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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.

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    In my edit, I added the word "aren't" to "there aren't any noindex rules on those pages" because I think that is what you meant. Please correct my edit if I assumed incorrectly. Sep 20, 2021 at 17:08
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    When you say "empty pages," how empty are they? Are they totally blank? Do they have an error message? What HTTP status do they have? Is it "200 OK," "404 Not Found," or something else? Sep 20, 2021 at 17:09
  • Thanks for the addition... Empty pages = A page with no content.
    – B4b4j1
    Sep 21, 2021 at 7:36
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    "Those pages are not redirected nor 404." - By extension, are you suggesting that any request to /page-does-not-exist results in a sparse page and a 200 OK response? (That would be a vulnerability that needs fixing.)
    – MrWhite
    Sep 21, 2021 at 18:38
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    @B4b4j1 A malicious attack could spam your site with inbound links of the form /many-bad-nasty-keywords (for instance) and potentially get these pages indexed which would be bad for SEO. These attacks are often automated so they don't necessarily discriminate between sites.
    – MrWhite
    Sep 22, 2021 at 10:18

1 Answer 1

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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.

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