Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Any way around buying hosting for an old domain to 301 redirect to a new domain?
-
Howdy.
I have just read this QA thread, so I think I have my answer. But I'm going to ask anyway!
Basically DomainA.com is being retired, and DomainB.com is going to be launched.
We're going to have to redirect numerous URLs from DomainA.com to DomainB.com. I think the way to go about this is to continue paying for hosting for DomainA.com, serving a .htaccess from that hosting account, and then hosting DomainB.com separately.
Anybody know of a way to avoid paying for hosting a .htaccess file on DomainA.com?
Thanks!
-
If I am understanding correctly you want people to access DomainA.com when they go to DomainB.com? If this is the case, you could set up DomainB.com as a Domain Forward to DomainA.com.
For instance a Client I have right now has www.drcharlescrane.com and www.drcharlescrane.net. Hosting is only set up for .com and we domain forward .net.
You can also have this set up as a domain forwarding with mask so if you wanted the user would actually see in the URL domainb.com but pulling domaina.com's content.
I hope this makes sense and if you need further clarification let me know. Also where is your domain registered. I use Godaddy primarily to the low costs for domains. Here is a how to domain forward provided by them and more information on the topic - http://help.godaddy.com/article/422
-
DNS, resolves a name to a ip number,
that ip number should route to your website. Inthe headers of the resquest is the domain name, your web site should be configured to accept either all requests on a ip number and port or filtered by host headers (domains names), add all teh host headers needed, then in htaccess 30 to the pirmary domain name.
-
Thank you Alan. Are you suggesting that via DNS records I have DomainA.com "live" in the same place as DomainB.com, and then host the .htaccess on DomainB.com's hosting space?
So somebody requests DomainA.com, the DNS points to the hosting for DomainB.com, and then the .htaccess for DomainB.com can process the original DomainA.com request?
-
Thanks, but does this help with 301s for inner pages?
-
I had just the same experience. It was only one occasion but I did nothing more to the site then putting it under a new account on my shared hosting, so only the last digit of the ip has changed. I saw a drop in rankings however the original I gained back the original rankings a few weeks later.
-
I cant say it does, but when I changed ips i had a drop in rankings. But i cant prove it was the change in ip
but there is some logic to it,
A domain name is resolved to a ip address to find the website, the domain name is sent in the header. Your web site accepts a connection on a socket, ip number and port 123.123.123.123:80, it then looks in the header for the domain name
so a SE will see a difference, it will know this is not the same address -
100% disagree.
Most of the biggest websites in the world use DNS load balancing which will change the IP address of the server every request.
301 redirects lose a small amount of juice but IP changes don't.
Hosting changes don't (assuming no errors or outages).
Who-is changes do, but that is not relevant here.
-
1. you need to make a change to your DNS settings.
where every you registered your domain, you ned to change your Arecord to point at the correct ip number
2. you need to do a 301 redirect to primary domain.
-
If you have Cpanel here are the instructions. For godaddy or plesk call your host and tell them what you are trying to do.
Log into where you purchased domain A and forward it to the name servers at B's hosting. Then go into B Cpanel and click on add on domains. Add your domain. Once the domain has been added go to domain redirects and redirect your old domain to new.
For type choose permanent 301
Choose the domain you want to redirect from the drop down. Next manually type in your new domain name where it says "redirects to".
-
I think I disagree as moving site A's hosting to a new ip causes a drop in rankings.
Never heard about this before. I think this is not true, i have chagned IP's in the past without any consequences.
-
You shouldn't have to continue to pay for hosting for the site you are getting rid of, just keep renewing the domain name and then 301 it to the new site and you should be fine.
-
Thank you. I'm actually not understanding. How do I Park A on B. What is "explicit .htaccess"?
-
There is no penalty or loss for changing an IP address. There are many legitimat reasons for doing that. IP changes often occr when your host moves your site to a different server, or, when you upgrade your hosting package, or move to a different hosting service. No worries at all about new IPs.
-
The .htaccess that have the information about the A domain is inside B hosting, so, you don't need anymore A hosting when you do all the redirections.
I think this post can help:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067216/The-10-Step-Site-Migration-Process
bye
-
Egol has usually got great answers that woths linstening to, this time however I think I disagree as moving site A's hosting to a new ip causes a drop in rankings. Put the redirection on top of that and you get some more fallback. I think in the above case I would not change the hosting but do the redirect and wait for google to notice the change. Maybe a few months later I would give up site A's original hosting and migrate it to site B's hosting to be able to keep the original urls live for some more time.
-
Park A on B and redirect with explicit .htaccess.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is 301 redirect the only way when using Vanity URLs?
We have been using vanity urls for some of our pages. Mostly the pages that have a vanity URL have a long URL length. But now the problem is, the vanity URL is getting displayed on the search engine when the particular keyword related to the page is entered. I checked the google search console, the vanity URL is indexed and the original URL remains unindexed. What should I do? Is adding 301 redirect to the vanity URLs are solution? Since some of vanity URLs are not redirecting to the original. Some of the original pages are not getting traffic. Also, can using canonical tag help?
Technical SEO | | tejasbansode0 -
Robots txt. in page with 301 redirect
We currently have a a series of help pages that we would like to disallow from our robots txt. The thing is that these help pages are located in our old website, which now has a 301 redirect to current site. Which is the proper way to go around? 1- Add the pages we want to disallow to the robots.txt of the new website? 2- Break the redirect momentarily and add the pages to the robots.txt of the old one? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Sudden drop in Rankings after 301 redirect
Greetings to Moz Community. Couple of months back, I have redirected my old blog to a new URL with 301 redirect because of spammy links pointed to my old blog. I have transfer all the posts manually, changed the permalink structure and 301 redirected every individual URL. All the ranking were boosted within couple of weeks and regained the traffic. After a month I have observed, the links pointed to old site are showing up in Webmaster Tools for the new domain. I was shocked (no previous experience) and again Disavowed all links. Today, all the positions went down for new domain. My questions are: 1. Did the Disavow tool worked this time with new domain? All the links pointed to old domain were devaluated? Is this the reason for ranking drop? Or 2. 301 Old domain with Unnatural links causes the issue? 3. Removing 301 will help to regain few keyword positions? I'm taking this as a case study. Already removed the 301 redirect. Looking for solid discussion.Thanks.
Technical SEO | | praveen4390 -
301 redirect relative or absolute path?
Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
Technical SEO | | Silviu
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
S.0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Is buying a domain with a high PR and redirecting it to your site considered black hat?
I want to buy a domain that has clean backlinks and then redirect it to my new domain to bump up my PR. Is this considered a black hat technique? Thanks Carla
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson1 -
Index.php and 301 redirect with Joomla
Hi, I'm running Joomla 1.7 with SEF on and I'm trying to do a htaccess redirect which fails. I have approximately 100 in effect so far and all working fine, but I have one snag. Index.php is not working as I need it to when it's redirected to www.myurl.com/ If I turn on index.php redirect to root using this code #index.php to root
Technical SEO | | NaescentAdam
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^myurl.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.myurl.com$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ "http://www.myurl.com/" [R=301,L] And then go to www.myurl.com/test.html I'm redirected to the homepage. I think this is because all pages are index.php in joomla. SEOMOZ and Google both think that index.php and root are duplicate pages. Does anyone have any advice for overcoming this? Thanks, Adam0 -
How much authority does a 301 pass to a different domain?
Hi, A client of mine is selling his business to a brand new company. The brand new company will be using a brand new domain (no way to avoid that unfortunately) and the current domain (which has tons of authority, links, shares, tweets, etc.) will not be used. Added to that, the new company will be taking over all the current content with just a few minor changes. (I know, I wish we could use the old domain but we can't.) Obviously, I am redirecting all pages on the current domain to the new domain via 301 redirects on a page by page basis. So, current.com/product-page-x.html redirects to new.com/product-page-x.html. My client and the new company both are asking me how much link juice (and other factors) are passed along to the new domain from the old domain. All I can find is "not the full value" or variants thereof.My experience with 301 redirects in the past has been within a single domain and I've seen some of those pages have decent authority and decent rankings as a result of the 301 (no other optimization work was done or links were added). Are there any studies out there that I'm missing that show how much authority/juice gets passed and/or lost via a 301 redirect? Anybody with a similar issue see any trends in page/domain authority and/or rankings? Thanks for any insights and opinions you have.
Technical SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0