What's the best way to pass link juice to a page on another domain?
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I'm working with a non-profit, and their donation form software forces them to host their donation pages on a different domain. I want to attempt to get their donation page to appear in their sitelinks in Google (under the main website's entry), but it seems like the organization's donation forms are at a disadvantage because they're not actually hosted on that site. I know that no matter what I do, there's no way to "force" a sitelink to appear the way I want it, but...
I was trying to think if there's a way I can work around this. Do you think 1) creating a url like orgname.org/donate and having that be a 301 redirect to the donation form, and 2) using the /donate redirect all over the site (instead of linking directly to the form) would help?
Are there alternatives other folks recommend?
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Maybe it is also possible to do a donation page on the domain like Patrick said (whats a great idea) and get a frame/ iframe of the donation form onto that page?
Sorry Alan allreay said it =(
Maybe I should read all comments
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Patrick makes some good suggestions, one other thing you can try, is to try and place the form in a iframe, then you can use the iframe page for your sitelinks.
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Yeah, that makes sense, and I see a number of organizations out there doing something like what you describe, and having their /donate page showing up as a sitelink when they do. I generally don't love making donors take an extra click (homepage->donate interstitial->donate form, versus homepage->donate form) while going through the donation process, but I think that needs to be valued against the SEO benefits of having a donation form show up in search. If it were an option, it does seem like finding a way to host a donation form on the organization's domain would be the best alternative.
Thanks for your thoughts - very helpful to have a second opinion!
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Hi there
I honestly doubt this would work. For one, there is going to be no content on the page for your site to rank. Beyond that, the content still lives on another domain.
I would develop a page that has information about donating, steps to donate, who the donations help, and so on. What this will do is help you pick up "donation" based traffic for a page that is honestly about donating for the organization.
I would then include a link at the bottom of the page to the donation form. You can have this be your /donate page, it would just link off to the actual form at the end, but at least you have information about donating.
Does this make sense? Honesty will always trump trying to redirect or "trick" (without actually trying to do so) crawlers / users. Let me know - hope this helps.
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I think for this organization, it isn't really an option to host the form on the website.
Is it possible that at meta-refresh might actually be a solution here? That way Google might actually index the /donate page and it'd have a chance at showing up in search results.
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I never tried it, but I would guess that Google wouldn't create sitelinks wich are directed to another domain in any way.
I think the only solution is a donation form on the working domain. -
Hi there
Is there any way to host or embed the form on the nonprofit's website? That way it could have it's own dedicated URL and page on the domain. At the moment, if the form is on another domain, it's not going to show up under your site's sitelinks because it's not part of the domain.
As for your redirect questions, I don't think that would work because again, it's not actually hosted on the website, but I will leave that to others to decide.
Let me know - thanks so much!
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