Many "spin-off" sites - 301 or 401/410?

[AceRentalCars]

Hi there,

I've just started a new job with a rental car company with locations all over New Zealand and Australia. I've discovered that we have several websites along the lines of "rentalcarsnewzealand", "bigsaverentals" etc that are all essentially clones of our primary site. I'm assuming that these were set up as some sort of "interesting" SEO attempt.

I want to get rid of them, as they create customer experience issues and they're not getting a hell of a lot of traffic (or driving bookings) anyway.

I was going to just 301 them all to our homepage - is this the right approach? Several of the sites are indexed by Google and they've been linked up to a number of sites - the 301 move wouldn't be to try to derive any linkjuice or anything of that nature, but simply to get people to our main site if they do find themselves clicking a link to one of those sites.

Thanks very much for your advice!

Nicole

[TomRayner]

Hi Nicole

I think a 301 redirect is exactly what the doctors ordered.  It looks like you've taken all of the key factors into consideration here and, for consolidation purposes, I would be doing the same for you.

Your alternative would be to simply remove the other sites and serve a 404 error for them.  I would only do this if you are worried about any of the links that the other domains have acquired - if any of them are particularly spammy or the kind of links you wouldn't want on your own domain, you may want to avoid redirecting them to your domain (as they will then be a part of its link profile).

If that's not an issue, I would redirect the other sites.  For continuity's sake, you could redirect each page on the other domains to their equivalent page on your main website - but it wouldn't be a problem I don't think if you redirect the whole domain to the root of your site.

Hope this helps.

[AceRentalCars]

Brilliant, Tom! Going to go ahead and do the 301. Thanks so much.