301 Redirecting an Entire Site
-
I have a question which has had me thinking for hours.....
If SITE A is ranking well on a number of search phrases and you 301 that site to another (SITE B). The site will change on the Google SERPs to the site which you've re-directed to... In this case SITE B.
But how do you maintain the rankings of SITE A?. Do you keep the rankings of SITE A forever? Or will your rankings of SITE A (now SITE B) gradually slip as other sites rank higher?
As you can no longer edit SITE A does Google take into consideration the content on SITE B and no longer take anything that SITE A had to offer into consideration? SITE B has simply replaced it in the SERPs??......
Please can anybody help?
Thanks,
-
Actually in this case the domain ranks highly but doesn't have many (if any) quality links. So is it likely that we will loose the rankings if we place a 301 redirect on the site?
-
Also don't forget you need to setup a change of address in google webmaster tools
-
If by "How do you maintain the rankings of site A" you mean "what value am I passing over to site B once site A is gone", remember that Site A probably got its ranking through its link portfolio and that isn't going to go away immediately. The purpose of the 301 is to direct crawlers and humans to the content that has superseded the content that was originally linked to.
-
Think of a 301 as a funeral service. Bob Sr is dead and now Bob Jr will carry on the family business. But Bob Jr is not Bob Sr. He needs to be treated as such.
The main problem with a 301 is that the changeover takes time. Your old page may lose its rankings to the new page before the new page inherits the popularity of the old. Eventually A is gone from the index and only B remains. But it's a different site and Google will still treat it as such. B will have to get its own popularity.
Incidentally, moving the entire site can be helped along by using WMT.
-
You won't automatically get the rankings from site A but I have done this in practice 3 times in the past year with whole site redirects and each time we have seen a significant boost in domain authority for the site we redirected to. This boosted our rankings and traffic.
If you do this just make sure you redirect at the page level tans also do outreach to see if you can get your best external followed links changed to your new url.
-
If you are redirecting all of the pages from Site A to Site B, Site A really no longer exists from a content point of view. You are simply passing on some of the authority from Site A to Site B, which will increase the authority of Site B.
You are not keeping Site A's rankings. You are telling Google, "I don't use Site A anymore, but the content on Site B is the equivalent... you should use that instead." If you were ranking #5 for a keyword using Site A, you will not automatically rank #5 for Site B when you have the redirect in place.
If you were to completely remove the content from Site A, Google would not care, because you have redirects that immediately redirect users and spiders from Site A to the Site B equivalent.
Does that answer your question?
Mike
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
-
Adventurous 301 redirection chain
Picture this - if you have a spirit for adventure! Client builds Alpha****Domain.com Then builds a number of backlinks to Alpha****Domain.com Client also creates a number of 301 redirects from several older domains to AlphaDomain.com Client then changes Alpha****Domain.com to Beta****Domain.com They create 301 redirects from Alpha****Domain.com to Beta****Domain.com But then... they 'park' Alpha****Domain.com (ie. no longer accessible)! About one year later, client changes a whole bunch of URLs on Beta****Domain.com without keeping track of changes. Thankfully, the hosting service (Shopify) automatically creates some redirects, but it's more by accident than design! Questions: After step 6 above, are the 301 redirects created in steps 3 and 5 now totally redundant and broken? If AlphaDomain.com no longer exists, surely all redirects to and from this domain are broken? Or can they be recovered? What happens to all the backlinks originally created in step 2? Finally, can anything be done to recover lost URLs in step 7? Yes. What a mess!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Code to Redirect Mobile Subdomain to Desktop Site
Hi Everyone, My client is switching from a mobile subdomain to a responsive site. All URLs are the same on mobile subdomain vs desktop so we just need a wildcard rule to redirect m. to www. Anyone have this wildcard redirect code for an .htaccess file? Much appreciated! Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kernmedia0 -
Multiple 301 Redirect Query
Hello all, I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues. I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago. We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's. Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Site migration from non canonicalized site
Hi Mozzers - I'm working on a site migration from a non-canonicalized site - I am wondering about the best way to deal with that - should I ask them to canonicalize prior to migration? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
302 Redirect of www. version of a site - Pros/Cons
Hi, I am considering making the 301 redirect from the domain to a 302 temporary redirect. Currently if a user lands on "www" version of the site, they are redirected to the non "www" version. But after the redirect, they will land on an external webpage (so if a user lands on the "www" version, they are redirected to a different website, not related to my domain). Reason I'm considering this is because I have received a large number of spammy backlinks on the "www" version of the site (negative seo). So I'm hoping that the temporary redirect will help me recover. Your thoughts on this: 1. Is this the best way to do a 302 redirect (redirecting the www version to an external domain)? 2. Will the redirect help the main domain recover, considering all spammy backlinks are pointing to the www version? 3. What are the pros/cons, if any? Thanks in advance for your thoughts! Howard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howardd0 -
Embed Same Video On Multiple Pages or 301 Redirect Into 1?
I have 3 pages that rank VERY well for related terms such as: -How to get widgets -How to become a widget -Getting widgets -etc. I am incorporating a video on the topic and rewriting much of the content on the site. I am wondering if it is wise to 301 redirect all 3 pages to 1 page that has the new/better video content or if I should leave the old content that is ranking well and embed the video on the top of each. The anal retentive side of me wants a nice new site structure and 1 powerful page. However, if the 3 pages are currently ranking (sometimes 2 pages in the same top 10 results), should I mess with what is working? Ultimately my goal is to increase the avg time on site as these 3 pages are top traffic pages for the site. However, they do not convert at all, as they are for a product we don't offer. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Is there a way to redirect pages from an old site?
I have no access to an old wordpress site of a client's, but have parked the domain on their new site, gone into webmaster central and requested a change of address and wait... the old domain still shows in the search listings in place of the new site domain and the log files show 404 errors from links to the old site which go nowhere - can anyone suggest a way of managing this on the new site - is there a workaround to what should have been done - 301 redirects on the old site before it was taken down. many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Highlandgael0 -
Have a problem with our home page. Is temporary 301 redirect an option?
Hey Mozers, I discovered this morning that the home page for my website is rendering fine in Chrome and Firefox, but very poorly in IE. My analytics show that over 50% of my visitors are using IE. As a result of the problem, IE has a bounce rate 32% higher than other browsers. I'm not a web developer and I'm fairly new to SEO, so I'm guessing that it's going to take me at least a couple days to get it fixed. In the meantime, I was considering doing a 301 redirect from the home page to the largest category page in hopes of keeping some of the IE users from bouncing while I get the home page sorted out. Would there be any long term negative effects from this once I get the page sorted out and take the 301 off it? Are there any other solutions that would be better? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matthewbyers0