Will rankings for my micro site rank better if I 301 redirect it to my main site?
-
This is my first time asking so I will try to be as clear as possible.
Ok, I have a micro site that is an (exact match domain) and the domain is a couple 3-4 years old and ranks very well for several search terms. The main two terms it ranks for are like this.
houses for rent in XXXXX
XXXXX homes for rent
(XXXXX equals a city name)
The issue is this site has no backlinks, zero advanced SEO, I only did basic optimization to it when i set the site up. Even site structure, url structure all are not good.
The only page I have ever even seen rank is the main root url. But with all that the site does really good in the top 1-2 results for key search terms.Now, I have a main site that is a very big site that has steadily been climbing in search terms every month with great backlinks, optimized for the city and all.
It currently ranks on second page for the listed search terms listed above.What I want to do is 301 redirect this microsite to my city page on my main site that is much better optimized for the key city terms.
The 301 redirect would point this "root domain" (mymicrosite.com) to my city page that looks like this.www.mymaindomain.com/city/XXXXXXX
If I do this will Google rank my main URL city page as well as it ranks this microsite with zero links, seo, etc, etc. What happens if it does not? Will I be able to turn off the 301 redirect and keep the microsite rankings?
My main reason for wanting this is I want this city page to rank well and I only want to optimize one site instead of both.
Any help would be great!
-
Glad to help Robbie and it is great to get a report back on what happened. Thanks so much.
-
Robert,
Thanks for your help and great input for this issue. The 301 redirect so far worked just as I expected it would. Actually after the redirect the new site ranks better than the old site.
One thing I have heard many times is a "301 redirect does not transfer rankings" Well now I have solid proof that this statement is totally incorrect. Because as of today my 301 redirect has launched my target page to page one and ranks better than the old site.
Either way I do appreciate your time and input for this topic.
Thanks!
-
Thank Robert,
Your first paragraph may have answered my question. Although I have seen this proved completely wrong a few years ago when a major competitor was bought out and they did 301 redirects and it did rank them for the terms for the site that they bought.
The only reason I do not post my url's publicly is our competitors do use SEOmoz so I keep it private. I will send you a private message so you can see the urls directly.
-
A 301 redirect does not transfer rankings. So if your home page on micro site is ranked first for a given term, it does not mean a 301 will get you ranked first for that term.
You have to compare the sites two pages (it sounds as if you are saying home page to home page). If one is ranking first for a term XYZ rental and the other is not, what are the content differences, title tag & other on page differences, etc. Have you looked at Google analytics to see if there is info there? Etc.I would suggest putting the two url's out there and letting a mozzer assist. Or use your private question and get one of the associates to help (they are quite knowledgeable and like what they do - or are great actors!). You get one private question a monty.
Many people get worried that if they put their site URL's up someone is in someway going to learn from you ,etc and get ahead of you. It is really quite the opposite: You ask questions that you think you should know already and someone comes along who has been there and helps you out. Occasionally, there is an incorrect or incomplete answer and someone comes along and corrects the answer (I know, I have had some corrective assistance to a couple of answers I gave... but I manned up and thanked them If the sites are a client site as opposed to an owned site that is a bit different. But I have clients that allow me to post information about some of their sites and I do.
I have yet to see perfection in the SEO world. I have found some pretty smart people here though.
-
Thanks for the reply Robert.
The main reason I think personally my main site will rank better for these search terms is the microsite is a city specific site and pretty small with no back links or content other than listings so i will not suffer any loss there.
So I want to take this city specific site that currently ranks on first page of Google for many terms and redirect it to my city specific page on my main site. The microsite does not get any traffic to internal pages so I think redirecting the main URL of it to the city specific page on my main site should transfer the page #1 rankings to my main site. I think i will just try it and see what happens.
-
Robbie,
The 301 redirect would point this "root domain" (mymicrosite.com) to www.mymaindomain.com/city/XXXXXXX
The key to this redirect is that you want to insure you 301 each url on the micro site to a specific url on the main site. You want to do this in the .htaccess file. You don't redirect the root domain to root domain.
Also you state the "site has no back links, no advance SEO", does it have any DA/PA? If the site has a PA 1, DA of 7 for example, I do not see where it will help you. When you redirect, you are trying to move the links to the main site so that you maintain that link juice to the new site (you will lose a bit 5 to10%). This way, when you change a domain name, sell a business, etc. you do not need to try to go to each site linking to the "old" site and ask them to link to the new.
With "what happens if it doesn't work, can I change back?" While I cannot say I have ever tried to, I can tell you that I have done a few redirects of sites and I always watched the old site to see if it lost value and the other gained.
I have a site we did a full redirect to new site in late August. When we initially did it, the old site home page had a PA 44 and a DA of 39, the new had PA 1 and DA 1. Today 3.5 months later Old site is PA 33 DA 31 and new site is PA 44 DA 33. The big difference is there are only two links showing for the old site now.
Since we handle a lot of Real Estate business, one thing you want to be sure of is that your Google Places and Bing Bus. Portal, Yahoo Local. Have the new site if at all possible. It may be fine for a short run, but you will gain more from having a correct, thorough local presence. Do the same with any citation sites.
Good Luck.
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
-
Why is this site ranking higher?
We've put a fair bit of effort into delivering value here: https://lewescountycars.co.uk/ But a search for "Lewes taxis" or "taxis Lewes" puts this site above us: https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk/ As you can you see, this is a tiny site that we outperform in most ways.... what can we do to rank above it that we haven't already done? Thanks in advance - Gerard.
Technical SEO | | Paul7301 -
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 -
Blogger to Wordpress 301 and Meta Refresher Redirect
Hi Everyone! So my client has a blogger that she has developed a good amount of link equity for. It is a hersite.blogspot.com (she doesn't own her own domain yet). She is moving to the Wordpress platform though and the only way we can do a redirect is through a meta refresh redirect (since she doesn't have access to the servers on blogger). I went to Google Webmasters to do a change of address and found that the 301 checker said it couldn't find any 301 redirect, which is disappointing. What we're planning is telling all the places that link to the blog to change their links to the new blog but other than that what does anyone recommend to keep this link strength? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Is this a safe 301 redirect?
We are moving our site from one platform to another. Currently on our site we have two homepages. "www.homepage.com" and "www.homepage.com/Index" Both pages have some high quality links pointing in on them. The problem: We are going to be doing a 301 redirect from "www.homepage.com/Index" page to "www.homepage.com" as we are moving platforms at this time we weren't going to create a "www.homepage.com/Index" page all. This leaves this page as an empty URL. With this webpage disappearing all together will we lose traction as we are redirecting an empty URL? Or is it better to recreate this "www.homepage.com/Index" on our new platform redirect it and wait for google to deIndex this page for us? As well is there a tutorial for how to implement 301 redirects or is this something worth looking for a developer and pay someone to do?
Technical SEO | | HCGDiet0 -
International Site, flow of page rank?
OK. I'm working on an international site. The site is setup with folders for UK, US, AU e.g www.site.com/UK/index.aspx The root (non folder based) is the international version of the site e.g www.site.com/index.aspx www.site.com/index.aspx has the lions share of links. Therefore, the pages immediately linked from www.site.com/index.aspx have page rank distributed between them. My UK, US and AU home pages are linked via a country selector from the www.site.com/index.aspx page via an aspx redirect page that 301's to the appropriate country home page. Therefore the home pages of UK, US, AU are recieving some of the 'juice' that is coming in to www.site.com/index.aspx (but only a fraction via the redirect links) Am I right in thinking that pages on the international version of the site will have much more potential to rank (because of their 'juice') than the pages on UK, US and AU versions of the site? If so, am I right in thinking that these will tend to rank over the equivalent UK, US and AU versions of the pages in each country version of Google despite having set directory level Geo-targetting in GWT?
Technical SEO | | QubaSEO1 -
Best cross linking strategy for micro sites?
Hi Guys. I created a micro site (A design showcase gallery) away from the main website to attract a lot of links in my space from competitors. It works so well it has become a valuable resource in my industry and I believe I will keep it running and adding content to it. Is the best SEO strategy for the main site simply to link from each page to the main site? Or should I be looking at something else? Thanks, Alan
Technical SEO | | spoiltchild0 -
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