Transfer Blog From External Domain

[TomPryor83]

Hi All

I am in stages of transferring a blog. We currently have partial manual penalty for unnatural links, and we received sample links of our own blog, which happened to be originally setup on another domain. e.g. example.co.uk and the blogs hosted on exampleblog.co.uk - the only way these were linked were through anchor text in each and every blog - so it's clear why this has been picked up. We are now going to transfer these across to our actual domain.

Around 60% of the blogs had no meat, so we have pruned through these. What is the best solution;

Redirecting ONLY the good blogs via 301 Redirect and 404 pages with no meat

OR

Redirecting ONLY the good blogs via 301 Redirect the others to Example.co.uk/Blogs

Thanks

Tom

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Tom,

I would not advise taking the second option. You only want to redirect when there is a situation where the 301 takes someone to a logical place (similar / same page elsewhere), rather than lots of random ones pointing to a single page.

Your first option is the logical route.

-Andy

[iPullRank]

Hey Tom,

Can you confirm that there has been no penalty on your blog domain? If not, you should be careful because penalties are known to hop 301s and JohnMu recently revealed that penalties will follow content without a 301.

That said I would prioritize what you redirect based on what has links and shares. There's no reason to set up redirects for page that no one is visiting or linking to. Go with your first option, but 410 them to get them out of the index faster.

-Mike