Put an Old Website to Good Use

Writing by Brick Marketing in Internet Marketing

It’s not uncommon for a business owner to have more than one website. Maybe when they first started out they weren’t sure what the direction of the company would be, so they launched a few different sites that went after a few different kinds of products or services. As time went on they found their stride and decided to focus all of their efforts on one website. The other websites are still out there and even generate some traffic since they have aged, but they aren’t active. If you are one of these people that owns a few inactive websites, it’s important to put those sites to good use instead of just letting them flounder around out there in cyber space.

The age of a website contributes towards its search engine trust. If you have a few sites that you aren’t really using anymore, it would be worthwhile to get that age and those inbound links working in your favor. If you have a website that is somewhat relevant to your main website, consider 301 re-directing to the main website. For example, if one of your websites focused on plumbing services but you have shifted focus on the main website to plumbing and heating and cooling services, 301 re-direct the old plumbing site over to the plumbing services page of the main website that you are actively using.

The key to 301 redirects is to link to website content that is relevant. You don’t want to use a global redirect that sends visitors to a page that could be completely irrelevant. If your “old” websites had lots of content, it’s a time consuming and manual process, but the best practice is to go through and accurately match the content from the old page to the new page. For example, if you had a page of content that discussed how to plunge a toilet on the plumbing site, redirect it to a similar page on the active plumbing, heating, and cooling website. You never know where that page was linked to across the web and someone may stumble across it at any time. You don’t want to send them to the homepage of a plumbing, heating, and cooling site. That’s not the information that they wanted.

When implementing a 301 redirect you might not see any kind of immediate improvement. It can take awhile for it to get re-indexed and rebound, but it’s important to implement the 301 redirect and take advantage of any content that you have online that isn’t currently being used.