Redirecting Pages from site A to site B
-
Hi,
I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B).
To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B.
What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A?
What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.
-
DO NOT interlink your sites with dofollow links, Google hates this kind of activity and can penalize both sites for this.
It is a blatant attempt to self promote your own site and will be seen as a paid link. If you have a good site, I would not mess with it.
I would look at better ways to integrate the eCommerce site into the current existing site, why do you need a new site with a new url?
-
Thanks Chris,
A good Answer.
best,
-
You would have a drop in rankings.
Normally if you 301 a page to a relevant page you shouldn't loose any link juice however if you don't there is a lose.
Matt Cutts does touch on it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw
Site A would vanish and Site B wouldn't rank as well as the established site A it's sort of like chopping it in half you don't have a whole site only two half ranked sites (to a degree)
I wouldn't say Google would see it as cloaking etc. (unless you move the 301 back after a short while) Google should look at the 301 and think "This is now where all the links should go" however if there is no relevance there it might think "well this isn't relevance to this search query" and then give priority to a page that may have more relevance.
Unfortunately its a bit vague sorry but it's always a tad Hard to give certains. If you're going to remove site A all together then 301 its fine but if your doing it as a quick fix it will work in the short term but longer term your going to find it a bit harder.
as I mentioned it may be easier to have links to relevant pages so if your on site A on a product you could have a link to site B with a similar product. you would be sharing the juice to a degree and reinforcing the relevance of both sites.
Feel free to get more advice as more research never hurts and that's just an opinion really but good luck let us know how it all goes.
-
Thanks Chris,
What do you thin the negatives would be? Literally, the client wants to redirect site a's man navigation menus to site B.
Would google then look at site a as some sort of link farm / cloaking site?
-
I would agree that this is indeed a poor idea, a better idea may be to create some links between site A & B to pass link juice that way. You would loose some traffic and rather than have 1 good site and 1 needs some work site you would have two sites that need work.
I would suggest getting a landing page on site B start some basic SEO on that to give it a nudge prior to launch and give it some SEO focus with some links on site A pointing to relevant sections of site B.
Good luck!
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
-
Site's pages has GA codes based on Tag Manager but in Screaming Frog, it is not recognized
Using Tag Assistant (Google Chrome add-on), we have found that the site's pages has GA codes. (also see screenshot 1) However, when we used Screaming Frog's filter feature -- Configuration > Custom > Search > Contain/Does Not Contain, (see screenshot 2) SF is displaying several URLs (maybe all) of the site under 'Does Not Contain' which means that in SF's crawl, the site's pages has no GA code. (see screenshot 3) What could be the problem why SF states that there is no GA code in the site's pages when in fact, there are codes based on Tag Assistant/Manager? Please give us steps/ways on how to fix this issue. Thanks! SgTovPf VQNOJMF RCtBibP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Adding hreflang tags - better on each page, or the site map?
Hello, I am wondering if there seems to be a preference for adding hreflang tags (from this article). My client just changed their site from gTLDs to ccTLDs, and a few sites have taken a pretty big traffic hit. One issue is definitely the amount of redirects to the page, but I am also going to work with the developer to add hreflang tags. My question is - is it better to add them to the header of each page, or the site map, or both, or something else? Any other thoughts are appreciated. Our Australia site, which was at least findable using Australia Google before this relaunch, is not showing up, even when you search the company name directly. Thanks!Lauryn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john_marketade0 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Does it make sense to create new pages with friendlier URLs then redirect old pages to new?
Hi Moz! My client has messy URLs. does it make sense to write new clean URLs, then 301 redirect all old URLs to the new ones? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Redirecting non-www pages to www ones
Hello:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
I'm trying to consolidate all the link juice and see that some of my pages are linked to by using both www.mysite.com/whatever.html and mysite.com/whatever.html.
Is there a safe re-write rule that not just redirects non-www(s) to www(s), but designates the redirect as 301, so link juice will be transfered as well. If not RewriteRule, are there any other ways to accoplishe this? And the last question: can this be solved by simply setting Preffered domain in google webmaster tools to display www URL? Any help will be appreciated.0 -
301 redirect or Robots.txt on an interstatial page
Hey guys, I have an affiliate tracking system that works like this : an affiliate puts up a certain code on his site, for example : www.domain.com/track/aff_id This url leads to a page where the hit is counted, analysed and then 302 redirects to my sales page with the affiliates ID in the url : www.mysalespage.com/?=aff_id. However, we've noticed recently that one affiliate seems to be ranking for our own name and the url google indexed was his tracking url (domain.com/track/aff_id). Which is strange because there is absolutely nothing on that page, its just an interstatial page so that our stats tracking software can properly filter hits. To remove the affiliate's url from showing up in the serps, I've come up with 2 solutions : 1 - Change the redirect to a 301 redirect on his track page. 2 - Change our robots.txt page to block all domain.com/track/ pages from being indexed. My question is : if I 301 redirect instead of 302, will I keep the affiliates from outranking me for my own name AND pass on link juice or should I simply block google from crawling the interstatial tracking pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CrakJason0 -
One page wordpress site - what are the steps for SEO
Hello, I am launching 5 sites with keyword exact domains. I am developing the sites on wordpress as one page sales funnel sites. What do I need to do to optimize my sites? Really appreciate any bullet points or directions. Tks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianmaher0 -
How Fast Is Too Fast to Increase Page Volume of Your Site
I am working on a project that is basically a site to list apartment for rent (similar to apartments.com or rent.com). We want to add a bunch of amenity pages, price pages, etc. Basically increasing the page count on the site and helping users be able to have more pages relevant to their searches and long tail phrases. So an example page would be Denver apartments with a pool would be one page and Seattle apartments under 900 would be another page etc. By doing this we will take the site from about 14,000 pages or so to over 2 million by the time we add a list of amenities to every city in the US. My question is should I worry about time release on them? Meaning do you think we would get penalized for launching that many pages overnight or over the course of a week? How fast is too fast to increase the content on your site? The site about a year old and we are not trying to scam anything just looking to site functionality and page volume. Any advice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioV0