Existing content & 301 redirects
-
Hi All,
I will try to keep this to the point.
- One of our websites was hit by penguin for unnatural linking.
- We are building a new site (same business, different domain), but we would like to take some of the pages/content off the old website and use it on our new site.
Is it just a case of copying each page onto our new site and 301 redirect the old URL? Or should I just be completely rewording/recreating the old content so it is unique?
Any help on this would be great, but I am also open to alternate methods too.
Thanks
Lewis
-
Yes a toxic domain will infect a new domain if 301 is implemented.
I would lean towards cleaning up the existing domain. Even if you end up disavowing every linking domain the existing domain is likely to have created more trust than starting from scratch. If it is a manual penalty ensure you document all steps to try and clean up so you can detail in the reconsideration request.
-
Lewis,
Transferring content becomes more complex when an entire site changes the domain name or when you move content from one domain to another. Due to abuse by Spammers, search engines are suspicious of lots of 301s from one domain to another. 301s between domains may require more time to be properly spidered and counted.
One thought: if your last sight was penalized, do you not just want to disavow links / clean up your link profile and content, and then ask for reconsideration by Google?
If you do continue to move to a new domain, and you 301 redirect the old domain to your new one (without disavowing / cleaning link profile) you may end up bringing down your new site. Plus, making the content new and fresh (like you mentioned) couldn't hurt.
Eli
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
-
301 redirects- how long to keep and how many are too many?
Hi, I was told we have way too many 301 redirects on our site. We have some that have been there for 3 years. Our site is datacard.com . Question- how long should you keep a redirect out there when building a new page and expiring an old page? Is it 6 months, is it a certain time frame? wondering what the best practices are? Thanks! Laura
Technical SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Backlink management: 301 redirect unsuccessful.
I am managing my company's spammy backlinks using Open Site Explorer. Our company owns a few URLs that are related to our company or are iterations of our main URL. All of these additional URLs have 301 redirects to our main domain. Open Site Explorer has identified one of these URLs as having a spam score of 8 indicating a 56% chance of Google crawler penalization. Obviously, this is a red flag. Instead of being redirected to our main domain upon visiting the URL, I was directed to what seems to be an automatically generated, generic webpage with links that seem to have been generated by keywords from our main domain. I have seen this type of webpage before when incorrectly typing in URLs from other pages. They tend to look the same. They have a black background with the URL written in grey at the top and a rectangular related links bar. Is anyone familiar with my problem and could you offer any advice? Thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | SOLVISTA0 -
404 to 301 redirects is there a limit?
Hi We've just updated our website and have binned out alot of old thin content which has no value even if re written. We have a lot of 404 error on WMT and I am in the process of doing 301 redirects on them. Is there a limit to the number of 301 the site should have?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Could a URL change path conflict a 301 redirect?
Hi Mozzers, We create multiple pages for one of my client. Some of them are replacing old pages. I setup 5 of them out of 40. I was able to set them live via the drupal CMS. The new pages were actually published but didn't have any URL but had nodes in directory such as www.example.com/node298. To set them live i changed the url path to one page that already existed( www.example.com/old). In order to setup the replacing page: www.example.com/node298 i added the same name as the old one but in order to avoid URL conflicts with new page(www.example.com/new) I had to change the old page's url path as well such as www.example.com/old2) I know i have to 301 redirect the old to the new obviously but my question is: does a URL path change on the old page www.example.com/old matters in when 301 ing it? will it still transfer all the juice to the new page Visual Process: Main goal: www.example.com/old redirect to www.example.com/new but these two are exactly the same url So modification of URL path: www.example.com/old to www.example.com/old2 to avoid URL conflict Therefore www.example.com/old2 =www.example.com/old (just url change path difference) Question: Because of this url change, will a 301 from www.example.com/old2 to www.example.com/new will still carry all the juice that www.example.com/old carried or not? I hope i didn't make it too confusing. Let me know if it is the case Thanks Mozzers Ty
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
301 Redirect From Dynamic Page To Static
I want to 301 redirect all "id" and "type" numbers from my page dynamic.php page (I have thousands of IDs and thousands of Types) all to a single URL. So for example the following.... www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=1&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=2&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=3&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=1&type=6 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=2&type=6 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=3&type=6 ...would all be sent to: www.mysite.com/page.html How can this be done without doing a redirect for each ID/Type?
Technical SEO | | TheDude1 -
Setting up a 301 redirect from expired webpages
Hi Guys, We have recently created a new website for one of our clients and replaced their old website on the same domain. One problem that we are having is that all of the old pages are indexed within Google (1000s) and are just getting sent to our custom 404 page. We are finding that there is an large bounce rate from this and also, I am worried from an SEO point of view that the site could lose rank positioning through the number of crawl errors that Google is getting. Want I want is to set up a 301 redirect from these pages to go to the 'our brands' page. The reason for this is that the majority of the old URLs linked to individual product pages, and one thing to note is that they are all .asp pages. Is there a way of setting up a rule in the htaccess file (or another way) to say that all webpages that end with the suffix of .asp will be 301 redirected to the our brands' page? (there is no .asp pages on the new site as it is all done in php). If so, I would love it if someone could post the code snippet. Thanks in advance guys and if you have any other ideas then be my guest to suggest 🙂 Matt.
Technical SEO | | MatthewBarby0 -
Is it worth setting up 301 redirects from old products to new products?
This year we are using a new supplier and they have provided us a product database of approx. 5k products. About 80% of these products were in our existing database but once we have installed the new database all the URLs will have changed. There is no quick way to match the old products with the new products so we would have to manually match all 5k products if we were were to setup 301 rules for the old products pointing to the new products. Of course this would take a lot of time. So the options are: 1. Is it worth putting in this effort to make the 301 rules? 2. Or are we okay just to delete the old product pages, let the SE see the 404 and just wait for it to index the new pages? 3. Or, as a compromise, should we 301 the old product page to the new category page as this is a lot quicker for us do do than redirecting to the new product page?
Technical SEO | | indigoclothing0 -
Too many 301 redirects - good or bad?
Hi, Currently, page A is redirecting to page B. I am in the process of developing new site for the same domain and this time page B will be redirected to page C. This is gonna happen on many pages. Is it correct or should i adopt some other strategy? Will it have adverse effect on the speed of my site? Page A -----> Page B ------> Page C Regards, Shailendra
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0