Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Any way around buying hosting for an old domain to 301 redirect to a new domain?
-
Howdy.
I have just read this QA thread, so I think I have my answer. But I'm going to ask anyway!
Basically DomainA.com is being retired, and DomainB.com is going to be launched.
We're going to have to redirect numerous URLs from DomainA.com to DomainB.com. I think the way to go about this is to continue paying for hosting for DomainA.com, serving a .htaccess from that hosting account, and then hosting DomainB.com separately.
Anybody know of a way to avoid paying for hosting a .htaccess file on DomainA.com?
Thanks!
-
If I am understanding correctly you want people to access DomainA.com when they go to DomainB.com? If this is the case, you could set up DomainB.com as a Domain Forward to DomainA.com.
For instance a Client I have right now has www.drcharlescrane.com and www.drcharlescrane.net. Hosting is only set up for .com and we domain forward .net.
You can also have this set up as a domain forwarding with mask so if you wanted the user would actually see in the URL domainb.com but pulling domaina.com's content.
I hope this makes sense and if you need further clarification let me know. Also where is your domain registered. I use Godaddy primarily to the low costs for domains. Here is a how to domain forward provided by them and more information on the topic - http://help.godaddy.com/article/422
-
DNS, resolves a name to a ip number,
that ip number should route to your website. Inthe headers of the resquest is the domain name, your web site should be configured to accept either all requests on a ip number and port or filtered by host headers (domains names), add all teh host headers needed, then in htaccess 30 to the pirmary domain name.
-
Thank you Alan. Are you suggesting that via DNS records I have DomainA.com "live" in the same place as DomainB.com, and then host the .htaccess on DomainB.com's hosting space?
So somebody requests DomainA.com, the DNS points to the hosting for DomainB.com, and then the .htaccess for DomainB.com can process the original DomainA.com request?
-
Thanks, but does this help with 301s for inner pages?
-
I had just the same experience. It was only one occasion but I did nothing more to the site then putting it under a new account on my shared hosting, so only the last digit of the ip has changed. I saw a drop in rankings however the original I gained back the original rankings a few weeks later.
-
I cant say it does, but when I changed ips i had a drop in rankings. But i cant prove it was the change in ip
but there is some logic to it,
A domain name is resolved to a ip address to find the website, the domain name is sent in the header. Your web site accepts a connection on a socket, ip number and port 123.123.123.123:80, it then looks in the header for the domain name
so a SE will see a difference, it will know this is not the same address -
100% disagree.
Most of the biggest websites in the world use DNS load balancing which will change the IP address of the server every request.
301 redirects lose a small amount of juice but IP changes don't.
Hosting changes don't (assuming no errors or outages).
Who-is changes do, but that is not relevant here.
-
1. you need to make a change to your DNS settings.
where every you registered your domain, you ned to change your Arecord to point at the correct ip number
2. you need to do a 301 redirect to primary domain.
-
If you have Cpanel here are the instructions. For godaddy or plesk call your host and tell them what you are trying to do.
Log into where you purchased domain A and forward it to the name servers at B's hosting. Then go into B Cpanel and click on add on domains. Add your domain. Once the domain has been added go to domain redirects and redirect your old domain to new.
For type choose permanent 301
Choose the domain you want to redirect from the drop down. Next manually type in your new domain name where it says "redirects to".
-
I think I disagree as moving site A's hosting to a new ip causes a drop in rankings.
Never heard about this before. I think this is not true, i have chagned IP's in the past without any consequences.
-
You shouldn't have to continue to pay for hosting for the site you are getting rid of, just keep renewing the domain name and then 301 it to the new site and you should be fine.
-
Thank you. I'm actually not understanding. How do I Park A on B. What is "explicit .htaccess"?
-
There is no penalty or loss for changing an IP address. There are many legitimat reasons for doing that. IP changes often occr when your host moves your site to a different server, or, when you upgrade your hosting package, or move to a different hosting service. No worries at all about new IPs.
-
The .htaccess that have the information about the A domain is inside B hosting, so, you don't need anymore A hosting when you do all the redirections.
I think this post can help:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067216/The-10-Step-Site-Migration-Process
bye
-
Egol has usually got great answers that woths linstening to, this time however I think I disagree as moving site A's hosting to a new ip causes a drop in rankings. Put the redirection on top of that and you get some more fallback. I think in the above case I would not change the hosting but do the redirect and wait for google to notice the change. Maybe a few months later I would give up site A's original hosting and migrate it to site B's hosting to be able to keep the original urls live for some more time.
-
Park A on B and redirect with explicit .htaccess.
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 redirects delay in picking up
Hi I have been involved in the redesign/development of a website which has up until now had a lot of international traffic. On day of migration I uploaded all the 301 redirects to the website (wordpress) using Simple 301 redirect plugin. I tested a number of them and they appeared to be working. I also submitted the new sitemaps to Search Console. Since migration international traffic - particularly from countries such as india, Phillipines, Sri Lanka etc have significantly dropped off whereas the local traffic and some of the international traffic such as USA has remained fairly consistent. Looking at Analytics and entrances recently it appears as though search results are/were showing a number of pages with 404's (one in particular which received significant traffic and for which I had created a 301 redirection) - I have checked this page using the old url and it re-directs correctly for me and today asked a colleague in India to also check - he is getting the redirection fine. Does Google.in take a significantly longer time to pick these up in search results? Or am I missing something?
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing0 -
Max Number of 301 Redirections?
Hi, We currently made a re-design of a website and we changed all our urls to make them shorter. I made more than 300 permanent redirections but plenty more are needed since WMT is showing some more 404s from old urls that I hadn't seen because they were dynamic. The question is, please, is there a limit? I think we have more than 600 already. We don't want to create a php commando to redirect all the old ones to our home, we are redirecting them to their correspondent url. By the way, Im doing them with the 301 method in .htaccess. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
301 Redirects Relating to Your XML Sitemap
Lets say you've got a website and it had quite a few pages that for lack of a better term were like an infomercial, 6-8 pages of slightly different topics all essentially saying the same thing. You could all but call it spam. www.site.com/page-1 www.site.com/page-2 www.site.com/page-3 www.site.com/page-4 www.site.com/page-5 www.site.com/page-6 Now you decided to consolidate all of that information into one well written page, and while the previous pages may have been a bit spammy they did indeed have SOME juice to pass through. Your new page is: www.site.com/not-spammy-page You then 301 redirect the previous 'spammy' pages to the new page. Now the question, do I immediately re-submit an updated xml sitemap to Google, which would NOT contain all of the old URL's, thus making me assume Google would miss the 301 redirect/seo juice. Or do I wait a week or two, allow Google to re-crawl the site and see the existing 301's and once they've taken notice of the changes submit an updated sitemap? Probably a stupid question I understand, but I want to ensure I'm following the best practices given the situation, thanks guys and girls!
Technical SEO | | Emory_Peterson0 -
Sudden drop in Rankings after 301 redirect
Greetings to Moz Community. Couple of months back, I have redirected my old blog to a new URL with 301 redirect because of spammy links pointed to my old blog. I have transfer all the posts manually, changed the permalink structure and 301 redirected every individual URL. All the ranking were boosted within couple of weeks and regained the traffic. After a month I have observed, the links pointed to old site are showing up in Webmaster Tools for the new domain. I was shocked (no previous experience) and again Disavowed all links. Today, all the positions went down for new domain. My questions are: 1. Did the Disavow tool worked this time with new domain? All the links pointed to old domain were devaluated? Is this the reason for ranking drop? Or 2. 301 Old domain with Unnatural links causes the issue? 3. Removing 301 will help to regain few keyword positions? I'm taking this as a case study. Already removed the 301 redirect. Looking for solid discussion.Thanks.
Technical SEO | | praveen4390 -
302 redirect used, submit old sitemap?
The website of a partner of mine was recently migrated to a new platform. Even though the content on the pages mostly stayed the same, both the HTML source (divs, meta data, headers, etc.) and URLs (removed index.php, removed capitalization, etc) changed heavily. Unfortunately, the URLs of ALL forum posts (150K+) were redirected using a 302 redirect, which was only recently discovered and swiftly changed to a 301 after the discovery. Several other important content pages (150+) weren't redirected at all at first, but most now have a 301 redirect as well. The 302 redirects and 404 content pages had been live for over 2 weeks at that point, and judging by the consistent day/day drop in organic traffic, I'm guessing Google didn't like the way this migration went. My best guess would be that Google is currently treating all these content pages as 'new' (after all, the source code changed 50%+, most of the meta data changed, the URL changed, and a 302 redirect was used). On top of that, the large number of 404's they've encountered (40K+) probably also fueled their belief of a now non-worthy-of-traffic website. Given that some of these pages had been online for almost a decade, I would love Google to see that these pages are actually new versions of the old page, and therefore pass on any link juice & authority. I had the idea of submitting a sitemap containing the most important URLs of the old website (as harvested from the Top Visited Pages from Google Analytics, because no old sitemap was ever generated...), thereby re-pointing Google to all these old pages, but presenting them with a nice 301 redirect this time instead, hopefully causing them to regain their rankings. To your best knowledge, would that help the problems I've outlined above? Could it hurt? Any other tips are welcome as well.
Technical SEO | | Theo-NL0 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TroyW0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0 -
301 Redirect vs Domain Alias
We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?
Technical SEO | | briankb0