Multiple domain level redirects to unique sub-folder on one domain...
-
Hi, I have a restaurant menu directory listing website (for example www.menus.com).
Restaurant can have there menu listed on this site along with other details such as opening hours, photos ect. An example of a restaurant url might be www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza.
A feature i would like to offer is the ability for Bob's pizza to use the menus.com website listing as his own website (let assume he has no website currently). I would like to purchase www.bobspizza.com and 301 redirect to www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza
Why?
So bob can then list bobspizza.com on his advertising material (business cards etc, rather than www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza).I was considering using a 301 redirect for this though have been told that too many domain level redirects to one single domain can be flagged as spam by Google.
Is there any other way to achieve this outcome without being penalised? Rel canonical url, url masking?
Other things to note:
- It is fine if www.bobspizza.com is NOT listed in search results.
- I would ideally like any link juice pointing to www.bobspizza.com to pass onto www.menus.com though this is a nice to have. If it comes at the cost of being penalised i can live without the link juice from this.
Thanks
-
That's a good point you make Cyrus in regards to linking to a site that has competitors on it also. I have considered this and my idea was to pass in a url param that would not show anything else only the restaurants own menu. For example, menus.com/bobs-pizza?ads=0 would not show a search bar or any other links (simply just their own menu). This page would have rel-canonical link to menus.com/bobs-pizza so as to maintain link juice...
Other option i was thinking was to include an iframe on the restaurants page that would source data from menus.com. I guess i could have a link pointing back to menus.com at the bottom of the menu in the iframe.
I think the link idea makes sense rather the redirect for the reasons you mentioned. Maybe i could have a popup on mobile devices that contains a link to the menu's site (again this would be in javascript - not sure if this is a good idea though).
Any other ideas on how i may be able to show a link (only on mobile devices) that could point to menus.com (in a SEO friendly way)?
-
Without getting into the technical details, I have to address the bigger question of why a business owner would want to redirect their site to yours? In all honesty, I have to question the soundness of that business plan. If I'm printing www.bobs-pizza on my business cards, I want my visitors to go to www.bobs-pizza.com, and not redirect to some other site where they can view all my competitors as well.
Regardless, I would think it would be much easier to get a link from these sites than a redirect, and this would mitigate the potential problems of mass 301 redirects.
Another thing to consider, what if the site has been penalized due to poor link building practices? Once you 301 redirect to your site, those bad links become yours, and this could effect your entire site.
Regarding the issue of redirecting mobile users, yes, it's possible using browser detection agents, but redirecting to another site runs huge risks of penalties to the point that I wouldn't advise it.
Instead, I think this is a great idea, but I would opt for links instead of redirects. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
+1 URL Shortener
Also, custom URLs for each business might work, i.e. menu.com/bobs-pizza.
-
Thanks for your response Moosa. I like the idea of shorter urls.
On a similar yet slightly different note.
Some restaurants already have an existing and well established websites (eg www.tomspasta.com). For these websites i would like to redirect to www.menus.com/tomspasta (which is mobile optimised), only if the user is viewing the site (www.tomspasta.com) from a mobile device (ie user agent detection would be used in JavaScript to do the redirect).Would this kind of redirect have any impact on SEO (positively/negatively)? Would any link juice be passed? Would i need to notify Google that the content is different for mobile devices?
-
Thanks for your response Moosa. I like the idea of shorter urls.
On a similar yet slightly different note.
Some restaurants already have an existing and well established websites (eg www.tomspasta.com). For these websites i would like to redirect to www.menus.com/tomspasta (which is mobile optimised), only if the user is viewing the site (www.tomspasta.com) from a mobile device (ie user agent detection would be used in JavaScript to do the redirect).Would this kind of redirect have any impact on SEO (positively/negatively)? Would any link juice be passed? Would i need to notify Google that the content is different for mobile devices?
-
Hi Adam,
It is true that too many 301 redirects could look a bit fishy.
If what you want is for people that see bobspizza.com on advertising material and type the url on their browser to be redirected to your site (and have no possible issues with Google), I'd would use a 302 redirect.
The only problem with 302 redirects is that the link juice pointing to bobspizza.com won't pass onto menu.com .
There are many hosting providers that will allow you to park and 301/302 an unlimited number of domains.
Cheers
-
Adam I think a lot about this even before you actually come up with this question and I thought best URL structure you can follow in this case is of about.me
- You cannot park many domains (ideally one domain for each business page)
- Too many domain level redirects might kill your site and at the same time 301 redirect from domain to a specific page will not let main domain stay in SERPs.
- Canonical can work but again you cannot eat the search engine love.
But there is one thing that you cannot do!
How about shortening the URL?
For instance you have a BOB pizza in Ohio so instead of having a URL http://www.menue.com/pizza/OH/bob-pizza/ why not go for a smile and short URL that looks great with branding http://menu.com/bobpizza/
The URL is short so you can easily use in branding plus search engine will not exclude this in Google... when people will share this short version of URL the domain authority of the overall domain will automatically improved.
Hope this idea might work for you...
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
-
Redirect Chains
Hi There, I have had conducted a few migrations recently and have a common issue which is this: HTTP (old site) -> HTTPS (old site) -> (HTTPS) (new site) Which causes a redirect chain. How should you prevent this before migration or fix it after migration? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
Putting my content under domain.com/content, or under related categories: domain.com/bikes/content ?
Hello This questions plays on what Joe Hall talked about during this years' MozCon: Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing. My Case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
So.. we're working out guidelines and templates for a costumer (sporting goods store) on how to publish content (articles, videos, guides) on their category pages, product pages, and other pages. At this moment I have 2 choices:
1. Use a url-structure/information architecture where all the content is placed in one subfolder, for example domain.com/content. Although it's placed here, there's gonna be extensive internal linking from /content to the related category pages, so the content about bikes (even if it's placed under domain.com/bikes) will be just as visible on the pages related to bikes. 2. Place the content about bikes on a subdirectory under the bike category, **for example domain.com/bikes/content. ** The UX/interface for these two scenarios will be identical, but the directories/folder-hierarchy/url structure will be different. According to Joe Hall, the latter scenario will build up more topical authority and relevance towards the category/topic, and should be the overall most ideal setup. Any thoughts on which of the two solutions is the most ideal? PS: There is one critical caveat her: my costumer uses many url-slugs subdirectories for their categories, for example domain.com/activity/summer/bikes/, which means the content in the first scenario will be 4 steps away from the home page. Is this gonna be a problem? Looking forward to your thoughts 🙂 Sigurd, INEVO0 -
Move Pages From One Domain To Another - The SEO Friendly Way
Hi All, One of our clients is a hair salon, that's currently dividing into two separate entities. For over 10 years the hair salon has been for both men and women, but that's now changing. The company is splitting into two, the original website contains pages for both men and women, but will soon only contain pages for women's hairdressing. The problem I have here is that there's probably around 20-30 service pages that get really great, targeted traffic on the men's side. There's a brand new domain for the men's hairdressing company and I'd like to know how you'd go about retaining the SEO value instead of just culling the pages. I'm thinking that we should maybe take the content from the original website, re-write it slightly to match the new brand, add it to the new website and then 301 the pages on the original website across to the new website. Has anyone had any experience in doing something like this before? and will the SEO value move across to the new domain? Also, I'm scared that the internal pages of the new domain may hold more authority than the home page and could cause problems. Any ideas on this would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
We 410'ed URLs to decrease URLs submitted and increase crawl rate, but dynamically generated sub URLs from pagination are showing as 404s. Should we 410 these sub URLs?
Hi everyone! We recently 410'ed some URLs to decrease the URLs submitted and hopefully increase our crawl rate. We had some dynamically generated sub-URLs for pagination that are shown as 404s in google. These sub-URLs were canonical to the main URLs and not included in our sitemap. Ex: We assumed that if we 410'ed example.com/url, then the dynamically generated example.com/url/page1 would also 410, but instead it 404’ed. Does it make sense to go through and 410 these dynamically generated sub-URLs or is it not worth it? Thanks in advice for your help! Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffchen0 -
Domain forward or 301 redirect
My company recently acquired another company including their web presence. We are soon ending their website and will be either 301 redirecting their domain to our domain or pointing their domain to our nameservers. Their domain authority is only 25 while our domain authority is 32. Their domain was created in 1998 while ours was created in 1999. So to keep our domain authority up or enhance it, should we do a 301 redirect or a domain forward. And that is if there is any difference? Thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | topsailislander0 -
Order and multiple match when 301 redirect ?
Hi, I'm migrating a single domain to a multiple domain for each language, using apache redirections: Redirect 301 /partners http://www.itris-automation.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2MSens
Redirect 301 /partner-si http://www.itris-automation.com/system-integrators-partners
Redirect 301 /partner-institute http://www.itris-automation.com/institutional-partners
Redirect 301 /fr/ http://www.itris-automation.fr/
Redirect 301 /fr/support http://www.itris-automation.fr/support
Redirect 301 /privacy?lang=fr http://www.itris-automation.fr/politique-de-confidentialite Redirect 301 /de/plc-converter http://www.itris-automation.de/plc-converter
Redirect 301 /de/services http://www.itris-automation.de/
Redirect 301 /de/plc-quality http://www.itris-automation.de/sps-qualitat .... However it doesn't work properly: For example automationsquare.com/privacy?lang=fr redirect to http://www.itris-automation.com/privacy instead of http://www.itris-automation.fr/politique-de-confidentialite Does the order of the redirect has an influence? Am I missing something? I've seen that the command [L] can be useful to avoid mismatch? Thanks, Best, Benoit.0 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
How would I be able to move content from one domain to another?
I have a client that wants to migrate some of his site's content to a new domain, not all of the content, just some of it. This is not an address change. He wants to continue actively using the domain name where all this content currently resides, so it's not a matter of notifying search engines of an address change. The first thing that comes to mind is the use of the canonical tag, but it's not making sense. Any recommendations? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UplinkSpyder0