How do I clean up this 301 disaster?
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I launched my site, InternetCE.com, and blog, www.continuingeducationjournal.com, a few years ago.
I then learned I should probably merge the content, and foolishly created a subdomain, http://blog.internetce.com, and 301 redirected the blog to it. As an aside, my site is on a microsoft server, thus cannot host my wordpress blog on it.
After a bit more study, I realized that my blog wasn't helping me nearly as much as it could be, so I 301'd it again to http://internetce.com/blog.
In just becoming a pro member (long overdue) I realize that my entire site needs to be 301'd to merge non-www and www versions.
I read somewhere that mr. cutts says not to 301 more than twice for fear of mistakenly being construed as something a bit to spammy.
So, here I sit..not sure what to do.
Does anyone have any advice on how to most efficiently correct this spaghetti bowl?
Many thanks!
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I completely agree with what Ryan Kent said. As with a lot of things, and even though it is a bit messy, if you are doing things for genuine reasons you are probably OK. If all of the redirected sites are pointing to where the content should be and now resides that is going to be OK, just make sure that you leave the 301's up there for a good amount of time (6 months or more).
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i agree with Ryan your problem is not so great, just replace all teh 301's to the new site in one hop, dont be lazy and 301 all to the home page, as Bing for one will dismiss them.
also if the pages have no links, then there is little to gain by 301ing them.
As for hosting word press on a Microsoft server, you certainly can. if you use the Web Platform Installer it will do it all for you.
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Hi Aaron.
Your situation is a bit messy, but actually it's not so bad.
Step 1 - implement a site wide www to non-www redirect (or vice-versa) on your InternetCE.com site.
Step 2 - update your 301 from the original site, www.continuingeducationjournal.com, to ensure the redirect happens in 1 hop.
Step 3 - update your 301 redirect from the blog subdomain (http://blog.internetce.com) to ensure the redirect happens in 1 hop.
Whenever possible all redirects should be a single hop. If a user bounces from your old blog to your subdomain, to your main domain but as www then to your main domain's root that would be 3 hops and a lot of PR would be wasted in the process.
The most popular pages should update within search engines in a couple days, while the least popular pages may take a month.
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