What will happen after I 301 this domain?
-
A while back I created a new website. Somehow my "scratch" copies of the site got indexed even though I didn't have links built to them. (In the future I will use noindex tags when I am playing around with designing).
Now, I have three versions of the site online...let's call them TheRealSite.com and Practice1.com and Practice2.com. Practice1.com and Practice2.com now rank #1 for their main keyword. (It's a relatively uncompetitive niche). TheRealSite.com is somewhere lower than page 20 despite having an exact keyword match domain name. I'm assuming that Google considered it duplicate content as it is the exact same thing as Practice1 and 2.
I had considered simply removing Practice1 and 2 from the server, but I was worried that if I did that, I would lose my #1 rankings if TheRealSite didn't recover.
So, what I've done is 301 redirect Practice1 and Practice2 to TheRealSite. I'm guessing that over time TheRealSite will come back to #1 and then I can just remove the files from Practice1 and Practice2.
Is this the best way to handle this situation?
-
[EDIT] Previous answer deleted because I had a brain fart and thought you were answering a different question I asked this morning! LOL!
Yes, this WBF was very timely! It sounds like this is exactly what I need to do!
-
Today's Whiteboard Friday post addresses this situation: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday
Since you have identical content on each page and it's basically the same site you could rel=canonical the secondary sites to the original and you should see your original site gain the rankings, while keeping the old sites online for the time being.
Like the others said, just a small amount of link building should let the original site outrank the others.
Cheers,
Vinnie
-
Excellent thank you.
-
Ah, tricky situation. Well, if no links have been built to any of the domains and one is ranking at no.1 for this particular keyword, then it would lead me to assume that it would be very easy to get to no.1 for it with the other domain once you have a few incoming links for it.
Therefore, it would seem most logical to build some links for the domain you want to use, and do like you said with the 301 until the proper site domain hits no.1
-
The problem is that the domain name is not great. It's a complicated situation because this is a site that I built for a friend/client and it was a really difficult relationship. He's now very happy that his business is #1, but it comes up as "ABCWebdesign.com/businessname" as the URL.
His business is seasonal and right now is the busy season. So, right now my thought was to 301 redirect the ABCWebdesign.com/businessname site to the BusinessName.com site and then if the SERPS have not reversed in a few months I'll just remove the content from ABCWebdesign in the off season.
-
Okay yeah, if the domain name is okay for the one that's ranking you could just replace the existing site with the one you want then. I know there is still an exact match bonus for keyworded domains but it's far from the be-all and end-all if everything else is right. And there's plenty of talk of it being worth a lot less now.
Mind you, I've seen some contradicting stuff. On the one hand there's the fact it can improve CTR as people see the keywords they've searched in the domain, but on the other hand it can be seen by some as a bit spammy... although I have no idea what the ratio of the advantage vs disadvantage there would be.
There is a hell of a lot of abuse of exact match domains though so it wouldn't surprise me (and this is only my own humble opinion) if the value of them went down considerably sooner or later.
-
Thanks Steve. There are no links to either site right now.
-
Have you been link building to the practise sites? If not, don't bother with the 301's at all, just put the real site on to the practice domain that is ranking well (if you're okay with the domain name). Exact match domain isn't everything, and in some instances it can be seen as spammy. Exact match bonus is a lot less now than it was anyway.
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 redirect recovery
Hello Please understand that English is poor. I used to run a site called A This time, I am running a site called B. I need to set up a temporary 302 redirect from A to B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jinseok
I accidentally set a 301 redirect Site A has many spam links
For now I have removed the 301 redirect source to B. Will A's spam links affect site B?
For your reference, Site B is putting a lot of effort into SEO. Help me.0 -
Sub Domain Usage
I see that the gap uses gap.com, oldnavy.gap.com and bananarepublic.gap.com. Wouldn't a better approach for SEO to have oldnavy.com, bananarepublic.com and gap.com all separate? Is there any benefit to using the approach of store1.parentcompany.com, store2.parentcompany.com etc? What are the pros and cons to each?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kcb81780 -
Domain Authority... http://www.domain.com/ vs. http://domain.com vs. http://domain.com/
Hey Guys, Looking at Page Authority for my Site and ranking them in Decending Order, I see these 3 http://www.domain.com/ | Authority 62 http://domain.com | Authority 52 http://domain.com/ | Authority 52 Since the first one listed has the highest Authority, should I be using a 301 redirects on the lower ranking variations (which I understand how works) or should I be using rel="canonical" (which I don't really understand how it works) Also, if this is a problem that I should address, should we see a significant boost if fixed? Thanks ahead of time for anyone who can help a lost sailor who doesn't know how to sail and probably shouldn't have left shore in the first place. Cheers ZP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr_Snack0 -
Mass 301 redirect from a sub-domain - using Joomla or htaccess
How is best to mass redirect old domains - Listing the URL's in htaccess? We are looking to use Joomla as a CMS - transferring a blog from a sub-domain to the main site and want to 301 all the sub domain blog posts - any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
301 a page and then remove the 301
I have a real estate website that has a city hub page. All the homes for sale within a city are linked to from this hub page. Certain small cities may have one home on the market for a month and then not have any homes on the market for months or years. I call them "Ghost Cities". This problem happens across many cities at any point in time. The resulting city hub pages are left with little to no content. We are throwing around the idea of 301 redirecting these "Ghost City" pages to a page higher up in the hierarchy (Think state or county) until we get new homes for sale in the city. At that point we would remove the 301. Any thoughts on this strategy? Is it bad to turn 301s on and off like that? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisKolmar0