Redirecting external blog to main website blog - two questions I'm struggling with
-
Hiya Mozzers - I have a blog separate from main website which is duplicating the blog on the main website. This separate blog is duplicating the main website blog, so it needs to be closed down and redirected. There are some 200 pages of separate blog (identified via Screaming Frog).
So I am suggesting the blog pages should be 301 redirected from the separate blog to the equivalent blog pages on the main website.
Q1) Should the root domain of the separate blog be 301 redirected to the main www.mainwebsite.com/blog page, or to the root domain of the main website?
Q2) Should the blog pages, which lack equivalent content on the main website, be 301 redirected to the main www.mainwebsite.com/blog page, or to the root domain of the main website?
Thanks for your help on this one, Luke
-
Hi Luke,
As alrockn says, I would redirect the root domain of the duplicate blog to mainsite.com/blog.
With the pages that have no duplicate on the main site, either find the likeliest match or redirect to mainsite.com/blog. When I say likeliest match, I mean that if any pages on the old blog seem a good fit with something on the main site, redirect them there. You may find none that fit any of the existing pages. If so, don't worry - I'd redirect those to the main site's blog.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Thanks David - I was wondering whether blog root domain should go to the main website's blog page (www.mainwebsite.com/blog) or homepage (www.mainwebsite.com/) - not sure that it matters one way or the other as never had to deal with this kind of issue before.
-
Option 1 is a very good idea if you think these links will hurt you, Google wise. Since you says these are all duplicate content, this is probably what you want to do, but first be sure you don't want the link or authority juice from the old blog. If the blog gets more traffic, has more authority, etc...the decision gets tougher to make.
-
You have 2 options:
1. You can turn off the duplicated site, and do a URL removal request in Webmaster tools. The domain you do not want anymore, or the one that is causing the duplication must return a 404 error in order for Google to accept the request. This will cause the entire old site to go away, and the links to be removed from Google's index. If the site does not have a lot of traffic, or does not get a lot of visits, this would be the best route.
2. Do 301 redirects on the duplicated site. You should try and match them up, such as:
olddomain.com/your-blog-post
301 redirects to
NEWdomain.com/your-blog-postIf they do not match up exactly, use best judgement and redirect them either to the home page, or a similar subject matter. For example if you had an seo related topic that wasnt exact match, you could forward it to another article that referenced seo. If you have to send a few to the home page, that wont hurt anything, just dont make the total number excessive, as that could potentially look spammy. Best of luck, If you need any help let me know!
-
You should try to mirror the 301's to the duplicates on the main site. So in answer to your first question, the duplicate blog index page should go to main/blog, and everything else should go to the new location on the main site. Anything without landing pages on the new site, should redirect to main/blog.
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
-
I have redirected my old domain to my new blog, why its not being detected?
Hey Experts, I hope you are all doing great, I'm extremely confused right now. Any help will be much appreciated. I have redirected my old blog hellgatelondon.com to my new blog iriveramerica.com. It has been redirected for many days with wild card from bluehost and also within htaccess but Moz link explorer won't detect it, what's the problem? anyone please? Kind regards...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | euaobela0 -
Going from 302 redirect to 301 redirect weeks after changing URL structure
I made a small change on an ecommerce site that had big impacts I didn't consider... About six weeks ago in an effort to clean up one of many SEO-related problems on an ecommerce site, I had a developer rewrite the URLs to replace underscores with hyphens and redirect all pages throughout the site to that page with the new URL structure. We didn't immediately update our sitemap to reflect the changes (bad!) and I just discovered all the redirects are 302s... Since these changes, most of the pages have a page authority of 1 and we have dropped several spots in organic search. If we were to setup 301 redirects for the pages that we changed the URL structure would there be any changes in organic search placement and page authority or is it too late?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116990439410 -
Pull meta descriptions from a website that isn't live anymore
Hi all, we moved a website over to Wordpress 2 months ago. It was using .cfm before, so all of the URLs have changed. We implemented 301 redirects for each page, but we weren't able to copy over any of the meta descriptions. We have an export file which has all of the old web pages. Is there a tool that would allow us to upload the old pages and extract the meta descriptions so that we can get them onto the new website? We use the Yoast SEO plugin which has a bulk meta descriptions editor, so I'm assuming that the easiest/most effective way would be to find a tool that generates some sort of .csv or excel file that we can just copy and paste? Any feedback/suggestions would be awesome, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | georgetsn0 -
How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??
I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages. SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website. SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link. WHY? and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is. THINGS I"VE TRIED: (1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page. (2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag. (3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference. I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/'); to $redirect_url = home_url(''); nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) : RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dillman
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Please help friends.0 -
Website, webshop and blog. Subfolders or subdomains?
Hello fellow mozzers, I've seen a lot of discussion and confusion about whether you should use subfolders or subdomains when you have a website, a blog and a webshop.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WesleySmits
Of course with subfolders the PageRank will be more effective since it's all in one domain. On the other hand subdomains will be a better user experience since you can focus on just the webshop or just the blog. Was wondering how you guys/girls think what would be the best way to handle this.0 -
Questions about Vittana.org's blogging contest and having bloggers use specific anchor text.
Hi All, Kenji Crosland here. I just joined vittana.org (yesterday!) to do some of the blogger outreach and content creation/link building. Although most of the links we've gotten in the past are branded links, we've decided to actively pursue anchor text links with specific keywords. If you check, you'll see that vittana has a relatively high domain authority. At the beginning of next week we'll be conducting a blogging contest with A-list celebrity tech bloggers. I don't think we'll have time to contact influencers in other areas for this contest unfortunately. When these A-list bloggers write their posts, we want them to have a link to this page: http://www.vittana.org/students To me, this seems a great opportunity to win on certain keywords we've discovered that should be easy to win and yet have a high volume of monthly searches. These are 5 word plus keywords that have over 300,000 searches per month. The students page, however, isn't optimized for those keywords. In the long run we want to win for the more difficult keyword "literacy". The word "literacy" is what we think will be a part of our new tagline: "Literacy is not enough". Because of time constraints, we won't be able to create landing pages to win for those "low hanging fruit" keywords in time for the blog contest. My question is: to what extent should we optimize the http://www.vittana.org/students page for the five word plus low hanging fruit keywords that we've discovered. I imagine if the content isn't relevant our clickthrough rates will suffer even if we do win for it (Altering our meta description is a possibility here) . Should we just try for the difficult keyword from the get go and come up with other ways to win for the low hanging fruit keywords? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vittana_seo0 -
Yoast meta description in ' ' instead of " " problem
Hi Guys this is really strange, i am using yoast seo for wordpress on two sites. On both sites i am seeing meta name='description' instead of meta name="description" And this is why google is probably not reading it correctly, on many other link submission sites which read your meta data automatically say site blocked. How to i fix this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0 -
Can I use the same source for two different websites?
I have developed a successful portal based website but would like to grow my portfolio of sites by expanding into new niches and sectors. I would like to use the same source code to fast track new sites but I'm not sure of the dangers involved. Content, meta details etc. will all be unique and the only similarity will be the html code. Another example of how I want to use this is that my current site targets the UK but I want to target a global market with a .com domain and this would involve using the same source. Is this possible without a penalty or am I overlooking something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0