Link Relevancy (301 Redirects to Single Page on Different Site in Other Niche)

[illmasterj]

I have a couple of past projects that have decent enough link profiles but I don't care about them enough to try to revive them. I could try to sell them, but really don't have the time/interest for a few thousand bucks.

I'm thinking of 301'ing these domains to a personal site (general topic of business/entrepreneurship) where I will talk about that business as a 'case study' and mention "why it didn't work, etc". This way, I can 301 that domain's links to a relevant page.

My concern is, the site itself isn't relevant to the topic of the personal site. It would look like this:

personalname.com (topic: business/entrepreneurship)
personalname.com/case-studies/project-1 (301'd from all pages on project1.com, topic: ethical clothing)
personalname.com/case-studies/project-2 (301'd from all pages on project2.com, topic: carpet cleaning)
personalname.com/case-studies/project-3 (301'd from all pages on project3.com, topic: sporting goods)

From a relevancy perspective, I believe I can make each of those project case studies relevant to both the topic of personalname.com, and the old domains.

My questions are:

1. Will the differences in topics be an issue?
2. Would it be bad for an entrepreneurship site to get a link from a bunch of carpet cleaning sites, etc?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I don't think any of this will be harmful to your personal site. It may simply not provide the type of boosts one would expect from directly relevant 301 redirects. The improvements may be much smaller than they would be otherwise, but I don't think it'll hurt anything.

The classic example in my head was one I actually saw where somebody bought an amazing wedding domain as far as backlink profiles go (the domain itself was a horrible name like SmithWedding2008.info) and then built a bicycle website on it. And then wanted to know why they weren't getting any traction at all and why it was being treated as a new site.

In your case, the page relevancy will be there for the most part and could help absorb the links and make them trusted and relevant. I just wouldn't expect any giant page rank boost out of it. Maybe it pans out since you're doing something that makes sense with them.

 

[illmasterj]

In your case, the page relevancy will be there for the most part and could help absorb the links and make them trusted and relevant. I just wouldn't expect any giant page rank boost out of it. Maybe it pans out since you're doing something that makes sense with them.

I guess I'm in the position of:

1. try and sell them (not worth the hassle)
2. let them expire
3. see if 301-ing them is helpful in any way

If there's no potential for damage, I guess I'll do it and see what happens.

 

[wikibum]

1. try and sell them (not worth the hassle)
2. let them expire
3. see if 301-ing them is helpful in any way

Why waste the link juice and previous effort you had put into them? If I was in your position I would only consider option #1 or option #3

 

[Philip J. Fry]

I don't think any of this will be harmful to your personal site. It may simply not provide the type of boosts one would expect from directly relevant 301 redirects. The improvements may be much smaller than they would be otherwise, but I don't think it'll hurt anything.

The classic example in my head was one I actually saw where somebody bought an amazing wedding domain as far as backlink profiles go (the domain itself was a horrible name like SmithWedding2008.info) and then built a bicycle website on it. And then wanted to know why they weren't getting any traction at all and why it was being treated as a new site.

In your case, the page relevancy will be there for the most part and could help absorb the links and make them trusted and relevant. I just wouldn't expect any giant page rank boost out of it. Maybe it pans out since you're doing something that makes sense with them.

This is so true. Semantic relevancy and PageRank goes together. If you get a link from a relevant site, it'll be better than a link from an obscure site. I'm certain that this is true for 301 redirects too.

What OP said with pointing the 301 to a blog post that covers the old site's topic might be good IMO as it is an entrepreneur discussing old projects of his, which are now defunct and archived on the blog post. I don't see any problems with this on a user standpoint and, from GoogleBot, you are probably going to get somewhere between 0 and 1 in value from this. Probably not 0 and probably not 1, a full 100% of the link value, but somewhere in between. Vague answer I know but that's what I think would happen.