Google: Redirecting A Domain To A Brand New Site Is Not A Site Move

Oct 21, 2019 - 7:43 am 3 by

Old New Different

Over the weekend, John Mueller of Google had an interesting back and forth with an SEO about a redirect. In short, it seems someone took an old domain, redirected that domain to a new domain, with completely different content on the new domain. The SEO felt the site would just rank because of the redirect.

The exchange is a bit confusing because I am not sure if that is what this SEO meant. I mean, redirecting unrelated domain names to migrate the links from that unrelated domain name doesn't really work well these days in many cases. Google knows the links to the original domain name should not be counted on this new domain, because they are unrelated.

Read the stream of tweets, I've embedded them below:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Note: This story was pre-written before the Simchat Torah holiday. I am currently offline for the holiday and unable to respond to comments on this site, social, media or other platforms.

 

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