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Completely redefining a site ... best way to leverage existing traffic?

Discussion in 'General Business' started by Nitin M, Dec 17, 2005.

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  1. #1
    I own itch.com and after dumping about $50k into the project, it's time to pull the plug on it.

    Right now the site has ~500k indexed pages in Google and gets about 5k in uniques per day with about 90% coming from SE referrals and most of the rest from direct type-ins.

    There is no plan to move the existing functionality to a new domain... I plan on just completely shutting it down.

    The site that I plan on putting up is targeted for the general public and will NOT be relying on SE referral traffic.

    When I put up the new site, I plan on just redirecting any referral traffic that is pointing to non-existent pages from the old site (which would all now be 404's) to the homepage of the new site. My thinking is I'll get at least a week or more of free traffic that will be utterly confused why they ended up on the homepage ... but, at least I get them to see it :p

    Even though I don't care about the new site sending referrals from the SE's, I certainly don't want it banned or penalized.

    So my bottom line question: Is making a custom 404 handler that sends the traffic to the homepage going to put me at risk for having the site completely banned?
     
    Nitin M, Dec 17, 2005 IP