Fixing broken links from old domain

[SEO-Bas]

Howdy Mozfans,

I am fixing some broken links and I was wondering if someone could help me out.

Multiple old domains (www.olddomain1.com, www.olddomain2.com and so on) have been migrated to www.currentdomain.com/olddomain1 and www.currentdomain.com/olddomain2 over a year ago. The old domains redirect to the current domain but we found that a lot of those were redirecting to 404 pages at the current domain. We now redirected all URL’s that were on the old domains correctly. Will those redirects ever get indexed (and passing linkjuice) since the old domains haven’t been used for such a long time? If not, would it be a good idea to redirect the 404 pages on the current domain (that were a result of the previous redirects)?

Thanks in advance!

[NancyH]

Hi Bas!

Great Question! Its mainly depends on the links you have. If the back-links are authoritative and people visited your website using those links they will defiantly help in index the pages and pass the link juice although they are year old. But if those links does not have such significance then it might not help!

[TimHolmes]

Absolutely as seoman10 stated, you may get a few links back, however if there are a few dodgy links now would be a good time to look into having them either redirected or elect for them to considered a 404 and request that the urls be removed from the index.

If some of the 404s have a relevant page on the new site, consider redirect  the old link via 301 to a similar new page.

redirect 301 /oldpagelink /newpagelink

[seoman10]

I would recommend looking at htAccess redirect very useful and flexible.

If the old domains haven't been used for a while it's very unlikely they can pass anything of any value, although you may re-gain a few links from sites that previously linked to the domain