Redirecting a blog
-
We've acquired another company and want to redirect their soon-to-be-obsolete website to ours.
It includes a blog with many blog posts. Should we:
only 301 redirect the top level blog URL
try redirect individual blogs to blogs of a similar topic on our site (least practical I'm sure)
redirect all their individual posts to our main blog URLThanks, Caro
-
Thanks for the nudge Matt,
We're in the process of working on the redirects now...and checking GA results based on Matt-Williamson's feedback.
~Caro
-
Hi Caro!
We'd love an update on this. Have any of the responses helped? And if so, would you mind marking one or more as a "Good Answer?"
Thanks!
-
Hi Caro
Just before I directly answer your question can I ask whether you have done a backlink audit on their site? If not I would strongly advice it in order to make sure they don't have any penalties or links you don't want associating with your site. I like to work this way, yes it does take longer but you are going into it with your eyes wide open and avoiding any issues down the line, which will inevitably take up even more time trying to rectify. I would recommend further reading on the following:
Link Audit - http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207168/how-to-conduct-a-link-audit
Link Removals & Risk Mitigation - https://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation
As the others have already said I would look to redirect individual URLs to similar corresponding URLs on your site in order to get the best from this. As we know 301 redirects pass authority from the original URL to the new one.
However I would also take this one step further and look at the Google Analytics and Google Search Console Search Analytics Report for the other companies site if you have access to it and I would look at the most popular pages in terms of organic traffic. I would also look to analyse current rankings for that site and see if it is out ranking any of the corresponding content on your site. If so I would look to use it to improve my own content and then still do the 301 redirect. I have done this in the past and when moving across a popular blog from one site to yours I would look and see what are the most popular posts in terms of organic traffic as mentioned above but also other factors such as social interaction (I find https://socialcrawlytics.com/ ) and referrals. Then if my current site that I am redirecting too doesn't have some content that is on the same subject and very close in nature and popular I would look to migrate the content itself to a new post with the same content and then 301 redirect the original to that new piece.
Too many times you see people rushing this and just blanket redirecting things, however they forget that 1. you need to redirect to similar content to get the most benefit as a redirect is essentially telling the search engines the content has moved to a new location and 2 you won't always get close matches so why not take that content and publish it on yours if it is already working rather than trying to fit it somewhere it doesn't (basically don't force a square peg in a round hole).
Obviously I don't know how strong the site you want to redirect is but taking time over this now will pay dividends.
Hope this helps!
Matt
-
What you'll want to do is crawl the other site--and make note of all of the URLs. Then, 301 redirecting each page to the most appropriate page on the main site.
We usually recommend using a spreadsheet and making a list of the old URLs in one column and then listing the page it will redirect to next to it, in another column. That will make it easy to set up the 301 redirects in the .htaccess file on the site or put them into a redirect plugin.
There will be pages that you can't find another equivalent page on the new site--so you should 301 redirect those to the site's home page.
-
The redirects should always be to the most similar content on your site. The reason being is when the old site is being crawled by the search engine spider they will encounter the 301 permanent redirect and replace the index with the new url the redirect points to. So if you point all the links to irrelevant content you may loose ranking. The point of the 301 permanent redirect is to carry link juice over to the new urls.
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
-
Schema redirects for https migration
Hi, we are migrating our website to https. We have a lot of 301s in htaccess that we need to keep, changing the destiny to the https version of the site. At the same time, we need to make new 301 redirects from the http url´s to https url´s
Technical SEO | | unirmk
Our question is Could we combine this redirects in htaccess with a Schema redirect with 301 code? (Is it the same to use schema redirecs as using redirects in htaccess?) This would be the situation: Htaccess redirects: A http url ->301-> B http url -> (we change this in htaccess and use:)-> A http url ->301->B https url Schema redirect: B http url ->301-> B https url Thanks!0 -
One more redirect question
If there are two URLs like below: example.com/toys/batman-toys
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby
example.com/birthday/batman-toys Both have the exact same everything, except URL key. The first example ranks for all KWs and search terms in the SEs. Does having the second page hurt my ranking potential for the first page? Should I redirect the 2nd page to the first or just leave it? As always, thanks for your help.0 -
How does this rank? - a page that is 301 redirected
How does a 301ed page rank in google? In google I searched for" ikea.ca" which is set up as a 301 redirect to www.ikea.com/ca/en and was surprised to see the url --> www.ikea.ca actually ranking. IKEA Canada <cite>ikea.ca/</cite>IKEA Featuring Scandinavian modern style furniture and accessories. Include storage options, lighting, decor products, kitchen appliances and beds. Bedroom - Kitchen - Living Room - IKEA North York
Technical SEO | | Morris770 -
301 Redirecting weird URLs with % in them
I've been working on redirecting links reported as 404 in Google webmaster tools. I've stumbled upon 41 URLs that Google is reporting as 404 that include a '%' in the URL, but I don't know how to redirect. Here is an example: URL: bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ Attempted redirect: redirect 301 /bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ http://www.mysite.com/ Unfortunately, after implementing the redirect, http://www.mysite.com/bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ still resolves a 404 error. Anyone successfully fix these errors using Apache .htaccess?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
301 redirect issues
Hi all, I'm hoping someone will be able to help me with an extermley frustrating problem with 301 redirects in .htaccess. Basically I'm trying to redirect some old pages (from our old website) that stil rank to the new equivilent. For example - old url = www.domain.com/frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 New www.domain.com/news/article-title I've tried the simple redirect 301 /frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 http://www.domain.com/news/article-title But this doesnt work. I've also tried - RewriteEngine on
Technical SEO | | EclipseLegal
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^newsStoryID=395$
RewriteRule ^/news-reader.php$ http://www.domain.com/news/article-title/? [L,R=301] Could anyone help? I've followed lots of tutorials that all match the above but it just doesn't work! The only other thing within the htaccess file is from wordpress for pretty permalinks - BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Many thanks in advance!0 -
I Need advice in redirecting domains
I have tow domains (destination/town - travel websites), www.gansbaai.com, and www.danger-point-peninsula.co.za. The one, gansbaai.com is an old domain I bought under which I will be launching a new website in a couple of months. danger-point-peninsula.co.za, is another domain I acquired also about gansbaai, the area. I will we using the domain gansbaai.cm, but want to get the best link juice out of danger-point-peninsula. How do I merge the domains?
Technical SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
How should 301 redirects affect Page Authority?
We recently setting up 301 redirects from one of our sites so that the site redirects from the www version to the non-www version for all pages. We want to quantify what we expect to see as results. From what the experts say, we'd expect that the Page Authority of the canonical versio (non-www) will be higher than either of the two separate ones were previously. For instance, if this page - www.website.com/information/ - had a PA of 57 and this one - website.com/information/ - had a PA of 53, some time after the 301 redirects from www to non-www have been put into place, we should see the non-www version of that page move up to some PA about 57. It our thinking correct? How long does it normally take to see a PA update take place in a scenario like this? Thanks, Richard
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0 -
Domain Redirect Issues
Hi, I have a domain that is 10 years old, this is the old domain that used to be the website for the company. The company approximately 7 years ago was bought by another and purchased a new domain that is 7 years old. The company did not do a 301 redirect as they were not aware of the SEO implications. They continued building web applications on the old domain while using the new domain for all marketing and for business partner links. They just put in a server level redirect on the folders themselves to point to the new root. I am on Tomcat, I do not have the option of a 301 redirect as the web applications are all hard coded links (non-relative) (hundreds of thousands of dollars to recode) After beginning SEO; Google is seeing them as the same domain, and has replaced all results in Google with the old domain instead of the new one..... My questions is.... Is it better to take the hit and just put a robots.txt to disallow all robots on the old domain Or... Will that hurt my new domain as well since Google is seeing them as the same? Or.... Has Google already made the switch without a redirect to see these as the same and i should just continue on? (even the cache for the new site shows the old domain address) Old Domain= www.floridahealthcares.com New = www.fhcp.com *****Update after writing this I began changing index.htm to all non relative links so all links on the old domain homepage would point to fhcp.com fixing the issue of the entire site being replicated under the old domain. I think this might "Patch" my issue, but i would still love to get the opinion of others Thanks Shane
Technical SEO | | Jinx146780