Multiple domain level redirects to unique sub-folder on one domain...

[blackrails]

Hi, I have a restaurant menu directory listing website (for example www.menus.com).

Restaurant can have there menu listed on this site along with other details such as opening hours, photos ect. An example of a restaurant url might be www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza.

A feature i would like to offer is the ability for Bob's pizza to use the menus.com website listing as his own website (let assume he has no website currently). I would like to purchase www.bobspizza.com and 301 redirect to www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza

Why?
So bob can then list bobspizza.com on his advertising material (business cards etc, rather than www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza).

I was considering using a 301 redirect for this though have been told that too many domain level redirects to one single domain can be flagged as spam by Google.

Is there any other way to achieve this outcome without being penalised? Rel canonical url, url masking?

Other things to note:

• It is fine if www.bobspizza.com is NOT listed in search results.
• I would ideally like any link juice pointing to www.bobspizza.com to pass onto www.menus.com though this is a nice to have. If it comes at the cost of being penalised i can live without the link juice from this.

Thanks

[blackrails]

That's a good point you make Cyrus in regards to linking to a site that has competitors on it also. I have considered this and my idea was to pass in a url param that would not show anything else only the restaurants own menu. For example, menus.com/bobs-pizza?ads=0 would not show a search bar or any other links (simply just their own menu). This page would have rel-canonical link to menus.com/bobs-pizza so as to maintain link juice...

Other option i was thinking was to include an iframe on the restaurants page that would source data from menus.com. I guess i could have a link pointing back to menus.com at the bottom of the menu in the iframe.

I think the link idea makes sense rather the redirect for the reasons you mentioned. Maybe i could have a popup on mobile devices that contains a link to the menu's site (again this would be in javascript - not sure if this is a good idea though).

Any other ideas on how i may be able to show a link (only on mobile devices) that could point to menus.com (in a SEO friendly way)?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Without getting into the technical details, I have to address the bigger question of why a business owner would want to redirect their site to yours? In all honesty, I have to question the soundness of that business plan. If I'm printing www.bobs-pizza on my business cards, I want my visitors to go to www.bobs-pizza.com, and not redirect to some other site where they can view all my competitors as well.

Regardless, I would think it would be much easier to get a link from these sites than a redirect, and this would mitigate the potential problems of mass 301 redirects.

Another thing to consider, what if the site has been penalized due to poor link building practices? Once you 301 redirect to your site, those bad links become yours, and this could effect your entire site.

Regarding the issue of redirecting mobile users, yes, it's possible using browser detection agents, but redirecting to another site runs huge risks of penalties to the point that I wouldn't advise it.

Instead, I think this is a great idea, but I would opt for links instead of redirects. Best of luck with your SEO!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

+1 URL Shortener

Also, custom URLs for each business might work, i.e. menu.com/bobs-pizza.

[blackrails]

Thanks for your response Moosa. I like the idea of shorter urls.

On a similar yet slightly different note.
Some restaurants already have an existing and well established websites (eg www.tomspasta.com). For these websites i would like to redirect to www.menus.com/tomspasta (which is mobile optimised), only if the user is viewing the site (www.tomspasta.com) from a mobile device (ie user agent detection would be used in JavaScript to do the redirect).

Would this kind of redirect have any impact on SEO (positively/negatively)? Would any link juice be passed? Would i need to notify Google that the content is different for mobile devices?

[blackrails]

Thanks for your response Moosa. I like the idea of shorter urls.

On a similar yet slightly different note.
Some restaurants already have an existing and well established websites (eg www.tomspasta.com). For these websites i would like to redirect to www.menus.com/tomspasta (which is mobile optimised), only if the user is viewing the site (www.tomspasta.com) from a mobile device (ie user agent detection would be used in JavaScript to do the redirect).

Would this kind of redirect have any impact on SEO (positively/negatively)? Would any link juice be passed? Would i need to notify Google that the content is different for mobile devices?

[Carlos-R]

Hi Adam,

It is true that too many 301 redirects could look a bit fishy.

If what you want is for people that see bobspizza.com on advertising material and type the url on their browser to be redirected to your site (and have no possible issues with Google), I'd would use a 302 redirect.

The only problem with 302 redirects is that the link juice pointing to bobspizza.com won't pass onto menu.com .

There are many hosting providers that will allow you to park and 301/302 an unlimited number of domains.

Cheers

[MoosaHemani]

Adam I think a lot about this even before you actually come up with this question and I thought best URL structure you can follow in this case is of about.me

1. You cannot park many domains (ideally one domain for each business page)
2. Too many domain level redirects might kill your site and at the same time 301 redirect from domain to a specific page will not let main domain stay in SERPs.
3. Canonical can work but again you cannot eat the search engine love.

But there is one thing that you cannot do!

How about shortening the URL?

For instance you have a BOB pizza in Ohio so instead of having a URL http://www.menue.com/pizza/OH/bob-pizza/ why not go for a smile and short URL that looks great with branding http://menu.com/bobpizza/

The URL is short so you can easily use in branding plus search engine will not exclude this in Google... when people will share this short version of URL the domain authority of the overall domain will automatically improved.

Hope this idea might work for you...