Is it worthwhile setting up cross-domain redirects for old dead links?

• I have a redirect question. Can you/should you set up redirects for old pages that have been moved to another domain?

  To explain: A manufacturer of pet products has been introducing new brands on its main domain. When the brands got popular, they would create a separate site for that brand.

  This resulted in URLs that began as: www.manufacturer.com/brand or www.manufacturer.com/brand/product ... and later became www.brand.com or www.brand.com/product or /page

  After checking the manufacturer's backlinks in SEMRush, I find a good number of back links to these old brand pages, some having a high page and trust score (per SEMRush). They all return 404 page not found.

  Since we are currently rebuilding the manufacturer and brand sites in WordPress, I have a couple of questions:

  1. Can you do a redirect from manufacturer.com URL to brand.com URL?
  2. If so, is it worth doing for the higher value back links? I assume it would help beef up the brand sites, yes?

Answer:

Absolutely! ...however the sooner you redirect, the better – it's hard to say how much remaining value they'll have if those links have been dead for too long. Links that have been dead for 6 months or more tend not to recover all of their previous link juice.

Regardless, we believe that if the links are still there, they're worth salvaging. If they bring in traffic, all the better. So yes, we recommend you at least redirect the ones that are showing up in the reports.

And yes, you can redirect cross domain.

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