301 redirect while keeping OLD domain for branding
-
Say you have CharityName.com. They use a dedicated domain name CharityNameEvent.com to advertise their main event. They use this domain on posters, flyers,etc and want to keep using it because it's easier to remember. CharityNameEvent.com has far, far more inbound links than CharityName.com (about 8 times more).
Current problem: their current web developer has put the SAME content on both websites instead of setting up a redirect from CharityNameEvent.com (easy to remember) to CharityName.com/Event which would have made more sense.
My intention is to consolidate the 2 websites and make sure CharityName.com benefits from links to the Event. I plan to move and 301 redirect CharityNameEvent.com to CharityName.com/Event. I know this would keep links and PR intact but I have a couple of questions:
1. Is it enough to set up the 301 redirect or would they have to ask websites to ACTUALLY change the links to CharityName.com/Event?
2. They plan and need to keep using CharityNameEvent.com for its ease of use on posters, flyers, etc. The 301 redirect would be in place. Would this cause any problems with search engines, especially when/if some people STILL link to CharityNameEvent.com instead of CharityName.com/Event?
Basically, my understanding of 301 redirects is that they're used when a website permanently moves. In this case, the OLD DOMAIN name would still be used for reasons mentioned above but would be 301 redirected to CharityName.com/Event.
Any chance this might not maximise the potential of new/old links? Any other way to go about it? Anything I'm missing with this scenario?
Thanks
-
Hi! I'm following up on older, unanswered questions. Can you tell us what you ended up doing in this case, and any lessons you learned that could be helpful to others reading this thread?
Thanks!
-
Yes, your approach to 301 is correct.
-
You should contact admins and have them change when at all possible. 301 do not pass 100% of juice
-
No. You will probably have fewer linking to this page as they will have ben 301ed before they copy the URL
-
-
A rel canon will solve the duplicate content issue - telling Google that the "real" and "original" content sites on A not B.
-
Thank you for that. But the core issue is that the OLD SITE has the same content as the main site so it's a duplicate content issue as well which is why I'm considering the 301 redirect.
-
Read up on rel canonical - that will help with:
Keeping the old site live and giving direct load users the same experience instead of being redirected elsewhere, and transfer all the inbound link juice to the main site... (also takes care of cross domain duplicates)
Thats just one option of course...
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
-
Changing Domains - 301 old https to new https
Brief History: Our company made change to a new domain. Both domains had an SSL configured on it in which the old domain SSL was controlled and created by Shopify which gave us limited control. Because we couldn't redirect the old https:// to the new https:// So basically we duplicated our new HTML website and put canonical ref on all duplicate pages to the final domain to help get search to navigate to the newer domain. Question: In the near future I would like to take down the old domain and do a 301 domain forwarding. What is the correct course of action to complete this? Our old domain was indexed and SERP results were tied to it's https:// url's.
Technical SEO | | bnewt1 -
Backlink management: 301 redirect unsuccessful.
I am managing my company's spammy backlinks using Open Site Explorer. Our company owns a few URLs that are related to our company or are iterations of our main URL. All of these additional URLs have 301 redirects to our main domain. Open Site Explorer has identified one of these URLs as having a spam score of 8 indicating a 56% chance of Google crawler penalization. Obviously, this is a red flag. Instead of being redirected to our main domain upon visiting the URL, I was directed to what seems to be an automatically generated, generic webpage with links that seem to have been generated by keywords from our main domain. I have seen this type of webpage before when incorrectly typing in URLs from other pages. They tend to look the same. They have a black background with the URL written in grey at the top and a rectangular related links bar. Is anyone familiar with my problem and could you offer any advice? Thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | SOLVISTA0 -
301 Redirect domain with penalty
Wondering if I could get a few views on this please... I have added an affiliate store to a domain I own, however I forgot to noindex the product pages which were duplicate content of the merchants. Despite a good deal of backlink building the site will not do much in the engines at all, doesn't even come up on the first few pages for it's own name! This suggests to me that I have a duplicate content penalty. Try as I may I cannot get it removed so am thinking of cloning the domain to a new domain, however, I do not want to lose the links I collected so I am planning on 301ing them. While I will not get all the link power moved over, I should at least get credit for some of them which will kick start the new domain. Can anyone forsee any potential issues with doing this? Is there a danger of 301ing a site with a penalty that the penalty would be carried over? I know there is no penalty on the links, no WMT warnings etc, it is the content causing the issue. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Help with 301 redirect code
Hi, I can't work out how to make this one work and would apreciate if someone could help.
Technical SEO | | Paul_MC
i have a series of folders from a old site that are in the structure:
/c/123456/bags.html (the "123456" changes and is any series of 6 digit numbers), and the "bags.html" changes depending on the product.
I need that to be 301 redirected to the following format:
/default/bags/bags.html0 -
What is SEO impact of redirecting from domain to https appspot domain ?
Our site is hosted on google and is fully https. But since google's limitation is that all https needs to be on the appspot domain, we are redirecting users from our website to the appspot domain. What is the impact of this on SEO?
Technical SEO | | incandescent0 -
301 Redirect
Hi there, We are re-branding & re-structuring our website, there will be quite a number of 301 re-directs, possibly hundreds. The question is: Should i wait until the re-branding has been completed and do al the 301's in one go?, or should I try and do 301's as i go along? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
IP address URLs being indexed, 301 to domain?
I apoligize if this question as been asked before, I couldnt' find in the Q&A though. I noticed Google has been indexing our IP address for some pages (ie: 123.123.123.123/page.html instead of domain.com/page.html). I suspect this is possibly due to a few straggler relative links instead of absolute, or possibly something else I'm not thinking of. My less-evasive solution a few months back was to ensure canonical tags were on all pages, and then replaced any relative links w/ absolutes. This does not seem to be fixing the problem though, as recently as today new pages were scooped up with the IP address. My next thought is to 301 redirect any IP address URL to the domain, but I was afraid that may be too drastic and that the canonical should be sufficient (which it doesn't seem to be). Has anyone dealt with this issue? Do you think the 301 would be a safe move, any other suggestions? thanks.
Technical SEO | | KT6840
