301 redirect blog network to main site, good or bad?
-
Hi,
Here is a newbie question. When we launched our web shop 18 months ago I started eight blogs on a different host with keyword rich domain names to get some links to the shop.
Today I don't update them, but they have a lot of links to our shop and the blogs have something like DA 20 and PA 30-40. There are lots of links between the blogs as well.
Can I do 301 redirects of the blogs/posts to the web shop to rank higher in the SERP for the keywords? If I do, what happens to the links from the blogs to the shop? Will the shop loose a lot of links, but gain in PA, DA, mR etc?
Overall, would the shop/main site benefit from this?
Or should I just leave the blogs and not mess with them? They don't have much traffic.
I appreciate any input, thanks!
-
Thank you for your input Geoff!
-
Hi Todd,
If the blog contained valuable content but was instructed to 301 redirect to a new location, then you are correct, the crawl would not go as far as crawling the content and subsequently indexing/caching or analysing value therefore any weight the actual content possesses will not transfer via the redirect however domain/page/URL authority / link juice / PageRank and other link metrics will, not 100% of this, but most of it.
301 redirecting is not designed to directly improve rank although other benefits of 301 redirecting can lead to this. Such as usability, traffic, relevancy.
-
@Geoff , so if the blog has content in it would the301 stop the crawl and redirect it? If this is true then the content would not be crawled? I have a friend with a similar issue. He is trying to improve ranking by redirecting his old site (which has content) to his new on.
-
The scenario you describe...
"I started eight blogs on a different host with keyword rich domain names to get some links to the shop. Today I don't update them, but they have a lot of links to our shop and the blogs have something like DA 20 and PA 30-40. There are lots of links between the blogs as well."
...is likely to match much of the criteria Google are using to hit sites with Panda / Penguin updates, to be honest, unless the blog content is of high unique content and not 'over optimised', I would not make any efforts to associate yourself with the network of blogs as it will likely do more harm than good over the forthcoming 12 months.
Really, you need to be assessing the overall value of each blog and whether similar content on your current webshop is a good match for the content on each of the blogs. If you're just contemplating 301 redirecting to improve ranking of keywords, then it's unlikely that this will be the result.
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
-
Links from coupon sites
Hi All, I post coupons on coupon sites a month ago and when I checked backlinks of my website I saw approx 1000 links coming from coupon sites on my Brand Name. IMO it is quite natural please share your views. *All the big brands listed on that coupon sites e.g amazon, dell etc Thanks
Link Building | | Alick3001 -
Redirect 301 multiple url to frontpage
I have a lot of /dummy.php/xxx pages that i would like to redirect to the front page. /dummy.php/100
Link Building | | Morten-Hjemmesider
/dummy.php/101
/dummy.php/102
..... redirect 301 /dummy.php/WILDCARD http://www.domain.com I can not figure it out?0 -
Links from other sites in our network
I work for a large publisher with many websites, and it's common for our biggest sites to link to smaller sites within the network. These links are follow, site-wide, anchor text-optimised footer links. I think it's obvious that these links are harmful to the smaller sites that are being linked to, but it's hard to convince others of that, particularly because the toolbar PR benefit is very obvious. Do you think it would be better to: a) Remove the links completely b) Keep the links, but make them nofollow c) Keep the links (as it's not harmful) Thanks
Link Building | | OMGPyrmont0 -
Is it worth 301 redirecting an old backlink from a 404 to a landing page?
I was reviewing the 404 report in webmaster tools, when I found a 404 back link from a 10 year old forum topic on a very high DA site. It seems the poster did a direct hotlink to a pdf that was on our site a very long time ago, but is now gone so you get a standard "can not be found" page on our site. Is it now worth redirecting the url to an appropriate landing page, considering the age of the post/ link and the sites DA, or is it not worth it because of the age of the link, its a forum, and we are still getting some juice from it anyway despite it being a 404, and won't get much more out of it. Just want to know it good practice if I find many such links (very old links to now 404 pages) Thanks
Link Building | | PaddyDisplays0 -
Should you avoid links from infographic sites?
Suppose you have an interesting infographic that you are promoting. Should you be cautious about having it published on sites that only publish infographics? Do you think these sites pass any link value?
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Links for edu and gov sites
So it is general knowledge that links from .edu and .gov sites are valued higher by Google. So, I hired some guys on freelance sites to help me buildlinks and get some love from SERPS. But one thing I notice quite often is that some of these links are actually like *.edu.tw (with a international TLD after .edu) What is your thoughts on links like that, do they have ANY edu value?
Link Building | | limens1 -
New Blog
Hello, We have an online soccer equipment retail store (http://www.soccerstop.com) that we have been working on to get higher ranking results in many different areas of specific product pages, as well as our general homepage for several years. SeoMoz has been an excellent addition for us to learn and analyze, etc. In addition to our current PPC, and SEO efforts, we are going to create a blog as we have many thoughts, opinions and interesting information for what hopefully will be a good sized audience of soccer enthusiasts! We currently have a person who goes on other soccer blogger websites and offers our thoughts and expressions, but we now want to give our own blog. My thought is to create a subdirectory of our domain something like: http://www.soccerstop.com/blog as that seems what is recommended in many posts here in this forum. I am also thinking of using wordpress blog as it also seems recommended. We have a lot of ideas about content, and feel we will bring people to our blog in various ways through our existing and coming customers at the retail online store. However, it seems to get the best backlink performance possible out of our new blog, we need to join blog networks to get our blogs posted on outside third party websites. Is this right, and where would I begin to understand and start this process? I understand the first step is to get our blog started, but I want to foundationally have an idea where we are going with this as we build. This way it is built in a sound way, ready to be as effective as possible! Please understand I am a builder and not the blogger, which is why the structure and initial setup of syndication is so important to me! Thanks for any advice.
Link Building | | SoccerStop
James0 -
SEOs and web developers frequently leave links to their site in the footer of their clients' sites. Does this negatively impact the site with the links?
Does this provide any SEO value to the receiving site? Has anyone experienced problems doing this?
Link Building | | KatMouse2