. I wouldn't expect you'd end up penalized for it, but the value of those links could easily be stripped.

As a bit of insurance, you might want to consider some outreach to those in-linking sites to ask them to update the links. I wouldn't mention SEO or anything related as that can really turn people off - make it about the users. But, in the event Google strips the equity passed from redirected links, you've saved some of it.

And I'd also be careful that there are no shady links pointing to the domain you plan to redirect. If they get caught in the next wave of Penguin/similar, the site you're redirecting to could suffer a penalty.

Best of Luck,
Mike