How should we handle old URLs from a recently acquired expired domain that currently redirect to empty pages?

How should we handle old URLs from a recently acquired expired domain that currently redirect to empty pages? - If a page has internal and external outgoing links to redirecting URLs, it’s returning 3xx (301, 302, etc.) HTTP status codes standing for redirection. This issue means that the page does not exist on a permanent or temporary basis. It appears on most of the popular web browsers, usually caused by a misconfigured website. However, there are some steps you can take to ensure the issue isn’t on your side. You can find more details about redirecting URLs by reading the Google Search Central overview. In this article, we’ll go over how you can fix the How should we handle old URLs from a recently acquired expired domain that currently redirect to empty pages? error on your web browser. Problem :

I am managing a customer website. They recently bought an expired domain name and simply redirected it to their main domain.

The expired domain was safe, non-spam with good authority. However, the old domain had these URLs:

• https://www.expired-domain.com/news/article-01


• https://www.expired-domain.com/news/article-02


• https://www.expired-domain.com/news/article-03

And now I have multiple empty pages on the new website like:

• https://www.new-domain.com/news/article-01


• https://www.new-domain.com/news/article-02


• https://www.new-domain.com/news/article-03

Google Search Console reports that Googlebot crawled those pages but Google did not index them for now. Currently, there aren't any noindex rules on those pages.

How bad those "empty" pages can hit the new domain name? What is the best way to treat those pages ?

Edit :

By "Empty Pages I meant pages with no content.

You have the header and the footer from the theme and no body content.

Those pages are not redirected nor 404.

Solution :

As long as your "empty" pages are correctly returning a 404 (or 410) status code, you should not have to worry about any ranking drop in the new domain.

Google will treat the URLs as removed - which they were - and eventually reduce the crawl frequency on them.

We hope that this article has helped you resolve the seo, google-search-console, redirects error in your web browsers. Enjoy browsing the internet uninterrupted!