Redirect questions
-
Hi!
A client of mine have created a new site with a new URL structure which they launched the other day. They have done a 301 redirect on all pages on the old site to the start page on the new site. E.g:
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com
www.olddomain.com/subfolder2/index.html -> www.newdomain.comI'm thinking of fixing this now so the redirect instead looks someting like this:
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com/newsubfolder1/index.html
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com/newsubfolder1/index.htmlTwo questions:
1. Is it worth doing the latter kind of redirect in all cases (after all, it involves quite a lot more work compared to the first solution)? or do you recommend the first solution for all redirect projects?
2. Now that they have already done the first solution, is it at all worth amending this to the latter or is everything spoiled now that they have already gone ahead with the first solution?Many thanks in advance!
-
Thanks guys!
So my interpretation of your feedback and the short answer to my questions are:
1. Yes, it's worth doing.
2. Yes, it's worth doing.Cheers!
-
You should only need one redirect if link stucture is the same,
point both domains at the new site
then create a rule if HTTP_HOST is not newdomain.com then redirect to new domain,
here is the rule for IIS
<rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^thatsit.com.au$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="http://thatsit.com.au/{R:1}"></action></match></rule>http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issues
-
From a visitors perspective, if you've got links to deep pages, then it would be worth creating redirects to the relevant content on the new site.
If someone follows a link from another site with anchor text along the lines of "see this great article about x" and it just goes to the homepage, the visitor is going to find it rather jarring...
-
Agree with Rasmus pm the whole.
I'd still go with the updated subfolder version even if google has crawled the pages...these things take a while to settle down.
If there are lots of pages, check out the tool Russ Jones shared for using Levenshtein distance to automate creating redirects http://www.seomoz.org/blog/set-it-and-forget-it-seo-chasing-the-elusive-passive-seo-dream
There's another great post for larger sites that could help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/scripting-seo-5-pandafighting-tricks-for-large-sites-14455
And here's another version that creates the htaccess redirects for you (though I've not tried it so don't know how well it works) http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2010/10/levinshtein_link_fixer_aka_the.htm
-
in cpanel there is an option to redirect all at once, keeping the structure of site. try cpanel.yourdomain.com
-
I would recommend making the redirects from subfolder to subfolder. If you redirect all pages to the new frontpage Google needs to crawl the new site from scratch in order to index all pages.
If you make the 301 redirect from old pages to corresponding new pages I would say it is worth the effort. Otherwise www.newdomain.com/newsubfolder1/index.html needs to build up its own new page ranking since it is a new URL that Google does not know.
Question is if Google has already crawled a lot of the old URLs, but if it was me I would get on making the correct redirects before Google crawls to many of the old URLs. This will give the new site better ranking from the start I should think AND it will save time for the Google crawlers. One should always anticipate a drop when changing domain, but it is always a good idea to take precautions in order to ensure a quick bounce back.
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
-
How do I fix a 404 redirect chain
How do I fix a 404 redirect chain? I can't seem to find the answer and I'm worried about it effecting my SEO. Any help would be great!
Technical SEO | | sammecooper0 -
Question About Thin Content
Hello, We have an encyclopedia type page on our e-commerce site. Basically, it's a page with a list of terms related to our niche, product definitions, slang terms, etc. The terms on the encyclopedia page are each linked to their own page that contains the term and a very short definition (about 1-2 sentences). The purpose of these is to link them on product pages if a product has a feature or function that may be new to our customers. We have about 82 of these pages. Are these pages more likely to help us because they're providing information to visitors, or are they likely to hurt us because of the very small amount of content on each page? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | mostcg0 -
Website(s) Merge Questions
Hello Moz Community I have three separate websites that I have planned on merging into one. I recently acquired a strong domain ( stronger than my existing ones ) & after much deliberation, I have decided to move them together into one domain. Site 1) 1 Forum - Around since 2007 - Originally VBulletin, last year migrated to discourse. Site 2) E-commercece Magento Site - Around since 2010 Site 3) WordPress - Blog & Articles - Around since last year - Currently using the new ( Main Domain I want to use ) After a lot of research and White Board Fridays, I was thinking this would be my best bet: newdomain.com - Merged WordPress & Magento CMS Page. newdomain.com/ forum <-- Will move my forum content & Install to the new domain. newdomain.com/ store <-- Will move my Ecommerce content & Install. Between my developer and I, we have our heads around how to handle the technical aspect of the move, 301s to the new location etc. But one area we want to research before pulling the trigger ( we haven't found much data on this ) **My Main Question:**What is the possible penalty coming for shopping websites vs. content-driven websites, and possibility that forum-based content hosted on the same domain might cause another penalty to be applied to the other content on the domain. **My Developer Says:**In recent years, we noticed that forum content had been penalized in favor of editorially reviewed content when this is identified by search engines.
Technical SEO | | Shop-Sq
What big hiccups would / could we encounter from combining these 3 types of platforms into one site?Many thanks for any direction or insight.0 -
Redirect typo domains
Hi, What's the "correct" way of redirecting typo domains? DNS A record goes to the same ip address as the correct domain name Then 301 redirects for each typo domain in the .htaccess Subdomains on typo urls still redirect to www or should they redirect to the subdomain on the correct url in case the subdomain exists?
Technical SEO | | kuchenchef0 -
Mobile website question
Hi Mozzers, A website I manage has a mobile friendly version of their main website and a /m version as well. I was wondering if anyone had any experience in the best way of handling this? Should we just get rid of the /m version and tag the mobile friendly version? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
301 Redirect domain with penalty
Wondering if I could get a few views on this please... I have added an affiliate store to a domain I own, however I forgot to noindex the product pages which were duplicate content of the merchants. Despite a good deal of backlink building the site will not do much in the engines at all, doesn't even come up on the first few pages for it's own name! This suggests to me that I have a duplicate content penalty. Try as I may I cannot get it removed so am thinking of cloning the domain to a new domain, however, I do not want to lose the links I collected so I am planning on 301ing them. While I will not get all the link power moved over, I should at least get credit for some of them which will kick start the new domain. Can anyone forsee any potential issues with doing this? Is there a danger of 301ing a site with a penalty that the penalty would be carried over? I know there is no penalty on the links, no WMT warnings etc, it is the content causing the issue. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Redirecting a questionable domain to a trusted domain
I have a question!
Technical SEO | | FDFPres
We have 2 domains operating within the same retail sector. One of them is for our bricks and mortar business and the other is a new brand we launched as a nationwide e-retailer. We aggressively built links for the new one and achieved some very good search positioning, where we remained for about 4 months until the google updates of the first half of this year started biting. The domain never received a warning from google or anything, but the links have clearly been devalued to a point where the domain is now virtually buried for the most competitive terms. However, the domain does still get around 100-200 visitors per day, and has a DA of 38. We're thinking about a reshuffle that would involve putting the products in to our brick and mortar business website, and redirecting the brand domain to the bricks and mortar domain. Thank you for reading this far! the question is then, is there a danger of the bricks and mortar domain being tarnished by this? as i said the brand domain hasn't had any notices of penalty from google but it has definitely been hit by updates.0 -
301 redirects and OSE
We run a blog/video real estate site (yochicago.com) as one of the venues for sponsored content for our clients looking for off-page SEO and inbound links. I'm working with a client who we've linked to a handful of times in the last few weeks, but I'm not seeing any external links from our site on PRO/OSE. Come to find that our writer has been linking to http://clientsite.com, instead of http://www.clientsite.com, which is the canonical site. I wouldn't have thought that this would make a difference, and about an hour of web research seems to confirm that it shouldn't make a difference, save for losing a little bit of SEO credit. What am I missing? Any input would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mikescotty0