301 Redirect - What happens to backlinks
-
Hello...
One of my sites is losing rankings in G.
I received the webmaster notification of unnatural links...
My question is, should i do a 301 redirect of every page on my site to a new domain?
If so, do the backlinks (which i believe are causing my rankings to drop) carry over?
How about the good backlinks?
Also, what would happen to the rankings i currently have on page 1?
Thanks
-
I would not 301 redirects because it passes link juice, it will also pass the link juice from sites that have nothing to do with your phrases. What I would recommend is starting a new site. Manually check all your old backlinks.
-
i still don't have enough info on this topic. in my case, i purchased a domain name didigames.biz. actually it is expired domain name with 25DA already. but you know .biz domains difficult to rank in top ten. i purchased new domain name didigamesgirl.com and started making links. now i am thinking about redirecting my .biz domain to this domain. need expert opinion on this.
-
Personally I would not do a 301, as Donnie have said. With the 301, also the backlinks will be redirected. Actually one of the problems Wil Reynolds had with SeerInteractive was because of old backlinks to his previous domain name, then 301 to the actual one.
If you are thinking of creating a new site as a solution in order to avoid the penalization for unnatural links, then - during the migration - contact the "not-crappy" sites which linked to your old one, and inform them that you're changinge domain name and, therefore, you are asking them if they may update your link. 99% the link will be updated.
Obviously, all the link equity the "unnatural links" are passing to your site will disappear, which means that a loss in ranking in quite sure, but not at the same level a penalization could cause.
Another solution should be to try to quit all the unnatural backlinks but maintaining the same site. I don't know if this can be possible: if the domain is http://www.simplastics.com/ (taken from the email you use to register in SEOmoz) from OSE is see exact match links from comments, maybe a signature, and from blog related to politics (not quite related indeed).
Said that, and because the site has also other on page issue (i.e.: domain canonicalization), maybe to create a new site is the best decision.
-
There are many individuals that claim redirecting these sites will filter out the crap links. They juice up a site, then 301 it. My suggestion would be to test it. If the penalty is algo based and if you get hit with this penalty after your 301 then simply undo it and the penalty should go away. I don't believe it's a manual audit. Or you listen to google and start removing the unnatural links. Or you take Donnie's approach if you want to build a new, longer standing web presence.
-
I'm not the expert on this topic, so I'd love to hear some others jump in on this.
This is a very hot topic right. Wil Reynolds was talking about a new potential technique of putting up spam crap sites and building tons of anchor text links to them and letting them live for a few weeks until they get burned. Then put up a new one and repeat the process.
Ethan Lyon mentions in the comments something similar to what you're talking about
Ethan Lyon Apr 23, 2012
A strategy that is really big right now is 301 redirecting burned sites to new sites. So if you build 10,000 links to site A, then it gets burned, 301 redirect site A to site B. Build 10,000 links to site B, so now it has 20,000 links. When site B gets burned, 301 redirect site A and B to site C, so now you start with 20,000 links. Then build 10,000 links to site C so you have 30,000 links. Rinse and repeat and you have a strategy to rank consistently in the top spots in some of the most competitive spaces. Insane that it works, but it painfully does.
So I know that doesn't really answer your question, but sheds a little more information and validates the fact that a lot of people are doing this, or thinking about it right now.
So for people that have done this, do 301 redirects carry the original anchor text and thus can result in burning the new site as well?
-
I would not 301 redirect because it passes link juice, it will also pass the link juice from sites that have nothing to do with your phrases. What I would recommend is starting a new site. Manually check all your old backlinks. Find the backlinks that are authoritative and relevant to your topic (usually sites that have your keyword phrases in them), and contact them. Your email should be: Dear____ , we have moved our site to a new location can you please edit our link?
I love giving value.. The more value I give the more value I get (aka karma, and yes I am a hippie)
When you contact these sites webmaster you can check their sites in a broken link checker tool or find something to help them improve. If you cannot find something to improve at least be somewhat entertaining. Remember webmasters are people too!
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
-
Do bulk 301 redirects hurt seo value?
We are working with a content based startup that needs to 301 redirect a lot of its pages to other websites. Will give you an example to help you understand. If we assume this is the startups domain and URL structure www.ourcompany.com/brand1/article What they want to do is do a 301 redirect of www.ourcompany.com/brand1/ to www.brand1.com I have never seen 301 as a problem to SEO or link juice. But in this case where all the major URLs are getting redirected to other sites i was wondering if it would have a negative effect. Right now they have just 20-30 brands but they are planning to hit a couple of hundreds this year.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aaronfernandez0 -
Found a cache of old domain names, should I link or 301 redirect
We have found a cache of about 10 URLs, some are ranking above our main URL in Google SERPS. What is the best course of action here? a. Redirect all to the homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moconn
b. Link all domains to the homepage?
c. Link all domains to select pages on on main site, being careful not to anchor text spam
d. 301 redirect all to the main site. Is there any disadvantage to your recommendation? Is there likely to be a penalty incurred? I feel like we'll get the strongest increase in rankings by following option c but it feels like option d may be safer. Thanks in advance for your help!0 -
Can 301 redirects that are inaccurate cause Google suppressions on rankings?
In an interesting study by DeganSEO titled 'Negative Impact of 301 Redirects - A Case Study' a drop of rankings was observed when popular blog posts were redirected to product pages. One hypothesis is that the suppression is due to topical difference between the redirected pages (blog posts) and the target page. The topical difference issue is an interesting one when you consider it in the context of website migrations. We always recommend that 301 redirects are done at a page level and that if an equivalent page doesn't exist to just 301 anyway but to the most logical page. If you think about it Google are likely to frown on this because a) it's not a good experience for the user - 404 would be more accurate for them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QubaSEO
b) it's lazy - if you have good content that has gained authority/trust then create the same content on the new site don't trytp pass that to an entirely different page. Thoughts? Experiences?0 -
Clarification around 301 redirects.
I’ve come across numerous blogs recently that suggest that SEOs should NOT do bulk re-directs to a category page. This has come as something of a surprise (doh!!) and I feel like I should already know this. It does seem like there is lots disagreement here so I thought that I’d ask what people’s opinions were to make sure that I get my thinking straight. I've read all the main Moz blog posts on this topic and, although really useful, they've left me none the wiser around a few specific questions. Here’s some more detail about the situation. We’re currently consolidating a lot of content into a main blog, which will be the focal point of new blogs posts that are created. This is different to the past, where we tended to create separate blogs for different products on separate domains. I’m currently considering how we move content across from one the older blogs to this new blog (which will soon sit on a subfolder of our main domain). I have three (!) questions: 1) Could you confirm that doing bulk re-directs a category page is bad? I already know that doing them all to the homepage is an error. 2) Should I re-direct the home page of the old blog on a separate domain to the relevant category page on the new site? The category page is related, but does not cover the EXACT topic. The category page covers our replacement product offering. It I shouldn't do this, where should I re-direct the old blog domain to? 3) I’ve recommended that we set up 301 redirects on a one-to-one basis, redirecting each piece of content to its new location on the old site. What about content that has been earmarked for removal and for which there is no obvious alternative? My previous recommendation has been to re-direct these pages to the most relevant category page on the new blog. Would it be better to let this 404 or, as an alternative, create a custom 404 for the users on the new blog highlighting the new content that we offer? Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
301 redirect rule
Hi there, I have a website that has hundreds of links with a "question mark" at the end of URLs. For example: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQandil
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory?
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/? I'm want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess file but don't know what exactly to add. Ideally I want the URLs above to be: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/ Any help is most appreciated. Thanks
Issa0 -
Redirect 301 or Canonical.
Hello all, I have a page with a long post title and url path name (more than 70 caracters and 115). This page has many visits but I am changing the SEO website structure according to SEOMOz and forums guidelines so: I WILL CREATE A DUPLICATE PAGE WITH THE SAME INFO. This issue has been marked as an issue in the SEO tools, for long names>70 and url path names>115 My question is which option should I use and you would recommend me? 1. OPTION 1: Ideally I would like to keep the old post, so I should use the canonical tag, but my main concern is if the search engines in terms of SEO, even the canonical has been done, will penalise my SEO as there is still a post with bad SEO optimising, or if this is not the case because I already used the canonical. 2. OPTION 2: Eliminate the post and redirection 301 to the new page to keep the juice. I would prefer option 1, as I keep both post and page, but only if searchengines do not penalise my SEO as they detect a long post name and url path name. Thank you verty much, Antonio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aalcocer20030 -
301 Redirect how to get those juices flowing
HI Guys Following on from my previous posts i have still not got my rankings back, http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking i am beginning to think that i do have a underlying issue in the site which is restricting me My old site www.economyleasinguk.co.uk was moved to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk, as mentioned the 301 seemed to go really well and all pages updated within 48 hours, however over 5 months on and the juice from the old site is still not pushed over and i hardly rank at all for anything. here are a list of things i have tried 1:Swapped the original 301 which was PHP for an Htaccess 2: added canonical tag to all pages 3: Turned on internal links as per this post by Everett Sizemore http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well number 3 was only done 5 days ago and initially bot traffic was immense, and may need a bit more time to see any results. I still think i have another underlying issue due to the below reasons 1: Page rank on home page is one but inner pages mixture of 1, 2 and 3 sporadically 2: If I copy text from home page no results 3: Open site explorer still has the old site at with a PA of 60 compared to 42 for the new site 4: Checked server logs and Google is visiting old site 5: Header responses are all correct for the canonicals and see no chaining of the 301’s 6: All pages are do follow and no robots restrictions 7: site:has only in the last few days removed the old site from the index naturally it could be that its just a matter of time however 5 months for a 301 is a very long time and 80% traffic loss is immense I would really appreciate it if someone can give the site a once over and see if i have missed anything obvious. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kellymandingo0 -
301 redirect hell.... How do you de-commission an old site
Hi SEO experts: We operate a vacation rental website and around 1 year ago moved to a different platform. Because our pages are arranged by location (what we refer to as Locales) we need to put 301 redirects for all the old locale pages. So for example: www.example.com/__Skeggness.cfm redirects to www.example/com/vacation-rentals/locale/skeggness But here's the problem: We can't seem to get Google to drop those old __{locale_name}.cfm pages... even after over 12-months of the new site going live! Other clues we've noticed: The old underscore URLs show up in our SERP sub-links Sometimes google shows the new page title and description but attributes it to the __{locale_name}.cfm URL (aghh!!!) One suggestion we received was to use the URL removal tool in Google WMT.... But given we have 1,000's of locales i don't see that as being affective. Questions: Any suggestions on how to get Google to drop these old URLs and use the new ones? Is this situation hurting our SEO? Or do you think its benign... and I should just take a deep breath.... and relax at little more...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AABAB0