Are you planning on boosting your money site with a quality aged domain by redirecting it?
301 redirects can be a fantastic way to build links without having to do any outreach and negotiations with webmasters.

Although the benefits sound amazing, you will first of course need to technically implement the 301 correctly in order to obtain these benefits.

So, how do you do it?

What Is The Right Way To 301 Redirect An Aged Domain?

A lot of people get redirects wrong. But then again, everyone has their own opinion and methods in SEO.

But, we will show you how we have done thousands of 301 redirects at Niche Website Builders for hundreds of clients, and the results never disappointed.

Should You Redirect To The Homepage?

A common method among SEOs is to redirect the aged domain to the homepage and call it quits. But is it a suitable method? We don’t think so.

The reason why we don’t redirect aged domains to the homepage for our clients is because we treat websites as a business.

What happens when a real physical business acquires another business? They will have a big press release, they won’t just throw the acquired business to their front door and call it quits, will they?

A massive internal restructuring will take place, where different bits from the acquired business, will get incorporated into the existing business.

The same applies to websites. For example, a page on that aged domain you are redirecting into is relevant to a page on your main site, will probably get redirected page-to-page, just like for example some of the marketing departments of the acquired business will get incorporated into the existing marketing department of the existing business.

That is why we typically redirect aged domains to an acquisition page.

The acquisition page will heavily internally link to different parts of your site, spreading the juice nicely.

What is An Acquisition Page?

An acquisition page is typically a very long piece of content (Skyscraper style).
One of the main purposes of the acquisition page is to tell the world that you have acquired X business.

Typically this announcement will be made within the first couple of paragraphs. It will look like something like this:

“We are delighted to announce that we (e.g facebook.com) have acquired (e.g Twitter.com) and we are welcoming all the readers of twitter.com.”

The rest of the acquisition page typically covers very broad subjects of the niche you are in.

So, for example, if you are in the tennis niche, and you are acquiring a tennis-aged domain, you will cover the tennis niche very broadly. Something like “How To Play Tennis, a Beginners Guide”

And because you will cover tennis so broadly, you will be able to internally link to a lot of relevant pages on your site.

Can You Redirect An Aged Domain To a Category?

You will still need an acquisition page because you will still need to somehow tell the world that you have acquired an X domain and that it’s coming directly from your site, rather than just from a press release.

The best approach is to redirect the aged domain to an acquisition page, and then heavily internally link from that acquisition page to those posts within the category page.

How To 301 Redirect An Aged Domain To Your Man Site? (Step-By-Step)

Again, people tend to have their own different methods to implement 301 redirects.
However, here’s how we do it at Niche Website Builders.

Set up a staging WordPress site for the domain you are going to be redirecting.
– Set up a hosting
– Connect your domain to your hosting
– Install an SSL certificate

Publish the posts on your main site, if there are any that you will be page-to-page redirecting.
Publish the acquisition page on your main site.
Install the required plug-ins on the staging WordPress site.
Technically implement the 301 redirects from the domain you are redirecting → to your main site.

Now, let’s break down each one of these!

Set Up a Staging WordPress Site For The Domain You Are Going To Be Redirecting

This is an important step, and it sounds a lot more difficult than it actually is.
You will need hosting, and you will need to connect your domain from your domain registrar to your hosting and install an SSL certificate.

That’s it.

Note: Your redirects won’t work if the domain you are redirecting hasn’t got an SSL certificate installed.

Once you are signed into the back-end of WordPress, there 2 things you need to do:

1. Deactivate And Delete All Default Plug-Ins:

You won’t really need any of these plug-ins, as remember, this is a staging site, and you don’t need all this bloat.

2. Change The Permalinks

The default option is preset to Custom Structure, you will want to change this to Post Name instead.

Publish The Posts On Your Main Site, If There Are Any You Will Be a Page-To-Page Redirect.

Redirecting the homepage only, sometimes may not be enough. If some internal posts of the aged domain are getting good quality backlinks, or have previously generated a lot of traffic, you will want to recreate them.

Keeping the relevancy as close as possible when you perform redirects is crucial.

For example, if the aged domain used to have a post that was getting 4k of traffic historically, and has links like Buzzfeed pointing to it, and the post was “What To Wear To A Tennis Match” – then you will need to recreate that post (obviously make it unique, don’t copy and paste) and publish it on your main site, then 301 redirect that URL from the aged domain to your main site.

Publish The Acquisition Page On Your Main Site

Once the acquisition page is written up, make sure you upload it to the “Page” section of your WordPress, not as a post.

You don’t really need this page to rank specifically, as the purpose of it, is to extract the juice from the aged domain and pass it to your internal pages that you TRULY want to rank.

Install The Required Plug-ins On The Staging WordPress Site

You will only need to install 2 plug-ins.

1. Redirection

Make sure you select this when you are setting up this plug-in:

This plug-in is important, as it will redirect all the broken images and 404s onto the acquisition page.

Technically Implement The 301 Redirects From The Domain You Are Redirecting → To Your Main Site.

Once you have done all the other things above, it’s time for the fun part – redirecting!

You will need to open your redirection plugin:

You will then need to work on this box:

Now let me explain which one is for what purpose:

You will only really need 2 of these boxes, the first one being the Source URL:

However, there is a trick here, if you are redirecting page to page, you shouldn’t use the full URL in the Source URL box.

For example, if you are trying to redirect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_fish, you will only need to use everything after the ‘/’ so you will need to put this:
/List_of_fictional_fish – if that makes sense.

Now, the second box you will need is the Target URL:

This one is self-explanatory – this is where you will need to put the URL of where you want /List_of_fictional_fish to be redirected into.

Using the Target URL, you should use the whole link rather than anything partial like you would need to on the Source URL.

Let’s use the Wikipedia example, if you want a link to be redirected onto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_fish, then you will need to input the full URL onto the Target URL box, including any https, so it should be like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_fish

Once you have imputed the URLs correctly, just click on Add Redirect.

And that’s it, job done!

Now, this was just an example if you are doing page-to-page redirects.
If you have both page-to-page redirects to 301, then do the page-to-page redirects first, then finally do the redirect to the acquisition page.

Because the purpose of the acquisition page is to have everything that the aged domain has pointed to it, you won’t need to add a specific URL onto the Source URL box, since you want to redirect everything onto the acquisition page.

So, what you will need to do is input this ‘/’

this basically means that everything after ‘/’ will get redirected.

Now, with your target URL, you will need to input the full link of your acquisition page.

If it’s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_fish, then you should add it that way:

Then click on Add Redirect.

With the acquisition page, sometimes it may take some time until you are able to see that it’s come through.

The best way to check that is by using this tool.
If it shows you the results:

So the URL of the domain you wanted to redirect is displaying in the right URL, then it has worked.

We used an example above from one of our clients, so we have had to erase the domain name.

How Long Does it Take For Aged Domain To Take Effect Once Redirected?

The time will vary. But we have seen some very quick results, like within a week, but oftentimes it can take up to a month.

Here’s an example of an aged redirection we performed – and when the benefits came in:

The aged domain was implemented on the 26th of September, and the effects took place after…

1 month!

But as I said, the time will vary.

Should I Issue A Press Release Announcing My Acquisition?

We always recommend to all our clients that they issue a press release announcing that their site has acquired site X. This makes the whole thing more legit.

Although not an essential step, it is highly recommended.

How Many Redirects Are Too Many?

As Mark & Adam have discussed here – there really isn’t a limit, if you have done the redirects correctly and if you have performed the due diligence correctly, and implemented the 301 redirects well, then really, there isn’t much you should be worried about. If you do things right, you can redirect as many aged domains as you want.

Summary:

301 redirects may sound a bit scary to some people, but the process is quite straightforward.
Just remember, you should always redirect aged domains that are relevant to your site and ones you have vetted out well.

If however, you don’t want to deal with the technicalities, you can trust Niche Website Builders who are experts in the field of aged domains – we do all the due diligence for you, so you won’t have to worry about this part, and we can implement all the 301 redirects for you! Get in touch with us.

How To Technically Implement 301 Redirects Of Aged Domains