How long until 301 passes juice to new site?
-
We put up a new site for an attorney and changed his url along with total redevelopment. We used a 301 for the old to the new and it does resolve to the new. It has been one month and the old site in OSE still shows DA of 37 with PA for homepage of 15.
The new site has come up.....to a DA of 6 with homepage at 1 still. For any who might wish it, the referring site is theHollandLawFirm.com and the new site is Houston-Bankruptcy-Attorney.info.
Would love to know of any experience with the timing on this.
-
Ouch! Don't do that ... it hurts! (the kicking I mean)
Just 3 things that ever present significant issues that I am aware of
-
Most obvious is the time required to do it properly, which will depend how large the site is. If the page structure has changed significantly then you may need to point some redirects to a category page or something else relevant. I set up a simple excel file for the site with Old URL, Content, Category, Redirect URL, Redirect date and Check date. Once I've added the old URL and content info I then assign it to a category and Redirect URL, then use the list to set up the redirects. I generally spin through and do a manual check once the 301's are in place and use the check date column if there are a lot of pages and I need to come back and finish checking later.
-
I would also add a 404 catch-all just in case - all 404's go to home page or another appropriate page to make sure no old links are lost.
-
When choosing your redirect URL, think about the user and relevance - For example, if I click a link to buy an item which no longer exists, there is probably more chance I will look at another product if you send me to a store page full of products than send me to home.
Have fun!
Sha
-
-
Ahhhh, Sha Menz....I am now kicking myself. That is an excellent answer from an intuitive standpoint (and Matt Cutts too). Thanks for the assist, I will go back in and redirect page to page where it is relevant. Any issues I need to be aware of?
Thanks again,
-
Hi Robert,
Search engines seem unwilling to define a specific time period and of course that is reasonable as there are a number of factors that can affect the process.
Am I correct in assuming from your words "used a 301 for the old to the new" that you have used a blanket 301? (to the homepage for example)
If this is the case, I believe it is likely to take longer for search engines to recognize the change as a "move".
If you redirect specific pages on the old domain to relevant or matching pages on the new domain, search engines are more able to recognize that the pages have moved and over time transfer link juice and update indexes. Using a blanket 301 leaves a question mark for the search engine as to whether the old domain may simply be used for its SEO value to feed traffic to a page which may not be relevant to the end user.
Matt Cutts explains his reasoning for using specific page-to-page 301's to move a domain in this video (with a reminder that 301's happen at page level, not domain level).
I'm quite passionate about page-to-page 301's, which drives my Tech people a little nuts, BUT I just bite the bullet and do them myself nowadays. Although it can be a huge amount of work to do this correctly, my goal is to do it in the best way possible and to have some small measure of control over external factors wherever possible.
In the end, I am the person who will have to answer the client's questions about what is happening with the site because right or wrong, "SEO" seems to translate to "responsible for everything" :). I like to be able to tell my clients that we took the trouble to go the long way around something because it was better for them (and less likely to damage conversions on the new site).
Also - signalling the domain move in Webmaster Tools should help the process along, but I have seen several Googlers, including Matt Cutts qualify this as a "hint', so we shouldn't assume that it solves the problem. (BTW "Webmaster Tools" refers to both Google and Bing)
While this is not a definitive answer, hope it helps
Sha
-
Let me tell you this from what I seen. I just moved a website from /store/ to root about 3 weeks ago and google still has all of the OLD /store/ links in the search engines however all of the serp results have / in them. So it's like it didn't update its index for 3 weeks. I have never done anything like this before so I am wondering the same thing.
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
-
Our new site will be using static site generator which is supposed to be better for SEO?
Hi folks, Our dev team is planning on building our new marketing webpages on SSG or Static Site Generator(we are stepping away from SSR). Based on my research this is something that can help our SEO in particular for site speed (our site has a poor score).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl
Are there any challenges or concerns I should be aware regarding this direction? If so what are they and how can this be addressed? Thanks0 -
(Australia) Changing .net.au to .com.au - web dev is refusing to do a 301 redirect and wants to run two sites?
After years using a .net.au site, my client has purchased the .com.au version of the same domain. I've now set up a new, responsive website using a wordpress template with new content, but used a similar page structure. I've asked their web developer to now do a 301 permanent redirect on each old page from .net.au site to it's new .com.au page, but he has refused, saying it would be bad for long term SEO. Instead, he says they should run both sites (which I thought would cause duplicate content issues). Both domains are hosted with the same company. I thought as long as the 301 redirects were done on a page by page basis, there were no issues? I'm no SEO expert, (which he claims to be), so I just wanted to get another opinion on what best practice would be in this instance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | carolineraad0 -
New site, new URL, lots of custom content. Load it all or "trickle" it over time?
New site, new URL, lots of custom content. Load it all or "trickle" it over time? Would it make a difference in terms of ranking the site? Interested in your thoughts. Thanks! BBuck!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Should I start new domain and redirect site?
I recently my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) drop off a cliff. Google tells me there's no manual penalty therefore it might be algorithmic. I don't know why my rankings went but I think it could be that I added A LOT of category pages pulling the same content from posts and this could have caused both duplicate content issues and too many on page links causing an algo penalty. Ive deleted the categories and therefore fixed duplicate content issue (perhaps you guys could check out the site and see that you agree with me) but rankings have not improved even thougo most of the pages have been recrawled. I read somewhere its extremely hard to recover from such a penalty so should I move my site to a and domain and redirect all urls? I can't think of another solution. Any help appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
301 redirects
Hello, I want to ditch about 1000 pages of a 2000+ page site. I believe the 301 redirect thing is the way to go but my expertise is limited. Is there a way to do a blanket redirect ie if a user or search engine looks for a page thats not there it all gets redirected to the index page or do I have to do each one manually? Thanks Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
BIG CHANGE - 301 Main site to new domain
Hi Guys, Were wondering what to do about our main domain name, we were ranking quite high for our main keyword and before Christmas our site dropped to 10th and we have been there for a while - last week our site dropped again onto the second page. The worrying thing is now our main domain name is now ranking 1 place above another domain name that we don't really use but its an exact match domain name for our target keyword. This exact match domain has hardly any links pointing to it and it currently has a 22 domain authority. We are wondering if we 301 our main site to this exact match domain would it rank higher than the top of the 2nd page where we are now for our main domain. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW1 -
Dupicated Site Issues?
We are launching a new site for the Australian market and the URL will just be siteAU.com. Currently the tech team (before we came on board) has it setup with almost exactly the same content (including the site css/nav/structure etc). Some product page content is slightly different, and category pages have different product orders, plus there are location pages that are specific to AU, but otherwise it's the same. The original site: site.ca has been around for 6+ years, with several thousand pages and solid organic ranking (though the last few months have dropped ) Will the new AU site create issues for the original domain? We also have siteUSA.com which follows the same logic and has been live for a while.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMGSEO0