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.
Redirecting one site to another for link juice
-
I have two sites with same theme - buying cars. I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?
-
Hi Pert,
Karl and Bryan are right here - "domain forwarding" sounds to me like the common web hosting account feature, and this is generally a global 301 of all URLs of one domain to the home page of the new domain. You want to achieve page-to-page 301 redirects if possible (and if there are external links to deep pages you don't want to lose).
The problem with domain-level forwarding is any deep links you've built end up pointing to the new home page, and you lose that nice deep inbound link structure that helps your deeper pages rank. Deep pages are the hardest to build links to, so that can often be a tall price to pay.
The Open Site Explorer "Top Pages" tab is a great way to check out which deep pages have inbound links.
As for additional concerns, I'd keep in mind that 301 redirects for SEO purposes are a pretty old school trick, and definitely one that Google is wise to. I wouldn't expect you'd end up penalized for it, but the value of those links could easily be stripped.
As a bit of insurance, you might want to consider some outreach to those in-linking sites to ask them to update the links. I wouldn't mention SEO or anything related as that can really turn people off - make it about the users. But, in the event Google strips the equity passed from redirected links, you've saved some of it.
And I'd also be careful that there are no shady links pointing to the domain you plan to redirect. If they get caught in the next wave of Penguin/similar, the site you're redirecting to could suffer a penalty.
Best of Luck,
Mike -
Well you can do a 301 but also be sure to 301 all the deep links...
So 301 junkthecars.com to sellthecars.com/about-us and also junkthecars.com/about-us to sellthecars.com/about-us
Be sure to also do this in your webmaster tools. You will need to have both versions verified in this account.
-
Hi pert,
I would recommend you 301 each URL to a relevant one on the new website rather than just redirect all to the homepage. As well as being the best way to do it from an SEO point of view, it is also the best for users as they will still go to a relevant page. Also if anyone has links to the old website they will be sent to a relevant page.
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
-
All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself
Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!0 -
Getting SEO Juice back after Redirect
Hi, On my website, many product pages were redirected over time to its product category, due to the product being unavailable. I understand with a 301 redirect, the final URL would have lost about 15% of the link juice. However - if after some time (e.g. 2 months, or 1 year) I remove the redirection - is the original page going to have any SEO juice, or did it already lose all of it? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
What happens to a domain in SERPs when it's set to redirect to another?
We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Redirecting non www site
Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. I 100% agree with the redirecting of the non www domain name. After all we see so many times, especially in MOZ how the two different domains contain different links, different DA and of course different PA. So I have posed the question to our IT company, "How would we go about redirecting our non www domain to the www version?", "Where would we do that?", " we cant do the redirect on our webserver because the website is listed as an IP address, not a domain name, so would we do the redirect somewhere at GoDaddy?" who is currently maintain our DNS record So here is the response from IT: " I would setup a CNAME record in DNS (GoDaddy), such that no matter if you go to the bare domain, or the www, you end up in the same place. As for SEO, having a 301 redirect for your bare domain isn't necessary, because both the bare domain and the www are the same domain. 301 is a redirect for "permanently moved" and is common when you change domain names. Using the bare domain or the www are NOT DIFFERENT DOMAINS, so the 301 would not be accurate, and you'd be telling engines you've moved, when you haven't - which may negatively impact your rank. It sounds to me that IT is NOT recommending the redirect. How can this be? Or are we talking about two different things? Will the redirect cause the melt down as the IT company suggests? Or do they nut understand SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davenport-Tractor0 -
Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?
I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today. I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care. My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again. Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault741 -
Link Building Ideas for a health site
Hi, I am trying to rank a health related website. This is the url: www.ridpiles.com Domain age is 1 year 6 months. Done Directory submissions Blog Comments + Forum posts Done Social Bookmarks Article submissions (Not much) I have done competitor analysis. All of my competitors are just had links from directories and some link exchanges. They got links from quality sites like Yahoo dir. I know my site is far better than my competitors and has 100% unique content. I have submitted to yahoo directory inclusion, but still no luck i hadn't accepted into it. I am planning to go for a sponsered review but dont know, weather the link will be valuable for that much of money. I was left with Guest Blogging. I see this is the only option for me to build links. But i have a very tough competiton, i must compete with most reputed sites like webmd.com etc, i need to get more good links. But i cant get what other ways to get authoritative links. If Guest blogging is the only option for me, how many posts do i need to do daily? And can someone suggest me good Guest blogging sites? Anyhelp would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Indexxess0 -
Linking Sister-Sites - Diapers.com Example
Many of the big guns like 1800 Flowers, Diapers.com and others all have their sister sites in tabs at the top. Example: http://www.diapers.com/ with their 3 other properties. Since all properties link to one another on every page, it's really a wash, right? No real gain as engines know they are connected and it's the same link multiple times. No real problem either as it's natural for the user experience to have reciprocal links here between the brands. Any additional thoughts here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOPA0
