301 redirects - an ongoing argument in our agency
-
ok fellow marketers. we have an on-going argument in our office regarding 301 redirects. for seo best practices, should a 301 be done at the registrar level or in the htaccess file. We have arguments going both ways and I'd love to hear what everyone has to say about it.
Thanks, Stephan
-
Redirecting at the registrar level doesn't allow you to redirect individual pages, only entire domains. In some cases, that's not an issue but if you're redirecting a site that has back links pointing at internal pages by redirecting the entire domain, then you are foregoing a lot of the value of those back links. Redirects on the host can let you redirect one specific internal URL to another specific internal URL and keep much of the value of the links pointing at the old URL.
-
Stephan,
When it comes to redirects, as long as the server returns a 301 Permanent Redirect when a page is requested, it doesn't matter absolutely whatsoever when it comes to SEO and rankings.
There are other considerations, though. If it's done at the registrar level, then it will inevitably lighten the load on the server. But, you generally won't notice a difference unless there's a large amount of traffic and a LOT of redirects involved (thousands of redirects, not just a few).
-
It's the same thing! Both result in a 301 redirect...
The only difference is probably a little faster at the registrar level (unnoticeable), and the need of a server for the htaccess option. Besides that, there are no SEO benefits on any.
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
-
301 Redirects from example.com to store.example.com and then removing store.example.com subdomain
Hi I'm trying to wrap my head around the best approach for migrating our website. We're migrating from our example.com (joomla) site to our existing store.example.com (shopify) site... with the plan to finish the redirects/migration then remove the subdomain from shopify and use example.com moving forward. I've never done this and asking here to see if any harm will come from re-directing example.com URLs to store.example.com URL's then changing the store.example.com URL's to example.com. Right now my plan would run like this: redirect example.com URL's to store.example.com remove subdomain on store.example.com use example.com moving forward. wonder what happens next? Is there going to be any issues here, possible harm to the URL's?
Technical SEO | | Minarets0 -
Ranking for non-existing content which is 301 redirected
Hey there, In the beginning of this year I've made complete site migration from Dutch language to English. All the old Dutch URL's were 301 redirected to the English versions. I naturally lost rankings for all Dutch keywords during the next month. On the website there is no Dutch content anymore. But what happened now is that five months later the website started to rank for the Dutch keywords again. The page snippets in SERP are in English but the URL's shown are in Dutch (ending with .nl) and whenever a user clicks on the snippet he/she gets 301 to the correct English version. Any ideas what could be the reason for re-ranking of non-existing pages which gets 301 in SERP?
Technical SEO | | benesmartin0 -
Questions about the Sandbox and 301 Redirects
Does the sandbox still exist? What if you have a brand new URL and do a 301 redirect from another website because the name of the service business changed? Thanks for any insight and help.
Technical SEO | | SDSLaw0 -
Should we 301 redirect our old domain to the new domain
We have a product that when started was under the domain appnowgo.com. We've since changed the name and the domain is now knackhq.com. The latter domain doesn't rank nearly as well as the former for many of the keywords we are targeting. For example... "online database builder" and "web app builder" are two of those keywords. Obviously having app in the domain is not a bad thing but it is our old name. The question is, should we 301 the appnowgo.com domain to knackhq.com? Or should we use that better rank and just link users to knackhq.com from the appnowgo.com site until we can increase our ranking for knackhq.com? We don't plan to update the content on appnowgo.com anymore and we obviously don't want to drop off rank if at all possible. Thanks! Eric
Technical SEO | | sitestrux0 -
Is Buying Domains Good For SEO? Can I 301 redirect domains to an Original website?
I have a friend that purchased multiple domains related to their website. Each of these domains have the back ground of the original website and irrelevant content on them. Is is possible to redirect the various domains to certain pages on the original website. For example if the website is www.shoes.com and they purchased domains such as www.leathermensshoes.com and a few others related to the website. Is it SEO friendly to link the domains purchased to the original website?
Technical SEO | | TSpike10 -
Redirects 301
Hello, I need to reedirect a URL of a page that I have in my site (http://digitaldiscovery.com.pt/servicos-de-marketing-digital/publicidade-online/) to a new URL with SEO porpuses. Whats the best way to this? I use Wordpress btw. Tks in advance! PP
Technical SEO | | PedroM0 -
I think I'm stuck in a 301 redirect loop
Hi all, I'm trying to correct some of my duplicate content errors. The site is built on Miva Merchant and the storefront page, /SFNT.html, needs to be permanently redirected to www.mydomain.com This is what my .htaccess file looks like: #RedirectPermanent /index.html http://dev.mydomain.com/mm5/merchant.mvc? RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^dev.mydomain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://dev.emydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301] DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php /mm5/merchant.mvc redirect 301 /SFNT.html http://dev.mydomain.com/ RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Screen=SFNT&Store_Code=MYSTORECODE [NC] When I use this code and navigate to http://dev.mydomain.com/SFNT.html the URL gets rewritten as http://dev.mydomain.com/?Screen=SFNT So I believe this is what's called a "redirect loop".... Can anyone provide any insight? I'm not a developer, but have been tasked with cleaning up the problems on the website and can use any input anyone is willing to offer. Thanks, jr
Technical SEO | | Technical_Contact0 -
301 redirects for individual products - should I keep the old ones?
Hello We are just now starting up a niche site that will be the new home for a large group of products from an old site. Apart from straight up informative text links, we have set up 301 redirects for the 100 most important products from the old to the new site. Right now, we are in a transition period where we openly tell our visitors that we have a new site for this certain group of products. My question is: for how long should we keep the products on the old site? Can we remove them straight away, since our intentions of the 301 redirects is to preserve the serp positions for the most important products? Does it matter to google if we let the products remain on the old site for a while? Regards
Technical SEO | | jsigwid
Oskar0