301 Redirect from now defunct website?
-
Hi guys
Quick question about 301 redirection between domains.
I currently manage a website, lets call it website A.
Website A sells a particular product range, however the decision has been made by the powers that be to pull the plug on the business and sell the products previously sold via Website A via another website within the parent companies control.....lets call it Website B.
I need to make it clear to customers of Website A that the company no longer operates but want to pass the SEO equity that has been built up over time to the relevant pages on Website B.
My plan was to
1. 301 Redirect all key landing pages on Website A to the most relevant pages on Website B
2. Initially keep the website A homepage live but change the message to say "Website A no longer operates, but Website B can help etc. etc." Remove all sub links from navigation.
3. Monitor referral and direct traffic levels and consider 301 redirecting website A homepage to Website B homepage in the long term.
My questions:
- Does this sound like the best approach? If not, what alternatives are there?
- Will Website A look like a link farm for Website B? I dont want this obviously!
-
Hi Tom,
I am interested in how your project turned out with the redirect from the defunct site. I am in the exact position now and would love to know if you have any wisdom to impart...?
Cheers,
Brett
-
Hi Tom, yes - I think you'd be better off creating a page on website B which explains that website A is now website B.
I would also explain the site move on all the other redirects (but only for visitors arriving from website A). Yoast writes a good post about how to do this.
-
Hi Yusuf
Yes. Website B will now offer the same product as website A. Website A would also have repeat visitors.
Do you then think it would be a better bet to create a page on website B instead explaining that Website A is no longer in operation and redirect to this? I guess this may bring in branded traffic to website A using website Bs brand name?
-
Hi DHStom,
This seems like a reasonable approach.
But is there really a need to have the landing page on the old site to state that 'website A no longer operates..'? Is website well known and/or does it have a loyal customer base? Also does website B offer all the same products as website A used to?
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... Redirect all content at once or in increments?
Hello, I have been reading a lot about site migration and 301s and sometimes get confused with conflicting suggestions from different sources... So, in a site migration. Should I 301 redirect all old URLs to the news at once or little by little? I've see this Google handout that suggests doing it all at once (minute 13)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Koki.Mourao
https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cfco632lor7bl55j3tg1g8332l0 But also have read the opposite in other forums...0 -
301 redirects for a redesign.
About to completely redo a client's site and I want to make sure I don't loose our link juice. The current site is a old template site from another provider. They host it and we do not have access at all to the site itself, so there will be no transferring of the site from server to server because they feel the site is their property. Basically the site is a monthly service not a product. So this will be a completely new website, including new URL structure. So my question is how do keep the link juice flowing to the new site? I know I need to use 301 redirects, but do I rebuild those old URLs on my site and redirect them to their new counterpart or what? The link profile is not that impressive, maybe 15 back links (all mainly going to the homepage). But they all are local and coming from pretty good domain authority. But its keeping us ahead of our competition. Back story: This is one of my local search clients, we now have them ranking #1 across the board in the local packs. After analyzing the traffic, they are losing 75% of all traffic because of the sites design. So a new site is a must. I build a lot of websites, but have never worried about the back link profile before now. Thanks for all your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masonrj0 -
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Same website, seperate subfolders or separete websites? 12 stores in two cities
I have a situation where there are 12 stores in separate suburbs across two cities. Currently the chain store has one eCommerce website. So I could keep the one website with all the attendant link building benefits of one domain. I would keep a separate webpage for each store with address details to assist with some Local SEO. But (1) each store has slightly different inventory and (2) I would like to garner the (Local) SEO benefits of being in a searchers suburb. So I'm wondering if I should go down the subfolder route with each store having its own eCommerce store and blog eg example.com/suburb? This is sort of what Apple does (albeit with countries) and is used as a best practice for international SEO (according to a moz seminar I watched awhile back). Or I could go down the separate eCommerce website domain track? However I feel that is too much effort for not much extra return. Any thoughts? Thanks, Bruce.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceMcG0 -
Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page
Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!0 -
Help with setting up 301 redirects from /default.aspx to the "/" in ASP.NET using MasterPages?
Hi SEOMoz Moderators and Staff, My web developer and I are having a world of trouble setting up the best way to 301 redirect from www.tisbest.org/default.aspx to the www.tisbest.org since we're using session very heavily for our ASP.NET using MasterPages. We're hoping for some help since our homepage has dropped 50+ positions for all of our search terms since our first attempt at setting this up 10 days ago. = ( A very bad result. We've rolled back the redirects after realizing that our session system was redirecting www.tisbest.org back to www.tisbest.org/default.aspx?AutoDetectCookieSupport=1 which would redirect to a URL with the session ID like this one: http://www.tisbest.org/(S(whukyd45tf5atk55dmcqae45))/Default.aspx which would then redirect again and throw the spider into an unending redirect loop. The Google gods got angry, stopped indexing the page, and we are now missing from our previous rankings though, thankfully, several of our other pages do still exist on Google. So, has anyone dealt with this issue? Could this be solved by simply resetting up the 301 redirects and also configuring ASP.NET to recognize Google's spider as supporting cookies and thus not serving it the Session ID that has caused issue for us in the past? Any help (even just commiserating!) would be great. Thanks! Chad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TisBest0 -
Lost all ranking after site-wide 301 redirect
Hi all I did a complete site-wide 310 redirect about 3 weeks ago for a site that had consistently been in Pos 1-5 for my targeted keyword ("low glycemic foods"). I changed the domain from low-glycemic-foods-org to low-glycemic-diet.com because I thought that was a more appropriate title and thru my readings I believed that if I carefully followed the recommended procedures I would quickly regain my SERP. Webmaster tools is showing that I have over 800 inbound links - many from very trustworthy sources including .edu, etc BUT my home page is nowhere to be found for the keyword search "low glycemic diet". My Seomoz onpage SEO score is an "A" Any enlightenment would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | veezer0 -
301 redirect
I have 2 websites, lets call them Website A and Website B. Website A is a commercial website, website B is a 7 years old blog. Website B has many natural, high quality BL, including some from Nytimes, etc. I want to integrate the blog (B) into the commercial website (A). The idea behind this thought is to compress the two websites, it is easier to have everything in one place. I will do this with 301 redirect via Webmaster tools, htaccess etc. The uRL structure will remain the same: eg: websiteB/post-title/ -> websiteA/post title What will happen with my quality BLs? Is there any chance to be penalized by Google? What will happen with the PR of the 2 sites? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasmin281
