How to retain link juice moving to new site, cms and servers?
-
We have been hosting our website with a provider (their design and CMS) and we are now moving to a new design, better content focussing on keywords in a different CMS platform on different servers but want to retain the link juice from the old site.
We have used Open Site Explorer Report to determine all the links to the old site and the pages they link to.
What is the best strategy to keep the link juice flowing to the new site?
Example
This site <http: www.dogslifedownunder.com="" what-is-worse-then-going-to-the-v-e-t="">links to this page <http: 19105="" www.sydneyanimalhospitals.com.au="" ourstaff="" thevets="" tabid="" default.aspx="">on the old site.</http:></http:>
We will have a similar page on the new site with the same staff members called for example:
How do we ensure that the we retain the link juice?
Any thoughts most welcome.
-
Pleasure buddy, hope it helps!
-
Thanks Marcus. Appreciate your input and suggestions. Most helpful.
-
Hey, the basic answer here is with HTTP 301 redirections from the original pages to the new page.
Rather than just knowing the cryptic name it helps to understand what is going on behind the scenes a little and why this works. When a page is requested on your site the web server returns a HTTP status code. For a standard page request this is 200 OK and for missing pages a 400 Page Not Found response is returned. There are many other responses but the one we are interested in is for indicating a permanent redirection from the resource on Site A to a resource on Site B and this is a 301 Permanent Redirection.
This provides a range of benefits for users and the search engines
- a user visiting the old site from a search engine result listing is transported to the new resource
- a search engine visiting the link is informed that this resource has moved to a new location and the new page is given
- the page rank and value from any inbound links is forwarded to the new page (not all but most)
So, in this case the 301 redirect provides a complete solution to your problem. It updates and redirects users without requiring anything from them and it allows the search engine to update their records and start concentrating on your new site.
Note
There are a few things to take into consideration here to make sure this works well
- You need to manually redirect page A to page B so there maybe a fair bit of work involved for a larger site
- The redirections may need to be in place for a good while and if you generate a lot of direct traffic - keep an eye on the indexation and web logs for the old site to decide when you can kill it dead
Ultimately, you want the old site to remain in place, redirecting requests until it no longer receives any traffic (or such a low level that it is practical to remove it). If you do get a lot of direct traffic, be sure to update people so they can update their records.
Approach
Which brings us to the technology and approach required. I see you are using .Net aspx pages which is not really my bag but I can give you an overview of the options. You also seem to have wildly different page rules so a cute solution that just dynamically changes the domain but keeps the page the same is not going to work here (sorry).
- Page Level Redirects: add code to the individual pages to redirect to the new page
- Add redirection rules to the global.asax config file
- Create rewrites in the IIS GUI
Beyond the rewrites
An oft overlooked strategy with 301's is to get them done and then really concentrate on the new site. Start building links, try to repoint some of your high quality older links to the new site and start building and promoting new content to get some really high quality links to the new site. All of these strategies will bolster the new site and help it replace the old site as quickly as possible.
Summary
If you have a big site, manually rewriting all the URL's to the their counterparts on the new site is going to be a bit of a job but one that is worth doing. If you want to prioritise the job look at your most popular pages in your analytics and this gives you a plan of attack. Once you have created specific rules for this you can create a catch all rule to redirect all remaining pages to the sites homepage.
That, pretty much covers it. If we have a windows server / IIS / asp.net guru here who can dive in and fill you in on the specifics of the actual syntax and approach then you should be good to go.
Shout if you have any questions.
Marcus
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
-
Lost 86% of traffic after moving old static site to WordPress
I hired a company to convert an old static website www.rawfoodexplained.com with about 1200 pages of content to WordPress. Four days after launch it lost almost 90% of traffic. It was getting over 60,000 uniques while nobody touched the site for several years. It’s been 21 days since the WordPress launch. I read a lot of stuff prior to moving it (including Moz's case study) and I was expecting to lose in short term 30% of traffic max… I don’t understand what is wrong. The internal link structure is the same, every url is 301 to the same url only without[dot]html (ie www.rawfoodexplained.com/science.html is 301′s to http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/science/ ), it’s added to Google Webmaster tool and Google indexed the new pages… Any ideas what could be possible wrong? I do understand the website is not optimized (meta descriptions etc, but it wasn't before either) .... Do you think putting back the old site would recover the traffic? I would appreciate any thoughts Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JakubH0 -
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 -
Migrating a site from a standalone site to a subdivision of large .gov.uk site
The scenario We’ve been asked by a client, a Non-Government Organisation who are being absorbed by a larger government ministry, for help with the SEO of their site. They will be going from a reasonably large standalone site to a small sub-directory on a high authority government site and they want some input on how best to maintain their rankings. They will be going from the Number 1 ranked site in their niche (current site domainRank 59) to being a sub directory on a domainRank 100 site). The current site will remain, but as a members only resource, behind a paywall. I’ve been checking to see the impact that it had on a related site, but that one has put a catch all 302 redirect on it’s pages so is losing the benefit of a it’s historical authority. My thoughts Robust 301 redirect set up to pass as much benefit as possible to the new pages. Focus on rewriting content to promote most effective keywords – would suggest testing of titles, meta descriptions etc but not sure how often they will be able to edit the new site. ‘We have moved’ messaging going out to webmasters of existing linking sites to try to encourage as much revision of linking as possible. Development of link-bait to try and get the new pages seen. Am I going about this the right way? Thanks in advance. Phil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smrs-digital0 -
Brand new domain with a lot of old links.
So I just bought http://penny-auctions.co/ a couple of days ago, ignore the fact it's not set up yet and generally just a mess, and something kept bugging me about why the domain authority kept showing as 25 in the SEOmoz toolbar. Now initially I'd set it up as www. and with the trailing slash so the PA was 1, however after a bit of exploration it seems that someone has been building links to the non-www version of the domain for at least a year! The site has never been owned before so I've now made the non-www version the default and have a 5 day old site with PA 35 and DA 25! SEOmoz shows PA - 45 links, 20 domains and DA - 341 links, 113 domains. Majestic Historic - 8598 links, 236 domains and Fresh - 160 links, 62 domains. Brilliant! Except they're all spamtastic. What do you think this will do for my future attempts at ranking? Should I create pages that have links to them or just 301 them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StalkerB0 -
Where would the SEO juice go if I have a wordpress site hosted by godaddy?
I am planning on moving my website to a wordpress that is hosted by godaddy. I am wondering where the SEO juice that my website has already gained would go. Would it go to godaddy when I make the move instead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SierraPCB0 -
How to remove bad link to your site?
Hello, Our website www.footballshirtblog.co.uk recently suffered a major Google penalty, wiping out 6 months of hard work. We went from getting 6000-10000 hits a day to absolutely nothing from Google. We have been baffled by the penalty as we couldn't think of anything we've done wrong. After some analysis of Open Site Explorer, it seems I may have found the answer. There is a ton of bad links pointing to us. A few example domains are: ru.gg/ gogopzh.com/ 0575bbs.com/ This is nothing to do with us and so I can only assume some competitor has done this. As we were only about 4-5 months old, I guess Google has punished us. What do we do now? This is not a situation I have experienced before and would really appreciate your expert advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
Strategies to compete with a new domain/site
Hi all, What would be ( highlights ) your strategy in order to rank and compete with a new domain against competitors that have an average of 50% domain authority and around 2000 root domain linking to them, if you would start with a completely new website/domain? How long would you estimate the new site to be competitive? In the retail area. Working on it a month full time I would go with On page SEO off course, detailling each products and building the internal link structure Get back links, backlinks, backlinks and... backlinks... Build the social media network feed a blog Thanks for your input Considering working on the site for a month full time, I would estimate a ranking after a month or 2 although the competitions very high. Your thoughts ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Derek_A0 -
Will Linking To "Offical Sites" Increase My SEO?
I own a movie trailer website. (Where you can watch movie trailers) Will having links on each page that are for "offical website" of each movie, increase my SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster0