: Is 301 redirecting of *.example.com to example.com dangerous? I bought a domain which has several subdomains that don`t exist anymore but are indexed in Google. Is it dangerous from the SEO perspective

@Alves908

I don't think so. However, I would 404 each subdomain since that is a more accurate snapshot of what the situation is. It is likely less risky. If the content has been moved to example.com from something.example.com then I assume that there would be less work since in my mind, a 301 would be best matched from page to page to avoid any confusion that may result in loss of any individual page rank if it matters. Either way, you would have to create each subdomain for a period to make work.

If you do have important page rank on the subdomains that you want to preserve, then a page to page 301 redirect may be the only way to preserve the rank.

Personally, I feel it is sometimes best to cut bait and fish or as a Harvard Business School friend of mine likes to say, know when to cut your losses and just redo your site and wait the 60 days for things to settle out. That is what I would do. Depending on the amount of work, trivial in my case, I would recreate each subdomain and do a blanket 404 for each.

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@Ann8826881

Is it dangerous from the SEO perspective to do 301 redirect to my
homepage from all kind of subdomains that I don't use/not exist?


If they don't exist, the more appropriate status code for your server to return for these subdomains is a 410 Gone, which:


Indicates that the resource requested is no longer available and will
not be available again. This should be used when a resource has
been intentionally removed and the resource should be purged. Upon
receiving a 410 status code, the client should not request the
resource again in the future. Clients such as search engines should
remove the resource from their indices.


And does it help with the Google's index?

If you 301 redirect the subdomains to the URL of your home page, you'll just be telling search engines that they permanently moved to that URL and to continue indexing it, so it won't really help anything.

You're best option is to use a 410 to cut-down on user confusion and bounce rate, which Google may use a metric signal, and also to eventually reduce the load on your server due to the crawling of these non-existent links.

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