Redirect issue launching duplicate product categories on another TLD
-
Dear Mozzerz
We run this e-commerce website (superstar.dk) where we are selling all different kinds of wristwatches from different brand names (Casio, Garmin, Suunto etc). We just bought another website selling watches (xxx.com) and therefore we would like to move some of the content from superstar.dk to the new website xxx.com, making superstar.dk into a more niche website. So we are basically taking a brand with all the products in it and shutting it down on superstar.dk and instead launching it on xxx.com. Superstar.dk will still be running, just with a more niche product- and brand selection.
So my question is, should we redirect all the old product categories that we are shutting down to the new website on another TLD where we are opening them again and the same for the products (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> xxx.com/garmin)? Or would it be better to keep the redirects within the same website/TLD (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> superstar.dk)?
A few examples:
superstar.dk/garmin -> xxx.com/garmin
superstar.dk/suunto -> xxx.com/suunto
etc..
superstar.dk/product1 -> xxx.com/product1
superstar.dk/product2 -> xxx.com/product2
etc. -
That would point the most authority at the home page, but isn't the best user experience. Our concern is that Google monitors how people use 301s in terms of how it affects user experience and whether the redirection was done purely for SEO purposes. However, if you can do that without confusion, it would be a good option.
-
Wouldn't it be better to boost the frontpage of superstar.dk, redirecting all url's here (if we keep the confusion of our visitors out of the quation) ?
-
Hi Soren,
If I were going to redirect internally (i.e. remove the brands, sub-categories and products but not redirect those pages to xxx.com), I'd consider creating a page on a new URL on superstar.dk, explaining why the pages are gone and linking to xxx.com. This won't confuse users, but will keep the authority of those redirected pages within the old domain.
If I were going to redirect to the new site, I would clearly do as you've mentioned above, redirecting www.superstar.dk/product1.html to www.xxx.com/product1.html and so forth.
-
Thank you for your take Jane. We would like to keep superstar.dk as a well ranking website on all other categories (we are only removing 2-4 brand). Would you redirect the brand categories, sub-categories and product url's to the frontpage of superstar.dk or how would you do the redirects?
-
I would agree with Rishi that redirecting between domains can be a little bit troublesome - it should make a lot of sense, but it's a tactic that has been abused for spam / low quality purposes in the past, and any tactic that has been abused is likely to be scrutinised at some point.
Ignoring potential future issues for a second, I would also say that whether to redirect or not depends on your goals. If you wish to pass all the authority from a well-established, well-ranked existing site (superstar.dk) and move the brand (besides the small niche you'll keep), redirection could be very helpful. If you don't want to remove any equity from superstar.dk, redirection to the home page or to a page explaining the site's changes + linking to the new website, could be good too.
-
If the new website is really new I suggest testing to see what happens when you redirect from the older site. If the older site pages dont have rankings and or any authority, I wouldnt bother either way.
-
The new website has not even launched yet. We wan't to be sure how to handle this case before we launch. So what is your recommendation?
Anyone else who knows what best practice would be in our specific case?
-
So my question is, should we redirect all the old product categories that we are shutting down to the new website on another TLD where we are opening them again and the same for the products (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> xxx.com/garmin)? Or would it be better to keep the redirects within the same website/TLD (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> superstar.dk)?
Historically my answer would have been straightforward. Redirect to the new site. However with the changing rules in search engines I would advise caution. Does your new website have stable rankings? Is it worth the risk of 301's from another site?
My opinion is use of 301s for ranking cross domains may be a tactic that borders on the grey area and could lead to a penalty in the future.
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
-
Have issues about expired domain? How to work on it? How to redirect?
Using expired domains to redirect on your site? For this you need to first Active your expired domainsand put two to three articles After google will got it that its now active and so google start crawling after that you need to put same articles that you created on expired site on your new site with same urls Now make a wild card redirect to exact urls or posts you created on your site
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LyleTLai0 -
Issues with Sitelinks
Hey Everyone, I found a couple threads where this was asked, but unfortunately I haven't seen any responses that explain it yet. My issue is with the sitelinks Google is choosing for a section of my website; they're using wrong/lowercase anchor text for a couple of the page titles that isn't anywhere on the page or in the backend that I can find (see screenshot). Any thoughts/reasons as to why they'd be using the lowercase text there? Thanks in advance! David 9r9Pz4w
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidkaralisjr0 -
Galleries and duplicate content
Hi! I am now studing a website, and I have detected that they are maybe generating duplicate content because of image galleries. When they want to show details of some of their products, they link to a gallery url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
something like this www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/101 where you can find the logotype, a full image and a small description. There is a next and a prev button over the slider. The next goes to the next picture www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/102 and so on. But the next picture is in a different URL!!!! The problem is that they are generating lots of urls with very thin content inside.
The pictures have very good resolution, and they are perfect for google images searchers, so we don't want to use the noindex tag. I thought that maybe it would be best to work with a single url with the whole gallery inside it (for example, the 6 pictures working with a slideshow in the same url ), but as the pictures are very big, the page weight would be greater than 7 Mb. If we keep the pictures working that way (different urls per picture), we will be generating duplicate content each time they want to create a gallery. What is your recommendation? Thank you!0 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Crawl diagnostic issue?
I'am sorry if my English isn't very good, but this is my problem at the moment: On two of my campagnes I get a weird error on Moz Analytics: 605 Page Banned by robots.txt, X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header, or Meta Robots Tag Moz Analytics points to an url that starts with: http:/**/None/**www.????.com. We don't understand how Moz indexed this non-existing page that starts with None? And how can we solve this error? I hope that someone can help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nettt0 -
301 redirect rule
Hi there, I have a website that has hundreds of links with a "question mark" at the end of URLs. For example: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQandil
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory?
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/? I'm want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess file but don't know what exactly to add. Ideally I want the URLs above to be: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/ Any help is most appreciated. Thanks
Issa0 -
Duplicate content on subdomains.
Hi Mozer's, I have a site www.xyz.com and also geo targeted sub domains www.uk.xyz.com, www.india.xyz.com and so on. All the sub domains have the content which is same as the content on the main domain that is www.xyz.com. So, I want to know how can i avoid content duplication. Many Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
Redirect a temporary IP
I was performing some development work on a client's site recently under a temporary location on the host's server, for example: http://11.22.33.444/~accountname/folder/page.html Google managed to index a couple of pages using this url 😞 I have updated DNS to the correct domain and the site is live, but I am a bit confused in regards to the correct way to create a 301 Redirect for this example or at least a way point it to our 404 page. I am hoping someone more proficient with htaccess can help me out a bit... Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0