Type of redirect?
-
I'm almost ready to launch a website redesign. We are going to move what's currently being hosted on olddomain.com to newdomain.com. We want to do this early to avoid error and to have olddomain.com redirect to newdomain.com until the new content is ready.
Once the redesign is complete, we'll push the new content to olddomain.com (as it holds a higher SEO value) and take away the redirect.
A. Does this sound like a good idea?
B. What kind of redirect should I use? 302? 307?
Thanks, and sorry for the confusion
-
The 301 cancellation itself is immediate. It may take time for search engines to crawl your site and notice the change on any given page.
-
How long does it take to cancle the 301?
I had a 301, I just canceled it & uploaded my new content.
-
If you needed to proceed with your plan, then a 302 allows you to redirect traffic for a short period such as what you are describing. I would define "short" as being 7 days or less.
If you are going to move for 30 days or more, I would use a 301 redirect. Once the upgrade is complete, cancel the 301 and send your traffic back.
-
I get why you're confused -- it lies with the presence of our old site and the permissions we have to change content.
So we're not just taking the site down for maintenance upon completion -- we're pointing the domain to a different server (both domains will be pointing to different places). The main question for me is how to do this smoothly?
But, mostly I just needed confirmation that the developer's idea wasn't the best one and reading your responses has helped me understand this a bit better.
-
I am still a bit confused.
You are currently using olddomain.com. You wish to upgrade the site.
You have beta.olddomain.com. You perform your development work on beta.olddomain.com while your live site continues to receive traffic.
Upon completion of development you would take "olddomain.com" down for maintenance. You update the site with the changes from the beta site, then you re-open the site and are live.
The above method represents the stand process under which most sites are upgraded. What you are describing sounds more like what happens in the offline world. You own an office which needs to be remodeled. You then move to a temporary office because the construction workers require access to your old office to make the changes. That method is not required in the virtual world.
-
You're correct in the direction things need to go.
The point isn't to preserve link juice in 2 ways -- it's to maintain a domain that we've had for years and that has tons of links pointing to it.
Pretty confusing stuff if you ask me.
-
We want to use olddomain.com because we've had it for years, our customers know it, and we have tons of links pointing to it. We set up beta.olddomain.com for testing.
The only reason we even need newdomain.com is because our old site was mandated to us by the manufacturer and we need to keep it per their rules. We don't care about that site at all though -- we just need to transfer it at the same time that we get the new content onto the old domain, does that make sense?
-
I agree with Dan's approach.
It sounds like you want to use your current "olddomain.com" as your development area. That doesn't make sense to me. If you use your "newdomain.com" site for development, then when you are ready upgrade/switch your current domain with the newly re-designed content, you wont need to use any form of redirect. It's less work for you and search engines.
-
so your saying that:
beta.olddomain.com will go to: olddomain.com
existing content at olddomain.com will go to newdomain.comif that's correct it may be a bit over my head. perhaps someone else can chime in?
it sounds like you are trying to preserve link juice two ways, which i don't think you can do . perhaps a staggered launch that will allow the 301 to redirect the content, and then a relaunch via the beta content later (no 301s)?
-
Hi Dan, thanks for the response.
I agree that it sounds risky, that's why I posted here It was the route my developer suggested.
The site is being developed on a local server but we also have a subdomain set up (beta.olddomain.com). We'll be using the same domain, but the content that used to be there will be going to a new domain because it is a website that was mandated to us by our corporate manufacturer.
We have already planned to set up the 301 redirects from our old urls to the new ones. The main concern I have is the transfer of the new content to the old domain (from beta.olddomain.com to olddomain.com). Do you have any suggestions for a smooth transition in this regard?
-
hi Kyle,
all the domain forwarding sounds kind of dangerous to me.i've done a few site redesigns and can offer the following advice:
1.) if it ain't broke, don't move it.2.) if you can develop your new site via a local server, or a cheap host (set up a pw so only you can see it while you develop), i would do that. again, just moving domains seems risky.
301 redirects communicate to the search engines that you are permanently redirecting your content to your new site. you want to consider doing a 301 for ALL content/urls. this will help preserve rankings. a lot of times you can use a program like rewrite to handle this if you have tons of urls.
your best bet is to get all your "new" content ready to go, live, and then 301 redirect to it at your new domain. if that is happening on THE SAME domain (old content -> new content ; same domain), you want to 301 redirect your old url's to their equivalent new urls.
hope that helps! :>)
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
-
Do I need to 301 redirect www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com/ ?
So, interestingly enough, the Moz crawler picked up my index.html file (homepage) and reported duplicate content, of course. But, Google hasn't seemed to index the www.domain.com/index.html version of my homepage, just the www.domain.com version. However, it looks like I do have links going specifically to www.domain.com/index.html and I want to make sure those are getting counted towards my overall domain strength. Is it necessary to 301 redirect in the scenario described above?
Web Design | | Small_Business_SEO0 -
Redirects Not Working / Issue with Duplicate Page Titles
Hi all We are being penalised on Webmaster Tools and Crawl Diagnostics for duplicate page titles and I'm not sure how to fix it.We recently switched from HTTP to HTTPS, but when we first switched over, we accidentally set a permanent redirect from HTTPS to HTTP for a week or so(!).We now have a permanent redirect going the other way, HTTP to HTTPS, and we also have canonical tags in place to redirect to HTTPS.Unfortunately, it seems that because of this short time with the permanent redirect the wrong way round, Google is confused as sees our http and https sites as duplicate content.Is there any way to get Google to recognise this new (correct) permanent redirect and completely forget the old (incorrect) one?Any ideas welcome!
Web Design | | HireSpace0 -
Is it necessary to Remove 301 redirects from Wordpress after removing the 404 url from Google Webmaster?
There were many 404 urls in my site found by Google Webmaster. I've redirected these urls to the relevant urls with 301 redirect in wordpress. After that I removed these 404 urls from Google Index through Webmaster. "Should I cleanup these 301 redirects from Wordpress or not? ". Help Needed.
Web Design | | SangeetaC0 -
Help with redirects
Our travel company used to maintain a set of country destination guides on our site, under the www.oursite.com/destinations/country folder path. Because we offer tours all over the world, we used these pages as high-level guides to each country so a prospect could get a sense of the highlights of those destinations. These pages operated as landing pages too. Unfortunately the pages became stale and unfocused, and we decommissioned them. In order to bring them down, we put a 301 redirect on these URLs, pointing them to a faceted-search page that showed all of our tours to that country, with URLs: www.oursite.com/trips/country. These faceted-search pages were pulling double duty as both search pages and landing pages, which isn't ideal (from a users perspective). We are now in the process of redoing our search function and we'll need to move the search URLs off /trips/ and onto /search/. Within this transition, we are going to re-launch destination guides, and I think the best place for them will be back on the old /destinations/ subfolder. So, a few moving parts here. My question: Do you see problems with reversing the redirect path completely? Ie. where we currently redirect /destinations/country to /trips/country, we are now proposing to redirect /trips/country to /destinations/country. Our concern in this equation is that, over the last few years, we've built up significant link volumes and equity to the /trips/ pages, and we don't want to lose that.
Web Design | | Adventures0 -
HTTPS redirecting to subdomain; do I need to 301 to HTTP first?
Hello there, quick question on HTTPS downgrade to HTTP. Originally, full site was HTTPS. Redesign eliminated need for secure layer. Site currently has https 301'd to sub.domain.com. Ideally, site would live at domain.com, but with the old site having been indexed https, the security warning triggers when you visit, hence the 301 to a subdomain. Thinking possible solutions here are to a) add back in secure layer or b) 301 all old https pages to new http pages. Have I overlooked something? With (a), I will see no SEO impact, correct? With (b), can I expect impact similar to a relaunch? Have seen a lot of chatter that there is some impact in switching http to https, but not much the other way. Any help much appreciated!
Web Design | | alimo0 -
301 redirect on Windows IIS. HELP! (Part 2)
My webmaster's trying (but struggling) to 301-redirect the non.www version of my site to the www version. He's following these instructions given to me in a response to an SEOMoz Private Question (ah, the good old days!). So far he's 301-redirected the homepage but seems stuck on how to do the entire site. Any clues on what he should be doing?
Web Design | | Jeepster0 -
Random 302 Redirect (Wordpress CMS)
So this new project that i am working on is a redesigned CMS site using Wordpress (php based). Before i started on the project they made a few major updates that include: Changed from ID based URLS to SEO friendly URLS Added multiple languages in directories www.domain.com/en www.domain.com/fr www.domain.com/de etc... Due to the new languages they wanted to have the previous home page, www.domain.com, redirect to the proper language based on their IP address. Currently they are using a 301 redirect through a php header. So if i was visiting the site from my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio and i type www.domain.com into the browser. I would automatically redirect to www.domain.com/en and i would have the option to switch languages if needed. The issue: When i first added their site into SEOMoz the crawl returned a large amount of 302 redirects coming from their old homepage www.domain.com. So i took a look at the header calls using IE's webmaster tools and Firebug in Firefox. In both profilers it showed the same problem. Before the 301 header redirect there was a 302 redirect called first When viewing the response header it mentioned an x-pingback of some file that didn't even exist on the site: www.domain.com/xmlrpc.php This is obviously a huge issue because any link value from the old homepage will be lost due to the 302 not passing the value. I have tried search the almighty Google for help but it has gotten me no where. I have a hunch it is something to do with Wordpress but that is based on nothing but my gut. Any help is greatly appreciated. I got to get that 302 gone or changed to a 301 🙂 Regards - Kyle
Web Design | | kchandler0