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
-
Pages that did NOT 301 redirect to the new site
Hi, Is there a tool out there that can tell me what pages did NOT 301 redirect to the new sites? I need something rather than going into google.com and typing in site:oldsite.com to see if it's still indexed and if it's not 301 redirecting.. I'm not sure if screaming frog can do that. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
301 or Canonical - Ecommerce Site Question
We are making a change to our Navigation and this includes having to change the URL structure of a few pages of our site. Due to issues with the CMS (that are out of my control) we are unable to keep the current URL structure of two of our highest ranking pages. Our site is an E-commerce Site The Structure is changing from..... www.domain.com/page/highrankingpage <----OLD PAGE RANKED WELL to www.domain.com/category/highrankingpage <----NEW PAGE Generally I would have 301 'd this page but I found out that our Tech team added a Canonical to this page instead....(showing the high ranking page to the Search Engines) and on our site the visitors are able to browse the website getting the new page. BOTH PAGES ARE BASICALLY IDENTICAL (Same Content) http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical# Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMcMullen0 -
301 and Canonical - is using both counterproductive
A site lost a great deal of traffic in July, which appears to be from an algorithmic penalty, and hasn't recovered yet. It appears several updates were made to their system just before the drop in organic results. One of the issues noticed was that both uppercase and lowercase urls existed. Example urls are: www.domain.com/product123
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK717
www.domain.com/Product123 To clean this up, a 301 redirect was implemented a few months ago. Another issue found was that many product related urls had a parameter added to the url for a tracking purpose. To clean this up, the tracking parameters were removed from the system and a canonical tag was implemented as these pages were also found in Google's index. The tag forced a page such as www.domain.com/product123?ref=topnav to be picked up as www.domain.com/product123. So now, there is a 301 to address the upper and lowercase urls and a canonical tag to address the parameters from creating more unnecessary urls. A few questions here: -Is this redunant and can cause confusion to the serps to have both a canonical and 301 redirect on the same page? -Both the 301 and canonical tag were implemented several months ago, yet Google's index is still showing them. Do these have to be manually removed with GWT individually since they are not in a subfolder or directory? Looking forward to your opinions.0 -
301 Redirection problems
A couple of days ago we did a restructure of our e-commerce site (wordpress + woocomerce) where some product categories needed to change names. I used Yoast SEO plugin to do 301 redirects in the .htaccess file.Today I noticed that we had two hits in the SERP on the phrase "dildos med vibrator". See the attached screenshot (first two results).One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibrator/ which is the right URL. One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildosdildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ which is a corrupt URL that has never been in use. The old one we did a redirect from was /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/The command in the .htaccess file was: Redirect 301 /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibratorWhat has happened here? Why does the 301 create entirely new URL:s in the SERP?Tz0TULT.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
404 ? 301 ? What is your opinion ?
Hi, I have a classifieds website and I am wondering about the life of a page with an ad. An announcement has therefore a limited life, so : Is a 404 pages? a 301 redirect to the section? let the content without redirection? What is your opinion? Sorry for my english, i'm french 😉 Thanks. A.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon0 -
301 canonical'd pages?
I have an ecommerce site with many different URLs with the same product. Let's say the product is a hat. It's in: a a) mysite.com/products/hat b) mysite.com/collections/head-ware/hat c) mysite.com/collections/stuff-to-wear-on-your-head/hat Right now, A is the canonical page for B and C. I want to clean up my site, so that every product only has ONE unique URL, which is linked to from all the collections. So B and C URL will be broken. Is it necessary that I 301 them if they were already canonical'd? Based on the number of products I have, I would have to 301 1000+ URLs. I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do to avoid getting penalized. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0 -
How does Google treat chained 301 redirects?
I did the following two chained 301 redirects (A->B->C) Plural to Singular to New Domain A. http://domain1.com/filenames B. http://domain1.com/filename C. http://domain2.com/filename To new domain without www and then back to origining domain A. http://www.domain1.com/filename B. http://domain2.com/filename C. http://domain1.com/fifilename How much link juicy will be rediectetoto URL C in above two scenarios?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bull1350 -
301 vs. 404
If a listing on a website is no longer available to display is it better to resolve to a 301 redirect or use a 404? I know from an SEO point of view a 301 will pass on the link value, but is that as valuable as saying tto the user hey that page is no lonoger available try something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0