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.
DNS or 301 Website Redirect
-
We are running a marketplace site, so we have thousands of vendors selling their products on our site. Each vendor has a Profile page and we are soon to launch a premium store-front that is white label.
Many of these vendors will want to point a custom url to their premium store-front (which is a sub domain of the marketplace) and we are trying to get an understanding of how we should instruct them to point their url in a way that will give the main marketplace site the seo juice.
We also want to understand what will show up in the address bar. Will it be their url or our sub domain?
Will any of the marketplace seo juice boost their url local listing status?
-
Hi Evgeny,
Good question. For starters, one thing to keep in mind from the beginning is that link juice flowed to subdomians don't pass the same link juice as would links to the same domain. So while these links and/or redirects may help the individual storefronts to rank - assuming there is sufficient link juice behind them - it doesn't necessarily help your root domain.
Of course, the way around this is to link these individual storefront subdomains to your main domain, making sure to vary the anchor text and do it in a non-spammy, Penguin friendly way.
Okay, onto the main question. In my experience working with 100's of clients, the best way to get them to redirect to your site is anyway they can.
Seriously, it's almost impossible to choose a single method that works for all vendors, so I think it's probably best to offer a variety of solutions, such as changes in DNS, server-side redirects, .htaccess , etc.
You may even need to offer tech support to manually make these changes for your client. Although this is a sticky area fraught with headaches. (I know from experience)
In some cases, it may pass better link juice if you merely have the vendors link to you, instead of going through the trouble of a redirect. Links can carry relevancy signals that 301's can't, and redirects can often loose much of their relevancy if the target page(s) differ too much from the original.
Regardless, if you choose to go the redirection route, you'll want all of your redirects to be 301's, no matter what method you choose. The URL in the browser will be your subdomain. (There are ways to do URL masking, but you don't want to go there) A common practice is to have the name of the vendor in the subdomain, such as vendor.yoursite.com.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Got it. 301 to your server where it's parsed. The details are here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9896877/dns-redirect-domain-to-subdomain -
Chas, thanks for the response.
My question may not have been very clear. I am going to be creating premium store-fronts for the vendors in the marketplace that will act as a stand alone website. Many of the vendors will be using this premium store-front as their new stand alone website and will want to redirect their current domain www.vendor.com to my sub domain www.vendor.marketplace.com.
What is the best way to do this? Use a DNS or 301 redirect and what are the pros and cons? (ie url in the address bar, seo juice to marketplace, seo juice to local vendor)
Thanks
-
So you want your cake and eat it too?
Don't we all! I think getting a thousand links to the root domain would be satisfaction enough.
One way would be to have the entrance page for all vendors be the same page. Each vendor would have a section on an auto scrollable layer (but without user scrolling).
Each vendor would have a distinctive page section href anchor IBL
<a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </a<span>name="ABCstore">.ABC Store info and links <a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </a<span>name="XYZstore">.XYZ Store info and links
Each vendor would have a unique looking URL but all created urls would look the same to the bots, as they would ignore all to the right of the hashtag.
http://store.yourdomain.com/index.html#ABCstore, http://store.yourdomain.com/index.html#XYZstore, etc.When the page loads the tagged vendor would display in the "open" area of the page for that layer so each vendor would appear to be unique.
The drawback would be the size of the page and number of links out.
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
-
Hacked website - Dealing with 301 redirects and a large .htaccess file
One of my client's websites was recently hacked and I've been dealing with the after effects of it. The website is now clean of malware and I already appealed to Google about the malware issue. The current issue I have is dealing with the 20, 000+ crawl errors which are garbage links that were created from the hacking. How does one go about dealing with all the 301 redirects I need to create for all the 404 crawl errors? I'm already noticing an increased load time on the website due to having a rather large .htaccess file with a couple thousand 301 redirects done already which I fear will result in my client's website performance and SEO performance taking a hit as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK0 -
I'm a newb, built a website with Wix want to redirect it to a domain I own, but am reading that Wix is bad for this
Hi, I am building this site for my boss http://charlesfridmanpr.wix.com/real-estate and am still working on it. I'm getting close to the stage where I want to redirect it to the URL we want to use, but in reading these forums, it says that because all of subpages (?) have a # in them, they will not be read or indexed by google. I am very new to this, and while it may not look like it, the website has taken me quite a while to design. Is there a way to fix this? We want to appear high up for a non competitive keyword. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlesfridmanpr0 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
Php 301 redirect
Hi I am migrating an old wordpress site to a custom PHP site and the URL profiles will be different, so want to retain all link profiles and more importantly if a user visits the old urls via search then they are seamlessly transferred to the new equivalent page For example www.domain.com/about-us is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/aboutus.php www.domain.com/furniture is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/furniture-collections.php etc What is the best way of achieving this apart from .htaccess as not 100% confident of doing this. Could it be done via PHP or using meta tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page
Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!0 -
301 doesn't redirect a page that ends in %20, and others being appended with ?q=
I have a product page that ends /product-name**%20** that I'm trying to redirect in this way: Redirect 301 /products/product-name%20 http://www.site.com/products/product-name And it doesn't redirect at all. The others, those with %20, are being redirected to a url hybrid of old and new: http://www.site.com/products/product-name**?q=old-url** I'm using Drupal CMS, and it may be creating rules that counter my entries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0