Redirect ot new domain
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Hello,
Can someone give me advice on this specific situation:
For now we have a website www.website.com/
Because of some specific business situation we want to move to .ca version but also we want to keep website.com - for U.S customers.
Here's how I imagined to do this:
301 Redirect from www.website.com to website.ca.
Because at this time website.com redirects to www.website.com I would remove the redirect and just keep it like website.com (so this will be new domain).
Is this is the right solution?
Regards,
Nenad
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Hi Tom, thank you very much for your answer and time! I explained to Patrick above which are the reasons for doing in this way.
I will have to find another way because this will obviously not work.
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Patrick thank you very much for your answer and time!
You are right that this can create bad user experience. The reason we want to do this is: we have strong www.website.com site that are ranking good in Canada (this is our main target).
Since we'll splitting our website into .com and .ca domain I was thinking that redirecting www.website.com to website.ca would be the best option (since the Canada is our primary target).
My only concern is what to do with .com domain. I know that subfolders with hreflang will be the best solution but we would like to have .com.and .ca as separate (we will use hreflang)
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Nenad
by dropping the www. & trying to have each domain indexed but tied together in the fashion you suggested will not work. Every domain must have a page 2 page 301 redirect ideally you should be using Hreflang too do what you're describing
http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/301-redirects/
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633
Redirect to another page
To redirect one page to another page:
Redirect /old-index.html http://www.mynewwebsite.com/foldername/new-index.html E.G. https://css-tricks.com/snippets/htaccess/301-redirects/check with
TOOLS
http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/
http://www.htaccessredirect.net/
https://websiteadvantage.com.au/HtAccess-301-Redirect-Generator
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I agree with Patrick we need more info
there's no way to run them side-by-side efficiently without using Hreflang
you will have to pick a www.or non-www.
domain
using a tool like https://www.deepcrawl.com/ is going to make this easy to check. You can do this many ways including via site maphttp://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php
http://www.internationalseomap.com/hreflang-tags-generator/
http://www.internationalseomap.com/
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/getting-a-better-understanding-of-hreflang/60468/Let's assume you were to pick website.com as your default
http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
By Geo targeting your subfolder e.g. /ca/ in Google Webmaster tools you can accomplish your goal that would look something like this.
If you end up choosing to 301 redirect your existing site to a new site make sure it is page to page not just redirecting the entire domain.
http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirectionI hope this helps and please inform me more about what you are actually planning on doing because it is kind of tough to guess.
All the best, Tom
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Hi Nenad
Without the background on this, this may be a little difficult to answer.
To make sure I am understanding your question, you are essentially saying...
Currently:
- website.com 301 redirects to www.website.com
- No website.ca
Future:
- Remove website.com 301 redirect to www.website.com
- www.website.com 301 redirect to www.website.ca
Is this correct? Without telling you what to do, my issue here is that you are creating a very confusing user experience - for one, you have a website.com showing one website, and a www.website.com redirecting to another website. If I somehow, as a user, end up typing in "www.website.com" (and yes, users still type in www., myself included) I get to a website that isn't meant for me. I am also not entirely sure it's possible from a technical standpoint (I will leave that to another user to answer).
If it were my site, I would leave the website.com redirect to www.website.com (as I am assuming you have built equity in that URL), I would then go to my Webmaster Tools, target that site for the United States and whoever else that site is meant for.
Then, I would build the www.website.ca and also go into Webmaster Tools and geotarget that for Canada and whoever else is supposed to see that site.
I would also consider using a prompt asking users if they want the United States site or the Canada site depending on their location, and also (depending on French-Canadian language users and if you were using the same content) look into hreflang - just something to think about.
My fear is you creating a bad experience for your users by way of unintended confusion. Think about your users first. It's just not a best practice at all what you're describing - from both a UX and technical perspective.
Hopefully this helps, let me know if there is something I am missing here as well.
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