I've already tried asking this question before my im trying to clarify this.

So I have an older website that I plan on getting rid of, and I have a newer website in phpbb that I am focusing on.

My old website has some links going to it, and I understand that it's helpful to have links going to your website. I was wondering, if I set up an .htaccess 301 permanent redirect for my old website to direct to my new website, will this actually tell the search engines that the links going to my old site are for my new site? Hence giving me a better SEO score on my new website?

Im very curious on this. Also some(not all) of the links to the oldsite are going to subdirectories that will not exist on the new website... althought I may just setup a custom error page to direct 404's to my homepage.

Anybody have any ideas?

In your case and in few words, yes, redirecting the old domain to the new one will for sure help SEOwise.

Generally speaking, if you just update your domain, keeping the same web site structure, then a per case redirecting is advised, each page being redirecting to its new location. But if the structure changed, redirecting all the old domain's pages to your new domain's root is already something good to do, to at least keep all the old backlinks to your old domain. It's way better than redirecting and then issue a 404 on the new domain.

Going a bit further would be if you have similar category or directories, you can then for example redirect olddomain/cat1/*.* to newdomain/similartocat1/ and still redirect all pages without equivalent to new domain's root.

And of course, all the redirecting is assumed to be HTTP 301.

++

ya, the content on my new site is totally different. So probably will be some 404's but also there might be some valid pages and some links going to my old websites homepage which I was hoping would be counted towards my old websites SEO. Not sure if i should keep the redirect. I dont care about the traffic being moved to myself but just the links

Then just redirect everything to your domain's root

some(not all) of the links to the oldsite are going to subdirectories that will not exist on the new website...

I think this would not be a problem. Those deep links would all be calculated as juices for your new domain, IMO.

Have a nice day,

I thought that rediricting will actually hurt my new websites rank. can you please clarify in what situations it will hurt and when it actually helps??

Thanks in advance!

If you moved your content then yes it will help just helping old URLs towards a random site won't help, maybe in the beginning but for long term it won't.