301 Re-direct Implementation & Its Possible Aftermaths
-
Hi all,
I'm currently working on a domain that seems to be 'unofficially' blacklisted by Google. The reason behind my belief are,
-
Ranking process of KW became stagnant.
-
Current crawling and indexing rate has been decreased.
-
Site performance deteriorate after every Search engine update or major data refreshes.
-
And few major indications pointing out that search engines might started doubting its authority.
The site is live n running for about 10+ yr and consists of 6000+ pages out of which 5000+ pages are indexed.
The site also have some serious issues like,
-
The site has been 2 times penalized by Google.
-
The link ratio & inbound link quality of the site is quite unnatural (mostly directory links, links form spammy sites, bad-neighborhood links etc. )
-
The site is in flat file and not CMS, thus making it extremely difficult to maintain and update it.
Due to the above reasons I was thinking of implementing 301 re-direction. I would like to redirect this poor performing existing domain to a new fresh one keeping the URL structure and files same and maintaining 1:1 redirection rules.
I've read an awesome article by Danny Dover on 301 Re direction of a site here in SEOMOZ. It seems that if any one follow the steps mentioned there can actually get benefited by the overall re direction process. Now I'd like know your suggestion about following points:
1. Considering the factors that I've stated, do you think that it would be good to go with this re direction idea?
2. If 301 is implemented then what can be its immediate effects on current rankings and site performance?
3. Assuming that the ranks drowned or gets completely vanished from SERP, after what approx time period can be regain back?
4. Any other suggestion that might help me out to better understand the situation.
-
-
Thanks Mark,
We have actually decided to get rid of the old domain and move forward with the new one. Your suggestions are really useful and it helps a lot during this transition.
-
One thing to bear in mind is that you are never going to retain all of the link juice that you've got with the old site when redirecting to the new site.
If I were you, I would really try to clean up the backlink profile of the site as much as possible before doing any sort of redirection. I would argue that you might even be able to salvage the existing site's rankings by doing some rescue work in terms of your link profile.
One very important consideration is that your domain is 10+ years old already, which is in itself a pretty good authority indicator.
My suggestions to you:
-
Clean up really spammy links by using a tool such as Open Site Explorer to find and weed out the bad links. Follow whatever process is required to remove some of these links. (Contact the administrator of the site, remove your URL from the directory etc.)
-
Help dilute the effect of the spammy links by building new, higher quality backlinks to your site. Diversification is very important. If you have 100 spammy links, but 200 really good links, I don't feel like the Big G will worry too much.
-
Check your on-page factors. What sort of content do you have on your site? Are you stuffing keywords everywhere? Are you using unique content, or spun nonsense? Do you have title tags and headings that are both relevant and unique? Are you duplicating any content throughout your site?
The problem, however, with salvaging the site is that, like you say, you're running on a static platform.
If your rankings are really that bad now, perhaps it would be a good idea to start fresh. Just bear in mind that this won't be a quick fix, particularly if you're using a new domain.
If you insist on creating a new site (CMS based) and using the same content, then you'll have to do the redirect to avoid duplicate content issues. I would just take a long, hard look at your content to ensure that it's really worth copying across rather than starting fresh.
Put it this way, I would use the 301 redirect to inform the search engines that the site has been transferred and is under a new domain now. I wouldn't use the 301 redirect to try and salvage much link juice.
-
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
-
Title & Keywords
Hi Quick question on arrangement of keywords in titles. I know the order isn't so important anymore, but would there be a real issue if I want to rank for 'Henry Xtra' but my title reads 'Numatic Henry Xtra Vacuum Cleaner' Rather than 'Henry Xtra Vacuum Cleaner' ?? Will it really make much difference? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
International SEO, Ecommerce & Rich Snippets
I have an Australian Ecommerce site. I also sell to NZ and USA . As part of the user experience it will detect where you are and change the currency accordingly. so when google crawls - the currency will always be USD I guess ( because it is a US IP address ). My question - how can I embed ecommerce microdata that will show the correct currency / price to the correct country in SERPS ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
301 Redirects?
We have an e-commerce website with about 4500 products for sale. About 1200 of these items were not showing up in the Google PLA ads because they were $0 dollar items, so we made those products invisible. Then Set 301 Redirects for each of the 1200 items. My question is this; we want to turn back on the 1200 items, should we delete the 301 redirects that are in place for them.? Will it hurt SEO performance by having them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Goriilla0 -
Using a 302 re-direct from http://www to https://www to secure customer data
My website sends Customers from a http://www.mysite.com/features page to a https://www.mysite.com/register page which is an account sign-up form using a 302 re-direct. Any page that collects customer data has an authenticated SSL certificate to protect any data on the site. Is this 302 the most appropriate way of doing this as the weekly crawl picks it up as being bad practise? Is there a better alternative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ubique0 -
What could be the reasons why PA & DA changed
Hi, What could be the reason why PA & DA of the site dropped? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal0 -
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect
Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
Using a 302 instead of a 301
I am trying to figure out the best way to garner the most amount of link value. We have an app that lives on a sub-domain ... For the purposes of this question, let's call it app.mydomain.com. We provide a service with this app that requires clients (with very high ranking websites) to link into app located on the sub-domain. Would I garner more authority if had the high ranking client website link into a url that wasn't a sub-domain and redirect it using a 302? For example: What if I created a 302 that was www.mydomain.com/app and have it redirected to the sub-domain version of app.mydomain.com? Additionally am I correct to assume that a 301 would merely pass that value to the sub domain and NOT provide much value to the root?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NextGenEDU0 -
SEOMoz Internal Dupe. Content & Possible Coding Issues
SEOmoz Community! I have a relatively complicated SEO issue that has me pretty stumped... First and foremost, I'd appreciate any suggestions that you all may have. I'll be the first to admit that I am not an SEO expert (though I am trying to be). Most of my expertise is with PPC. But that's beside the point. Now, the issues I am having: I have two sites: http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx and http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/Default.aspx A lot of our SEO efforts thus-far have done good for Federal Auto Loan... and we are seeing positive impacts from them. However, we recently did a server transfer (may or may not be related)... and since that time a significant number of INTERNAL duplicate content pages have appeared through the SEOmoz crawler. The number is around 20+ for both Federal Auto Loan and Federal Mortgage Services (see attachments). I've tried to include as much as I can via the attachments. What you will see is all of the content pages (articles) with dupe. content issues along with a screen capture of the articles being listed as duplicate for the pages: Car Financing How It Works A Home Loan is Possible with Bad Credit (Please let me know if you could use more examples) At first I assumed it was simply an issue with SEOmoz... however, I am now worried it is impacting my sites (I wasn't originally because Federal Auto Loan has great quality scores and is climbing in organic presence daily). That being said, we recently launched Federal Mortgage Services for PPC... and my quality scores are relatively poor. In fact, we are not even ranking (scratch that, not even showing that we have content) for "mortgage refinance" even though we have content (unique, good, and original content) specifically around "mortgage refinance" keywords. All things considered, Federal Mortgage Services should be tighter in the SEO department than Federal Auto Loan... but it is clearly not! I could really use some significant help here... Both of our sites have a number of access points: http://www.federalautoloan.com/Default.aspx and http://www.federalmortgageservices.com/Default.aspx are both the designated home pages. And I have rel=canonical tags stating such. However, my sites can also be reached via the following: http://www.federalautoloan.com http://www.federalautoloan.com/default.aspx http://www.federalmortgageservices.com http://www.federalmortgageservics.com/default.aspx Should I incorporate code that "redirects" traffic as well? Or is it fine with just the relevancy tags? I apologize for such a long post, but I wanted to include as much as possible up-front. If you have any further questions... I'll be happy to include more details. Thank you all in advance for the help! I greatly appreciate it! F7dWJ.png dN9Xk.png dN9Xk.png G62JC.png ABL7x.png 7yG92.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WPColt0