Link "Juice" and 301 Redirects

[PaulEchere]

This is something I've always been interested in and Googling this I often find conflicting information, is perhaps someone could answer from their own experience.
Does a 301 redirect of a domain related to a different niche actually (or potentially) help?

I'll give a couple of examples of what I am referring to.

Example 1.

A domain name previously associated with a something like a student organization. Has a number of links from reputable local news sources, not in any way related to gambling. Doesn't have any intentional spam links and doesn't appear to have any obviously toxic ones.

Example 2.

A domain previously used for a local music news / blog website. Has a lot of links, some of them spammy, some of them probably toxic, but others from good reputable websites and ~5% are even related to gambling.

Would (or can) redirecting domains like that (one or both) help a website from the gambling niche?

[wonderpunter]

i done an experiment with very high value redirect backlinks.. didnt notice any difference , however it may be different from others

[bpmee]

I assume you're redirecting the entire domain to your gambling domain? If so:

1. Probably not. The 301 means all content has been permanently moved to the new address, your gambling domain.

Many of the good inbounds to students' articles unrelated to gambling now point at a gambling domain. The redirect isn't relevant. For example, several major media links to a graduation page have absolutely nothing to do with online casino bonuses. Any "juice" passed will be marginal and likely lost.

2. Might be better as 5% of the links relate to gambling. The redirect would be more relevant, see above #1.

You might consider doing what many less scrupulous "content farms" do, and sometimes it actually works.

1. Rebuild the old website on the domain. Scrape from archive or Google's cache if the pages still exist.

2. This preserves the original content and navigation (more or less). Inbounds from major media are relevant: they still point to the same addresses and content.

3. The site will more or less stagnate and will likely keep *most* of any previous rankings. After all, it looks like the site owner sold the site or did a slow-paced redesign.

4. Add a "Gambling" section to the site. Or, drop links on the pages with existing inbounds most relevant to your gambling site.

Now you have your own PBN with backlinks built by someone else. Sell sponsored posts for $200 a piece and you'll have a nice side income if you care to do so.

Risks:

1. Google notices your name on the new domain registration (they are a registrar and can inspect through privacy barriers).

2. There's a chance Google doesn't accept your version of the site and it gets dropped.

3. It will stagnate eventually without fresh content. Maintenance and upgrades will take time.

4. A slipshod job pointing links at your gambling site won't yield any fruit. You'd be better off just spending a few hundred on a good outreach campaign or paying an informed author to write a piece for natural links.

[junabukovinskii]

This needs to be tested. It may work, or it may not; no one can guarantee it. I've come across cases where non-thematic domains were attached, and sometimes it worked. I've also attached drop sites in a different niche, but it didn't work for me. Based on my experience, I can suggest trying to attach it and if you see a clear result, it means the attachment worked. But if there's no result, it's better to detach it.

[edgarf76]

I tested it too and got mixed results. If the 301 link has links from a large publication like forbes but off topic it has worked but other times it has not. I wouldn't spend to much time on this.

[GeorgeRysak]

In my work, I constantly resort to using the 301 redirect strategy.

It just takes a little bit of imagination and luck.

For example, if it's a student organization with a drop-down domain, you could create a website article about that organization and set up a 301 redirect of the entire site to that article, but be sure to take at least some of the content from that site's archive into the article.

After all, it's important for a 301 redirect that the content is identical.