Domain now being used for a different purpose (how to deal with previous links!)

[DeanAndrews]

I managed to snap up a domain last October that was previously being used by people to create online resumes.

On this domain I have created a site that allows businesses to have a short web address that they then use to send their customers to. This short address displays a list of review sites that the customers can choose from to leave a review on the business, ie GMB, Facebook (basically any established reviews site) etc.
The problem I have is that there are so many old links that are pointing to the site referencing the previous resume business and I have three issues:

Many people blindly sign up thinking it’s the resume business because they read it on another site who’s link they followed.

The sites that list my domain are mainly job or resume related sites.

I have the previous business customers still with their personalised links leading back to the site that I currently 404.

The site in question is https://re.vu

Any assistance or advice would be gratefully received.

[DarinPirkey]

Not sure how many links are coming up as 404 errors but you could 301 the links to a central page that says basically that the resume/service in question is no longer available.  I would make it a static page with no navigation and noindex it.  There is some thought to just allowing the pages to 404 but if you have  standard 404 page they could still sign up. If you had a custom 404 pages just for these links, you could exclude the navigation and just have a message there.

Depending on the number of links you may want to reach out to these sites to help them out by letting them know that you are no longer a resource for them.  Its part of the link cleaning process you should be doing regularly anyway.  Simple email that you can write once and just copy that says that the link they have is no longer helpful to their users etc.

I'd have to see the link profile to really get indepth with a recommendation but this may be a start.

[DeanAndrews]

Thank you Darin I appreciate your answer and will look to put this in place.

Best wishes,

Dean