Technical 301 question
-
Howdy all, this has been bugging me for a while and I wanted to know the communities ideas on this.
We have a .com website which has a little domain authority and is growing steadily. We are a UK business (but have a US office which we will be adapting too soon)
We are ranking better within google.com than we do on google.co.uk probably down to our TLD.
Is it a wise idea to 301 our .com to .co.uk for en-gb enquiries only? Is there any evidence that this will help improve our position? will all the link juice passed from 301s go to our .co.uk only if we are still applying the use of .com in the US?
Many thanks and hope this isn't too complicated!
Best wishes,
Chris -
I'm confused a little
If you are going to be using only one domain, you don't have to use hreflang whatsoever.
If you do decide to kepp both, then you don't have to use hreflag or rewrite rules either, just do backlinks to whatever domains you need and that's it.
-
Have you checked out that tool yet and answered the questions? I can help you with the technical implementation, but need to know what's best for your business first.
-
Hi Charles so keep .com and then leverage hreflang and rewrite rules to - /en-gb and /en-us maybe?
Chris
-
My suggestion stays the same - "either combine two domains in one, or use two and do double work on SEO and backlinks"
If you do decide to combine them, i'd use .com
-
thanks for your input both - so what would be your two cents into how to do this? - we have a .com and want to keep .com as the central point, UK is our prime business so far.
-
- I am not too interested in looking at the UX side for now
Bad-bad-bad-bad idea
- I feel the .com is not ranking as well on google.co.uk because google favours .co.uk offer .com.it will still be ONE website.
Ok, .com is not gonna be favourable to local google domains, because it's "international" as Kate said. And still, the juice is not gonna be redirected from a link, just if you 301 it for en-gb locale. As I was saying before, link is "tied" to whatever domain it's linking, unless it has hreflang.
So, my suggestion is still the same: either combine two domains in one, or use two and do double work on SEO and backlinks.
-
First, please don't ignore UX. That is a big part of how the search engines operate today.
As Charles said, an IP based 301 redirect is a very bad idea. Please, please don't do it. It will only hurt you. Google only crawls from the US, so they will never see the redirect. And as Charles said, US people traveling in the UK would not be able to get to the US site.
Also, like Charles, I am confused. You have 2 domains, but want one. I think that is what you mean. You have .co.uk and .com, but would prefer to have everything on .com. That's possible, in my testings, having a .co.uk is not a guarantee for ranking. It can help search engines understand your target market, but regional TLDs (ccTOLDs) are meant for businesses that only operate in that country, or have content/products/information that is specific to that region.
.com on the other hand is a generic TLD, it is not focused to one country.
If you want the .com to rank better in the UK, there are a few questions I need you to answer. In fact, go here: http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/ and let me know what result you get from those questions. Then I can help you with the technical setup.
-
Hi Charles, we want to ideally have one domain - the .com. To simplify My question is about using 301 to pass link juice to both the .co.uk and the .com, with google.co.uk ranking the .co.uk website and google.com ranking the .com website using 301 rewrite rules. I am not too interested in looking at the UX side for now, this is just purely based on search engine urls and how they get structured, and the reason we want to do this, is because I feel the .com is not ranking as well on google.co.uk because google favours .co.uk offer .com.
it will still be ONE website.
hope that is a little clearer.
-
Howdy, my friend.
This does sound a little complicated.
We have a .com website which has a little domain authority and is growing steadily. We are a UK business (but have a US office which we will be adapting too soon)
We are ranking better within google.com than we do on google.co.uk probably down to our TLD.
From first line it sounds like you have one domain (.com), second line tells me that you got two domains (.co.uk and .com). So, which is it? well, it wouldn't affect my answer, I guess, I'll cover both.
So, let's go step-by-step:
-
Is it a wise idea to 301 our .com to .co.uk for en-gb enquiries only? - No!Because i can be in any part of the world and i can set my browser locale header to whatever i want. Or it can happen automatically due to whatever circumstances. So, let's say I'm travelling from UK to US. My browser is set to en-gb locale, I do my search for your company in US, I get redirected to UK website, even though I want to fing US one - no good. Bad UX
-
Is there any evidence that this will help improve our position? will all the link juice passed from 301s go to our .co.uk only if we are still applying the use of .com in the US? - I combine these two into one answer. Link juice can be passed if crawlers can differentiate locale on a given URL. Here is how they can do it:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en
So, let's say there is a website with link to yours. It's one link. You can't set two "hreflang"s, or "rel"s, or write it in two languages at the same time on the same URL. So, basically you can tell bots to consider that link as a "juice-passer" to only one domain.
Now, is there a good reason for you guys to have two different domains? If it has similar information, style etc., you can combine them into one (use subdomains or subfolders - Matt Cutts video) and pretty much cut efforts in half with double the return
If there is a good reason for you guys to have completely different domains, I would concentrate for building/working/structuring .uk website for UK and .com website for US. It means that you'll have to do two backlink profiles building, two different technical and "another one" (forgot the word
) SEOs and so on.Hope this helps.
-
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
-
Question about related topics
I know that in order to rank on any keyword I need to talk about different "concepts / topics " everyone has a different word for it but let say I need to talk about multiple subject to make it simple. My question is how to find those subjects ... in some industry it is pretty straight forward you go to related search or some keyword tool such as Moz and you find what you need. Example : If "Title tag" is my main topic the subtopic that I find and that I need to cover on the same page are "title tag length , title tag checker, mobile title tag, title tag example etc..." On my keywords such as " Alsace bike tours" all I find in related searches and using all the tools out there such as Moz keyword research explorer is "Alsace cycling vacations " ""Cycling Colmar" "Alsace bike trip " etc... not really anything exiting , it means the same thing and it is just variations of the keyword. I have used other tools such as Marketmuse and they give me related topic such as "Strasbourg" "Colmar" "half timbered houses" "Alsace wine" and I am not sure it is any better... because to cover those I have no other solution that doing definitions... or describe those in details which is probably not what someone typing "Alsace bike tour" is looking for. I have the feeling that all those tools are great for keywords like "content marketing" or "title tag" with a lot of requests but they fail for everything else. Can someone give me an insight on how they do to write on multiple topic where they are in my situation and based on the example I gave which topic they would cover and based on my example.. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
New Domain, No 301 Possible - Any Advice
A client of mine lost their domain when an ex business partner sold it out from under them. They've filed with WIPO, but in the meantime we're trying to figure out how to help them out. They had two really excellent links - one from the NY Times and one from a .edu website. I'm going to reach out to the authors of those articles (the articles are pretty old, so I doubt they'll change the links), but does anyone have any advice on how to let search engines know the new domain replaces the old without having the ability to do redirects? The content on the site is exactly the same - we were able to get the files over, happily. I've re-submitted the site for indexing, changed the domain links in Moz Local, changed in Analytics, and on all their social sites. Is there anything I'm not thinking of that can be done to let Google know that this new domain replaces the old? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newwhy0 -
Multiple 301 Redirect Query
Hello all, I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues. I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago. We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's. Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
301 vs 302
We recently launched a redesign and I noticed from running a crawl using Screaming Frog SEO that our redirects are all being seen as 302. I know 302 is a temporary redirect, but does this hurt SEO rankings when all our redirects are being seen as 302s instead of 301s? Also, the way I implemented the redirects was by using the IIS Manager Tool. Is it possible that our IIS Manager Tool is not configured properly and instead of adding the redirect as 301, it is inserting it into the rewrite file as 302s?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec0 -
Domain and Sitemap Question
Hi - I am hoping you can help me with this issue we are currently trying to solve. We are hosting our mobile site's content on a different domain than what the URL of the site is, though owned by same company. In Google Webmasters tool we have the mobile sitemap under "sitemaps.xyz.com", however the URL of the site is "m.xyz.com". We have submitted 60MM pages in the mobile sitemap, but only 1MM pages have been indexed. Do you think this set up causes confusion with the bots? Does this affect the crawlability of the site? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ladylana
Eva0 -
301 redirect from one domain to other domain, How To?
Hi, I need to redirect 150 products pages from http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ to http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/ How can I do this? Is there a tool or anything I can do to do 301 from one domain to another one? Can I use Google Webmaster Tool? Thank you, BigBlaze
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Canonical Related question
I have a site where we have search and result pages, google webmaster tool was giving me duplicate content error for page 1 / 2 / 3 etc etc so i have added canonical on these pages like http://www.business2sell.com/businesses/california/ Is this is correct way of using canonical ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | manish_khanna0 -
Explaining 301 redirects instead of 302
I am trying to explain in layman's terms to a client why using 302 for their redirects (which they have done themselves) is not right. There view is they do not seem to listen or believe what is being said to them and do not want to do permanent damage to the old domain so are using 302 redirects. I have explained over and over 301 is needed but I do not seem to be good at communicating this. Can someone give me a good example or description I can use to get my point across?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0
