301 redirect while keeping OLD domain for branding
-
Say you have CharityName.com. They use a dedicated domain name CharityNameEvent.com to advertise their main event. They use this domain on posters, flyers,etc and want to keep using it because it's easier to remember. CharityNameEvent.com has far, far more inbound links than CharityName.com (about 8 times more).
Current problem: their current web developer has put the SAME content on both websites instead of setting up a redirect from CharityNameEvent.com (easy to remember) to CharityName.com/Event which would have made more sense.
My intention is to consolidate the 2 websites and make sure CharityName.com benefits from links to the Event. I plan to move and 301 redirect CharityNameEvent.com to CharityName.com/Event. I know this would keep links and PR intact but I have a couple of questions:
1. Is it enough to set up the 301 redirect or would they have to ask websites to ACTUALLY change the links to CharityName.com/Event?
2. They plan and need to keep using CharityNameEvent.com for its ease of use on posters, flyers, etc. The 301 redirect would be in place. Would this cause any problems with search engines, especially when/if some people STILL link to CharityNameEvent.com instead of CharityName.com/Event?
Basically, my understanding of 301 redirects is that they're used when a website permanently moves. In this case, the OLD DOMAIN name would still be used for reasons mentioned above but would be 301 redirected to CharityName.com/Event.
Any chance this might not maximise the potential of new/old links? Any other way to go about it? Anything I'm missing with this scenario?
Thanks
-
Hi! I'm following up on older, unanswered questions. Can you tell us what you ended up doing in this case, and any lessons you learned that could be helpful to others reading this thread?
Thanks!
-
Yes, your approach to 301 is correct.
-
You should contact admins and have them change when at all possible. 301 do not pass 100% of juice
-
No. You will probably have fewer linking to this page as they will have ben 301ed before they copy the URL
-
-
A rel canon will solve the duplicate content issue - telling Google that the "real" and "original" content sites on A not B.
-
Thank you for that. But the core issue is that the OLD SITE has the same content as the main site so it's a duplicate content issue as well which is why I'm considering the 301 redirect.
-
Read up on rel canonical - that will help with:
Keeping the old site live and giving direct load users the same experience instead of being redirected elsewhere, and transfer all the inbound link juice to the main site... (also takes care of cross domain duplicates)
Thats just one option of course...
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
-
Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | TaraLP1 -
Should I resubmit a 301 redirected domain in Webmaster Tools
We recently switched over a .com site to a new server. The .com site had a .co.uk domain redirecting to it previously, but when the switchover happened, the .co.uk was forgotten about. We have now realised what has happened, but not before taking a hit with our rankings. The .co.uk is still indexed in Google and now that we have sorted the redirects they are pointing to the right places. My question now; is there anything further I need to do? I know that the .co.uk will soon be removed from the SERPs, but I just want to make sure I haven't forgotten anything.
Technical SEO | | Ben_Malkin_Develo0 -
Soft 404's on a 301 Redirect...Why?
So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Penalized domain redirected to the non-penalized one...
I've a technical question , For example site A was penalized by google updates, panda and penguin both and site b is in the same niche and it's running good and never been penalized by updates. If I redirect site A to Site B with 301 status code(permanent redirect), will Google penalize the site B too? because penalties travel from old domain to new one as per google's algorithms. And If yes then how can I stop my competitor from removing redirection of penalized domain to mine?
Technical SEO | | hammadrafique0 -
301 Redirect Domain or 301 Redirect Domain + Interior Pages
Hello - My company acquired another company in our industry and our IT team immediately set up the acquired companies domain name as a an alias to our site. This created a duplicate version of our website under another domain name and Google started ranking interior pages from the aliased acquired site for several top keywords that were previously held by our real site. Should we 301 redirect just the top level domain name of the acquired site to the real site or 301 redirect the top level domain name and the interior pages on the acquired site to help ensure that our real domain will take back the rankings it once had? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Room2140 -
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 -
Parked Domain blog directory not redirecting
My newly parked domain name, (our main website had to switch primary domains) is not redirecting properly and is causing our blog to be duplicate content. My 301 redirects work for everything else, but our parked domain /blog directory is not redirecting. I can type in both urls and then the blog appears on both sites. Not good. If I delete my blog .htaccess file, then it redirects fine. However, then our blog links are broken. So it has to do something with our .htaccess files. I do have a .htaccess file for our website, saying redirect everything to correct location, so i think this is interfering, but I cannot pinpoint it. this is the .htaccess file for the blog. BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | hfranz
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress main sites .htaccess (i am trying to pinpoint the issue here) Options +Includes
AddType text/html .htm .html
AddHandler server-parsed .htm .html
Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?parkeddomain.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^newdomain.com [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^?]*)? RewriteRule (.*) /$1? [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.htm RewriteRule ^(.*)index.htm$ http://www.newdomain/$1 [R=301,L] RedirectMatch 301 /index.php/(.*) /$1 Is there something obvious here, that does not look right?0