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:
The old site looked completely different though. It seems like someone took an old domain, redirected it to a new one, and wanted the new one to suddenly rank. That's not a site-move. :-/
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 19, 2019
The old Facebook page of the store still shows an email address from the domain: https://t.co/p7I0JuSr8E (+there are lots of other signs). I'm ok with people reusing old domains, but that's not a site-move. :-)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 19, 2019
TBH it's also pretty obvious that the old domain was for a specific store, right? I don't know a lot of French, but ... ;-)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 19, 2019
Sure a 301 works, but you're not moving content, you're creating something new and just trying to take an old site's links. It's not a move.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 19, 2019
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.
