When to 301 a No1 ranking site to the new domain?
-
I have a site [company.com] that ranks number one for the products of my brand but I'm moving all the efforts to a dedicated brand domain. The old site covered a number of small brands and we had no dedicated brand sites, but we now focus on just this one brand and it doesn't belong on the old company domain name. BRAND belongs on the new brand.com
Because of the age of the old company site and because it had the first copy about the brand, it's still ranking well for the brand product names, and the new site has some duplicate content issues that I'm in the throws of resolving.
RANKS
- Company.com : number one for all product names
- Brand.com : nowhere for product brand names but top for the brand name (as I say, the product pages on this site have duplicate content issues which is likely keeping them ranked low - Hades low.
I would rather not maintain two websites and I want to give brand.com every bit of available oomph , so should I at some point 301 the old company site to the new one?
If so, is now the time?
Thanks
-
I would determine a top/important page as one that is not only ranking well for your terms, but pages that may be receiving traffic from other sources. Check out Google Analytics and sort by top pages and filter by source and redirect the ones that are actually seeing inbound traffic.
-
Thanks FUM
I was wondering whether I needed to redirect individual pages, it makes sense that I would.
There are 6 important pages on the site with one-to-one relationships with the new site, and quite a few pages besides, but webmaster tools is telling me there are 100 indexed pages and 700 crawled but not indexed pages. There are not 100 valuable pages on the site, and I think the not-indexed is because the cart has dynamically created all those urls.
I suppose I just need to determine which pages are worthwhile redirecting individually. Oddly, seomoz site explorer is giving me two top pages. How else might I determine the top pages?
-
One thing to keep in mind is that you will probably lose your rankings for that 2-4 week period. So do it ASAP but not during a peak sales period.
-
Sooner is better than later.
Make sure when you 301 redirect the site, you not only redirect the site, but redirect the individual pages to the new pages also so that any of the internal ranking pages pass the rank also.
Make sure to verity the new site in Google webmaster tools and notify them that the old domain has permanently moved to the new domain. In my experience, you will usually see direct ranking transfer within 2-4 weeks max.
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
-
Clients domain expired - rankings lost - repurchased domain - what next?
Its only been 10 days and i have repurchased the domain name/ renewed. The who is info, website and contact information is all still the same. However we have lost all rankings and i am hoping that our top rankings come back. Does anyone have experience with such a crappy situation?
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Can the sudden addition of a new section of a website cause the site to be sandboxed?
Hi there, We have noticed a sudden drop in traffic for certain keywords. It seems to correlate precisely with a different department adding a whole new recruitment section to the site. However there doesn't appear to be any keyword cannibalization or duplicate content issues. Any ideas would be most appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Blaze-Communication0 -
New keyword simply not Ranking
Evening all, first post. I'm currently ranking OK for a broad range of keywords - nothing at number 1 but some are on the first page. However, there is one particular keyword which simply refuses to get indexed. I've witnessed this behaviour before with another site where it appears at SERP 300 or so, then vanishes, comes back at 200 odd and then vanishes. Right now, it's not even ranking in any position. I'm using SERPFox for SERP position on Google. I've had Moz analyse the content on page and it's getting an A. The article is about 2000 words, with good Title and page description and the keyword is appearing under 1%. My question is, have you witnessed odd behaviour like this before where other keywords are ranking OK but an odd few don't even get indexed? I have a few links built to the URL and asked Google Webmaster tools to index the URL but still nothing. I have no penalties or anything to worry about. The only other info I have is that this URL is on a brand-new domain but the previous domain has a 301 redirect with a page authority of 42 and a domain authority of 38 (not too high). And, everything else appears to be running along OK. The point is, I have no expectations about the keyword ranking in a certain position but find it odd how the keyword keeps popping in and out of Google SERP. The keyword has a difficulty of: 58% Any thoughts appreciated. Robert. uH7vtbh
Technical SEO | | hooneyrobert0 -
Undo a 301 or Starting New Domain?
Hi Guys & Gals, I have a question I'd appreciate your input on. Quick History
Technical SEO | | Nobody1560986989723
When I first started in web design it was just me and a couple of clients. I had a website based on my name on the domain moxby.org.uk. The only 'SEO' work done on it was a bit of on-site work, various links based on forum and blog activity I was involved in (genuine involvement not crappy link building) and of course, building websites with a credit in the footer. When we got serious about the business we considered and finally put in place a new website, new branding and 301'd old URLs to their shiny new location on the new domain: _summitweb.net _(put in place about 12 months ago) Ranks were pretty much maintained and until recently we ranked well locally (still figuring the fallout from the last week or so's changes). The Question I would like to build a personal website, well I'm going to anyway. But as it's a personal/showcase website I need a personal URL for it and my natural choice would be my old url moxby.org.uk. However it is not that simple because summitweb.net is benefitting from redirected links and I don't want to harm our business' rankings just to reclaim a personal URL. So... is there benefit or would it be to my detriment to undo the 301 and build a website on moxby.org.uk or would it, in fact, just make more sense to buy a new domain and have a clean slate?0 -
301 Redirect How Long until the juice passes through to new site
Hi Guys, Following on from a question i asked last week in regard to a 301 http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking I was thinking that i had some kind of issue on the site, although i have gone over it with a fine tooth comb i cannot find any issue's and from the amount of reads the thread has had im sure if there was something obvious it would have been pointed out. So i am quite confident the 301 from site A to site B is fine and working as intended, so my question is how long should it take until the juice is passed From site A to Site B as its 9 weeks now and still down 85% on traffic and even text for my home page if copied into the search bar don't bring up my site Bing is fine and did not see any real traffic drops but Google is not giving me back the rankings i had prior Whenever i have done a 301 before the rankings pretty steady and i see no real loss in rankings but this time ... painful all changes in WMT made
Technical SEO | | kellymandingo
Canonical tag implemented
all Pages 301 and correct 200 response from the targeted page
Sitemap Updated
Many Links Changed from Old site to new (including DMOZ)
no Robots text Blocking directory's
Google crawling freely and regularly The strange thing is New content is indexed immediately and ranks easily, I added a page for my service in my local area and went straight to position 5 in Google however old existing content wont move, I tracked 150 keywords only 4 are top 75 Don't know what else to do so any advice would be much appreciated PS site is around 17k pages Paul0 -
Best META Fields to Include on New Site
I am in the process of transitioning sites to a Drupal CMS and am curious to know what META information to provide on each of the new site pages. Currently, this is the set-up I plan on using: My questions to the community are: whether or not I've added all pertinent information, and if there's anything I'm overlooking
Technical SEO | | NiallSmith0 -
When should you turn off redirects to your new domain?
Our website moved to a new domain a year ago, and we have our original domain to redirect to our new domain. We're working on contacting people who still link to our old domain to ask them to update, but 7% of our traffic is still coming as a redirect from our old domain. My question is, when should we just shut the old domain down entirely and stop redirecting people to our new domain? Or should we just keep it up indefinitely? What would be the positive or negative impact on our new domain's SEO if we shut the old domain down? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | UWPCE0