Is there a way to forward banklink benefits from one domain to another without a redirect?
-
In this situation I have SiteA, and SiteB on completely separate domains. SiteA is the marketing front for the company and SiteB is an app that company owns. SiteB receives a fair amount of backlinks as it has the login page of the application where customers link to a branded version for their members to login. Additionally none of that domain is indexable including the login page. SiteB's domain can't be changed to be a subdomain of SiteA as it isn't technically feasible.
Initially I was reluctant to use canonical because as it isn't really duplicate content. Is there a method for forwarding any link-juice from SiteB to SiteA without the use of a redirect and would canonical be appropriate in this case? Additionally would SiteB's not being indexed negate any link benefit?
Edit: Typo
-
In this case where I'm unable to do any sort of 301 is there any other in-page options that might be a reliable way to forward link equity?
The other option is that I keep pressing to change the domain of the login page to a subdomain of the marketing site, which is unlikely at this point, but even in that case the subdomain would cause issues with link equity correct?
-
Yes it's highly likely the canonical would be ignored. Regardless, canonical tags are NOT commonly thought to pass SEO authority (only relevance and content duplication nullification)
-
Canonical tags avoid duplicate content and help to determine page relevance, but common current SEO thinking is that they do not pass link equity or SEO authority. If they do, it's not much - and not comparable to the power of a 'properly' set up 301 redirect
Even when you DO use 301 redirects, they can fail for loads of different reasons. One big reason is content similarity in machine terms (think Boolean string similarity, for the content of the old and new URLs)
If even the mighty 301 has so many stipulations where it can just 'stop working' (or never work in the first place) I'd be highly, highly skeptical that canonical tags would have the desired effect
-
Possibly as Google may ignore the canonical - however, if the money site is the one you are pointing to, it is worth doing. It does sound like a disconnect, as would expect both features to be on same site - assume a "buy now" - CTA and click onto a separate site has also been considered..
-
The two pages in question here don't contain the same content. SiteA is a marketing description and features of the product and SiteB would be a login page for that product. Would the lack of duplicate content cause an issue?
-
Identifying a canonical URL for each range of comparable URLs can enhance the SEO of both sites. This is as the search engine knows which version is canonical, so it can consider the links pointing at all the different versions as links to the canonical version.
Setting a canonical is similar in concept to a 301 redirect, only without actually redirecting.
So the best outcome based on the above query is canonical. I note that google on occasions does choose to ignore canonicals. But it sounds like your starting point.
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
-
Domain Level Redirects - HTTP and HTTPS
About 2 years ago (well before I started with the company), we did an http=>https migration. It was not done correctly. The http=>https redirect was never inserted into the .htaccess file. In essence, we have 2 websites. According to Google search console, we have 19,000 HTTP URLs indexed and 9,500 HTTPS URLs indexed. I've done a larger scale http=>https migration (60,000 SKUs), and our rankings dropped significantly for 6-8 weeks. We did this the right way, using sitemaps, and http and https GSC properties. Google came out recently and said that this type of rankings drop is normal for large sites. I need to set the appropriate expectations for management. Questions: How badly is the domain split affecting our rankings, if at all? Our rankings aren't bad, but I believe we are underperforming our backlink profile. Can we expect a net rankings gain when the smoke clears? There are a number of other technical SEO issues going on as well. How badly will our rankings drop (temporarily) and for how long when we add the redirect to the .htaccess file? Is there a way to mitigate the rankings impact? For example, only submitting partial sitemaps to our GSC http property? Has anyone gone through this before?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
Disavow without penalty
Hi fellow Mozians, I have come up with a doubt today which I would appreciate your thoughts on. I have always been convinced that the disavowal tool can be used at any time as part of your backlink monitoring activities- if you see a dodgy backlink coming in you should add it to your disavowal file if you can't get it removed (which you probably can't). That is to say that the disavowal tool can be used pre-emptively to make sure a dodgy link does do your site any harm. However, this belief of mine has taken a bit of a beating this morning as another SEO suggested that the disavowal tool only has en effect if acompanied by a reconsideratiosn request, and that you can only file a reconsideration request if you have some kind of manual action. This logic describes that you can only disavowal when you have a penalty. This theory was backed up by this moz article from May 2013:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk
https://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
The comments didnt do much to settle my doubts. This Mat Cutts video, from November 2013 seems to confirm my belief however:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRsc It seems perfectly reasonable that Google does allow pre-emptive disavowal-ing, not just because of the whole negative seo issue, but just because nasty links do happen naturally. Not all SEOs spend all their waking hours building links which they know they will have to disavowal later shoudl a penalty hit at some point, and it seems reasonable that an SEO should be able to say- "Link XYZ is nothing to do with me!" before Google excercises retribution. If, for example you get hired working for a company that HAD a penalty due to spammy link building in the past that has been lifted; but you see that Google periodically discovers the occasional spammy link it seems fair that you should be able to tell google that you want to voluntarily remove any "credit" that that link is giving you today, so as to avoid a penalty tomorrow. Your help would be much appreciated. Many thanks indeed. watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRsc0 -
Indexing and Resolving to One www.domain.com format
People can come to a site www.domain.com in these 6 different ways. http://www.domain.com, www.domain.com, http://domain.com, domain.com https://www.domain.com, https://domain.com Obviously we don't want google to maintain an index for any more than one of these. What is the way to handle this? 301 redirects for all to resolve to www.domain.com? Or is that overkill? Or 302 redirects? Seems like a pretty basic issue but I'm not finding simple answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Is there any ranking benefit to buying and redirecting high PageRank domains?
Hello, I'm interested in learning how to assume ownership of a site without Google resetting the PageRank and the links back to zero. I've read that buying sites is one of the most powerful SEO "shortcuts" you can employ, but can be tricky. I've heard that, unfortunately, buying an existing domain and 301 redirecting for SEO credit is not that simple. When the WHOIS registration information on the newly purchased domain is updated to reflect its transfer to you, the new owner, that domain will almost immediately be reset by Google to a PageRank=0. That's the standard practice when a domain changes hands. Since Google is a domain registrar, obviously, change of ownership information is readily available for their use in factoring it into their algorithms. If you decide to 301 redirect the new domain to another domain you already own, you will get credit for the site's current incoming link profile, at least in the short-term. However, this purchased domain will eventually reset to PR=0 (usually during the next PageRank update) AND you will then get no credit for all of those links post-transfer. What is your experience with buying and redirecting domains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
Aged domain and 301 redirect? (11 year old domain)
Hey everyone, I'm about to launch a new website for an accounting firm. They currently have a website, which has an 11 year old domain. They are doing very well locally for SEO, and i'm guessing it's because of the aged domain, as their website is very badly built, and contains almost no content. They would like to launch the new site with a simpler, easier to remember domain. If i launch the new site, point the aged domain using a 301 redirect, and do redirects for all of the old pages to the newer versions of them, is there a chance the company will lose their current SEO rankings? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCDesign740 -
Buying an existing domain with higher ranks for redirecting
I've recently came across one of my competitors who's looking to sell their domain. Now they currently rank higher than my primary site for a few keywords we are targeting. Would it be wise to buy the domain and do a name server change over to my primary domain? Would it even help boost ranks for the keywords they rank higher for? Or will the link juice be minimal? Any thoughts would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | upick-1623910 -
Multiple retail sites redirected to one
Recently our company has acquired several high ranking retail websites which sell only our brand of products. We are now considering consolidating all our online sales from these different retail sites to be direct to our main website. The question we have is how do we do this without negatively affecting SEO for these high ranking retail sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DennyGan0