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
-
Does google credit links from iFrames or created by Javascript, if so, is one more powerful than the other?
Consider this example, because I want to be clear about what I mean. You have two websites. Lets all them www.a.com and www.b.com. On www.a.com/some/page, there is an iframe something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A Former User
<iframe src="www.b.com/some/special/path"></iframe>
Then content of this iframe is a bunch of pictures, text and numbers, as well as a group of links, linking each picture to www.b.com for example the links might be:
www.b.com/content/1
www.b.com/content/2
www.b.com/content/3 Questions: When google crawls **www.a.com/some/page, **does it pass link juice to www.b.com/content/*? Does google instead consider these to be internal links within b.com itself. because links to www.b.com/content/ ** are actually from b.com itself, since the domain of the iframe is actually: www.b.com/some/special/path 3) Is there any amount of link juice passed from www.a.com/some/page to* www.b.com/some/special/path **because this is the src= element of an iframe that a.com is hosting? Consider an alternative setup. Where instead of using an iframe the contents of the above described iFrame is actually added the the page dynamically using javascript, and a call to an API endpoint at b.com. Resulting in these links being added directly to the body of a.com without being wrapped in an iframe element. Questions:
4) Do these links that were created after page load still get crawled and credited by google? (i have heard in the past that google was going to start crawling javascript, i just don't know if this is known for a fact yet).
5) Do links created on the client side hold the same weight as a link that was served directly via the backend html generation? If both the links within the iframe and the links within the javascript embed method pass link juice. Is one preferred over the other? is one known to be more effective than the other? Thanks!0 -
Sponsored blog - pass any link juice?
Hello there, If a quality blog in our specific niche writes an article about us which is clearly labelled "sponsored post" as we have either paid them or given them a product, will Google discount that link going back to our website? Should we request for the link to be "no-follow"? Thanks Robert
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Ecommerce Site homepage , Is it okay to have Links as H2 Tags as that is relevant to the page ?
Hi All, I have a Rental site and I am bit confused with how best do my H Tags on my homepage I know the H1 is the most important, Then H2 Tags and so on.. and that these tags should really be titles for content. However, I have a few categories (links) on my homepage so I am wondering if I could put these as H2 Tags given that it is relevant to the page . H3 Tags will my News and Guides etc , H4 Tags will the whats on the footer. I am attached a made up screenshot of what I propose for my homepage if someone could please give it a quick look , it would be very much appreciated. I have looked at what some competitors do a lot of them don't seem to have h2's etc but I know it's an important factor for rankings etc. Many thanks Pete dJSFQwI
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Page title and slug as complements to one another?
When creating a page, is it ever worthwhile to ensure that there's minimal duplication in the keywords in the page title vs. the slug? Or is it more like the title is more like a sentence description of the page and the slug is a scannable set of keywords that describes the page, and duplication doesn't really matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
50,000 backlinks in webmaster tools from one site???
Hi All, I'm new to evaluating backlinks, but I just saw I got over 50,000 links from a backlink that was added on ONE page at this site here: http://www.netnewspublisherDOTcom. I presume this is not a good thing, and if I contact them to remove the one link on the one page, it won't solve the other 49,999 links that Google is seeing pointing to us, so what do I do??. Should I contact them and ask to remove it and see if they don't and then disavow? Or would you just tell Google to disavow the whole site? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mlm120 -
10,000+ links from one site per URL--is this hurting us?
We manage content for a partner site, and since much of their content is similar to ours, we canonicalized their content to ours. As a result, some URLs have anything from 1,000,000 inbound links / URL to 10,000+ links / URL --all from the same domain. We've noticed a 10% decline in traffic since this showed up in our webmasters account & were wondering if we should nofollow these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0 -
Getting Google to Correct a Misspelled Site Link...Help!
My company website recently got its site links in google search... WooHoo! However, when you type TECHeGO into Google Search one of the links is spelled incorrectly. Instead of 'CONversion Optimization' its 'COversion Optimization'. At first I thought there was a misspelling on that page somewhere but there is not and have come to the conclusion that Google has made a mistake. I know that I can block the page in webmaster tools (No Thanks) but how in the crap can I get them to correct the spelling when no one really knows how to get them to appear in the first place? Riddle Me That Folks! sitelink.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TECHeGO0