301 Question - Smart People Step Inside!!!!

I'm not that smart I'm just dropping by to give you a personal thanks.

That ebook you wrote (on your blog) is absolutely incredible. For a while I was having problems finding solid, unbias advice on how to rank a website, and 2 weeks after reading that book I have various keywords showing up between pages 2-5 of google.

I also purchased my first relevant/aged/high pr website thanks to you. So seriously man, I can't thank you enough!

(must be weird getting random thanks from people you don't know lol)

When I buy a domain with links I fire up SEO spyglass to find all the backlinks. I then sort the links it finds according the the PR. I redirect all the high PR links back to the home page and let the PR0's redirect to a 404. Sometimes If I see an inner page that had multiple high PR links pointed at it, I'll recreate the page on my new site and 301 to that. Now I have some extra high PR pages to use on my new site

I usually edit my .htaccess manually:

RewriteEngine on
ErrorDocument 404 /404.php
redirect 301 /plants/
hxxp://newplantsite.com
redirect 301 /plants/yellowroses.php
hxxp://newplantsite.com/plants/yellowroses.php

in the example above, the redirect 301 /plants/ is redirecting the old plants directory to the home page of the new domain. I don't tend to tell it to go specifically to index.php or whatever index type I am using. I just send it to the domain root.

in the example above, the redirect 301 /plants/yellowroses.php may have had some pr4's or pr3's linked to it, so I recreated that directory and page on my new domain and redirected the old traffic and links there.

I 404 the no PR value links typically.

I am no htaccess expert, and I usually have to do one line at a time in the file, save the file and then go check to see if the redirect is actually working. Often I'll get a 500 internal server error and I'll have to go back and troubleshoot the syntax. It's tedious, but onces it's working it tends to stay working forever.

What I do on my Wordpress sites is run a 404.php page that redirects all broken links back to the Index page, this way I don't ever have to check for broken links, or If my traffic screws up the URL when they create a backlink, as long as the domain is correct a broken link will be redirected to the Index page.

I've attached a copy of my Wordpress 404.php page (zip file below).