Closing down a site question.

[DomainOgre]

Will search engines penalize you if you put just a placement page where your site used to be with a link to one of your other sites? I know SEs will penalize you or even ban you for redirects, but I was unsure about a simple page saying that the site is closed and providing a link to similar content.

Could anybody clear this up for me? I was thinking about closing several inferior game sites and sending them (via a link not a redirect) to my best game site.

 

[deepstar]

You can be sure that your ranking will drop on any respectable se like google if you lack the content that used to be present.

Eric

 

[NamePopper.com]

Originally posted by DomainOgre
I know SEs will penalize you or even ban you for redirects...

Heyo Ogre!

Since some people use different terms to describe stuff - I need to make sure of something. When you say "redirects" - are you talking about simple url forwarding? Having a domain point to another site?

If so - then I know a lot of people who have never been penalized for that. In fact - many people are constantly buying expired domains that had a lot of links still out on the web - in order to gain the traffic - and point them to their existing sites. It's a very common practice - and nobody I know has been penalized for it.

So are people just getting lucky? - or are we talking about two different things here?

Anybody else please comment too. This is an interesting topic.

 

[DomainOgre]

Yes, I am talking about URL forwarding. I speak from experience since I got one of my game sites permanently banned from Google by doing that.

That said, I don't ever want to make that mistake again and it's the reason why I am asking this question.

 

[DomainOgre]

Eric, I am not talking about the sites I am closing down. I dont care about their rankings anymore. The site that I would be sending the visitors to, from the old sites via a link, has 10 times better content than those closing sites combined.

So what you were saying about content should not hurt the rankings of that site right?

 

[deepstar]

If the sites that you are closing currently get decent traffic from google because of the content on those sites and you remove that content just to put, "Sorry this site is now closed, please visit our parter site xyz.com" then your ranking will suffer because the lack of content. I do not think that having those pages up will effect your new site as I have changed all my enternal links around and basically had a park page that said, "This link no longer exists, please visit www.xyz.com for the new link" and that did not effect my sites ranking as I feel google understands that you could periodically change links.

Hope this helps, another good place to ask this question is www.seochat.com

Eric

 

[DomainOgre]

Ok thanks, Eric.

That is what I kinda thought. I figured since I will be giving visitors the option of going to "XYZ.com" with a link rather than simply directing them there via URL Forwarding, that it would not hurt "XYZ.com" with the SEs. However, I just wanted to make sure.