Is redirecting a large number of domains suspicious?

Cweave from Dallas asks a really interesting question “When permanently redirecting (301) a large number of domains (read: more than 10) to 1 domain does Google flag this as suspicious? What considerations does Google look at? For the purposes of this question let’s assume this as a consolidation move.

I think there is plenty of valid reasons why somebody might do this. For example, if you Google, there are ton of people who have registered Google typos and we try to get those as we don’t want people to get confused to get malware. So we end up with a portfolio with lots of Google related domains even things like Google sex and Google porn. And so I think it’s perfectly logical to have misspelling of Google and all that stuff just to a 301 to Google’s home page. So that’s what I think Cweave was talking about when they said consolidation move. At the same time if we see a ton of 301’s all going to one domain, then we might take a look at that, you could certainly imagine someone trying to abuse that or do spam so we could take a second look or scrutinize that. But if all you are doing is trying to consolidate misspellings or a bunch of brands, and by brands I mean a bunch of domains that you have registered that are very in-severe domain and you really only have that one domain, I don’t foresee that being a problem because people would check it out or someone reported it as a spam thing, if we took a look we’ll just see oh yeah they are just consolidating their brand. So Google might take a look but I don’t consider that to be a large problem.

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