Opportunity for Redirect?
-
Hi there!
I've got a site selling outdoor jackets and remembered about a friend's old business website (that also sold outdoor jackets) which is now dormant.
He's kindly agreed to let me host a splash page on his old domain, or to use the domain to redirect.
I wasn't sure if Google looked negatively at redirects, so I suggested the page host option? What do you think?
I guess what it would mean is for us to supply our name server details to him, and then ask him to put these into his DNS settings.
If we were to host a page in this way, would we add a page of relevant content, a simple link? Would this pull the link juice through?
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
Matt
-
I think it would be better if it were hosted on a different server than your main site is.
-
Thanks Adam.
He currently doesn't have anything hosted other than the domain name unfortunately. If I was to get a splash page up there, I would have to host it.
I'll ask him about buying the domain, and if it went through, what's the most effective method of utilising this?
I was a little concerned that Google might look at the redirect unfavourably, especially if it was hosted by us, and using the same company that hosts our own site.
Maybe I'm making it more complicated than it is?
Appreciate your help
-
Thanks Rob!
It seems that buying the domain would give us lots more options... I really only spoke to the owner about the possibility for a splash page or 301 redirect
It's all a bit new to me really, the URL gives a 404 Error at the moment, so the content of his old site is gone.
If I was to buy the domain, how would I go about doing the page by page redirects?
I set up a crawl there, and did a little research on Open Site Explorer; found 50 Links from 34 Domains. So there's definitely juice there!
-
If the old domain has incomming links, then you can 301 redirect it. That would be good value.
If it does not have any links, then it is of no value to redirect.
-
"I guess what it would mean is for us to supply our name server details to him, and then ask him to put these into his DNS settings."
Don't do that. That would setup your site to be accessible via both urls.
Either put up a splash page on his domain linking to yours, or do a 301 redirect. I've had success with both tactics.
-
Hi Matt,
This can be a great thing for you - if the old dormant domain is till being crawled, still indexed, and still has inbound links built to the site over time.
Adding a page to his site, and with unique relative content might pass back some value - but if the domain has been dormant for some time - the 'juice' value has probably fizzled a little (along with the site's rankings) for the market KW's he was targeting.
Is he planning to give you the domain? Perhaps sell it to you? If so, and he wanted out - I would do a domain and page by page level 301 redirect from his old dated site - to your domain. This would help pass through all the page link value as well as the domain - helping correct any 404's errorrs that might occur and help search index'es to map out the new 'address' of the pages on your site as the location - also pushing through those links and value to your domain.
Run a 'crawler' on his domain to map out the whole site - and then create an excel doc to map any relavant pages, info etc to pages on your domain and prep a 301 file to handle the redirects.
If that's a route he's willing to go, that's more or less what I would do to salvage any value from his domain/site and pass it along to yours.
If not - a page on his site, with a link back, will do just that - provide a link back from an older/dated and not maintained site which won't do all that much for you in the grand scheme of things.
Hope that helps
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
-
Redirect a sub-domain to other domain
Hi there! Suppose a domain 'abc.com' has a subdomain 'news.abc.com'. If we redirect (301) only subdomain 'news.abc.com' to 'xyz.com'. so is there any SEO harm on main domain 'abc.com'? Even both abc.com and xyz.com are running separately. Rajiv
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gamesecure0 -
301 redirects for 3 top level domains using WP SEO Yoast
Hey Guys I have a custom built website - and a wp blog attached to this - problem is there are 3 top level domains: zenory.co.nz, zenory.com and zenory.com.au **The issue is when I enter the domain to 301 redirect I only have to enter one domain usually i enter redirect from zenory.com/blog/oldpage to zenory.com.newpage ** For eg: I have just move Phone Psychic Readings from the blog - over to the main site. However there seems to be an issue that I'm still having and trying to clean up. I'm finding backlinks there are linking to each other of my 3 domains that end up backlinking across domains, which I was told this can look as spammy to google. For eg: co.nz links many pages to com.au. I'm currently trying to clean this up at the moment - however while im in the process of this - I find myself question when I'm creating the 301 redirects from the blog - but lets say I'm on the blog for zenoy.co.nz/blog/oldblogpost and when I click on a blog post - it redirects me to zenory.com/newarticlepost - because I have redirected it to .com - how can I redirect and make sure is going back to the right domain name to save myself from having to show this cross backlinks? Would gratefully appreciate any assistance on this tricky situation. Cheers Just
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
IT want to do a name server redirect
Hi, I am in a little bit of a pickle, and hope that you clever people can help me... A little background: In April this year we relaunched one of our brands as a standalone business. I set up page to page 301 redirects from the old website to the new branded domain. From an SEO perspective this relaunch went amazingly smoothly - we only lost around 10% of traffic and that was just for a couple of months. We now get more traffic than ever before. Basically it's all going swimmingly. I noticed yesterday that the SSL certificate on the old domain has expired, so I asked IT to repurchase one for us to maintain the 301 redirects. IT are saying that they would prefer to do a name server redirect instead, which would remove all the page to page 301s. They are saying that this would maintain the SEO. As far as I am aware this wouldn't. Please can someone help me put together a polite but firm response to basically say no? Thanks, I really welcome and appreciate your help on this! Amelia
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CommT0 -
Do I need to undo a 301 redirect to dissavow links from the source domain?
A client came to me after being hit by Penguin and had already performed a 301 redirect from site A to Site B. Site B was subsequently hit by the penalty a number of weeks later and we are planing on performing link removal for Site A. Only the webmaster tools account for Site B exists, none is still available for site A. I assume that I cannot dissavow links to site A from Site B's webmaster tool account (even though website A's links show up in the GWT account). So do I need to undo the 301 and then create a new GWT account for site A in order to disavow the links pointing to site A, or can I submit from Site B's GWT account since they are 301'd to site B? Thanks! Chris [edited for formatting]
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOdub0 -
Removing/ Redirecting bad URL's from main domain
Our users create content for which we host on a seperate URL for a web version. Originally this was hosted on our main domain. This was causing problems because Google was seeing all these different types of content on our main domain. The page content was all over the place and (we think) may have harmed our main domain reputation. About a month ago, we added a robots.txt to block those URL's in that particular folder, so that Google doesn't crawl those pages and ignores it in the SERP. We now went a step further and are now redirecting (301 redirect) all those user created URL's to a totally brand new domain (not affiliated with our brand or main domain). This should have been done from the beginning, but it wasn't. Any suggestions on how can we remove all those original URL's and make Google see them as not affiliated with main domain?? or should we just give it the good ol' time recipe for it to fix itself??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | redcappi0 -
Redirect n domain to one
What happen when I redirect301 10 domain to one? I have 10 domain with ave Page Authority=45 and Domain Authority 60 and want to increase my new domain by redirect them. is it right or wrong?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vahidafshari450 -
Using Redirects To Avoid Penalties
A quick question, born out of frustration! If a webpage has been penalised for unnatural links, what would be the effects of moving that page to a new URL and setting up a 301 redirect from the old penalised page to the new page? Will Google treat the new page as ‘non-penalised’ and restore your rankings? It really shouldn’t work, but I’m convinced (although not certain) that our clients competitor has done this, with great effect! I suppose you could also achieve this using canonicalisation too! Many thanks in advance, Lee.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webpresence0