Aged domain and 301 redirect? (11 year old domain)
-
Hey everyone,
I'm about to launch a new website for an accounting firm.
They currently have a website, which has an 11 year old domain.
They are doing very well locally for SEO, and i'm guessing it's because of the aged domain, as their website is very badly built, and contains almost no content.
They would like to launch the new site with a simpler, easier to remember domain.
If i launch the new site, point the aged domain using a 301 redirect, and do redirects for all of the old pages to the newer versions of them, is there a chance the company will lose their current SEO rankings?
Thanks!
-
Great!
Thanks for pointing me to that other thread as well, tons of great info.
Thanks again Matt!
-
No problem Rob - domain age won't be passed through a 301 redirect
However in relation to the age of a domain and how it impacts your ranking have a look at this interesting Q&A from a couple of months ago -
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-your-urls-age-affect-your-ranking
I think you will be fine if you create a 301 redirect from the old domain and make sure you take the time to build a decent natural looking link profile and have optimised the site for the visitor and not the search engines. Taking into account all the on-page factors without going overboard....
-
Thanks for the reply Matt.
The link juice isn't even really the big worry here, as the current site only has 10 backlinks haha.
Are the benefits of the domain age passed along with link juice?
Sorry if these questions are a little redundant, but I really want to minimize any issues with the launch for the client
Thanks again!
-
Well what I would say is that when you do a 301 redirect from one domain to another you will lose some of the link juice that has been gained (a 301 passes around 90-99% of juice), so there is chance that when you do this you may see a difference in your SEO rankings. However if done correctly the impact is likely to be minimal and there are plenty of us that have done this successfully and it has worked out for the better. Remember as you said the website is poorly optimised and you are going to be pointing to a new site that has been optimised sensibly and will contain more content, so long term you are on to a winner and you should see improvements in search rankings and traffic generated by your site. Also remember online marketing and SEO is about the long term goals, as well as quick fixes and low hanging fruit that can be picked up, so explain this to the accounting firm and explain how your strategy will cause minimum impact and in the long run it will work to their businesses advantage.
Hope this helps - remember when you do your 301 redirect and tell Google in Google Webmaster Tools that your site has moved it does take time for the search engines to catch up...
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 old image that has backlinks
Hi Moz Community! I'm doing an audit of a website and did a backlink analysis. In the backlink analysis, there is an image that has 66 backlinks but the image doesn't exist on the website anymore (it was on a website that was created in 2011 - 2 web launches ago). I don't believe a 301 redirect will work for an image that doesn't exist anymore. How would I redirect the image URL (it's WordPress so we have a specific URL that other websites are linking to but get 404 errors) without going to each individual website and requesting they change the URL link? Any advice or recommendations would be great. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradChandler1 -
301 redirect impact on ranking
If Website A is ranking 19th position in Google for a specific keyword, and Website B is ranking 30th position for the same keyword, What would be impact after 301 redirect? Will Website A drop to 30th position because of 301 or existing position would improve because of link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
301 redirect to avoid duplicate content penalty
I have two websites with identical content. Haya and ethnic Both websites have similar products. I would like to get rid of ethniccode I have already started to de-index ethniccode. My question is, Will I get any SEO benefit or Will it be harmful if I 301 direct the below only URL’s https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez -> https://www.hayacreations/collections/salwar-kameez https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez/anarkali-suits - > https://www.hayacreations/collections/anarkali-suits
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
301 migration - Indexed Pages rising on old site
Hello, We did a 301 redirect from site a to site b back in March. I would check on a daily basis on the index count using query "site:sitename" The past couple of days, the old domain (that was 301 redirected) indexed pages has been rising which is really concerning. We did a 301 redirect back in march 2016, and the indexed count went from 400k pages down to 78k. However, the past 3 days it went from 78k to 89,500. And I'm worried that the number is going to continue to rise. My question - What would you do to investigate / how to investigate this issue? Would it be screaming frog and look at redirects? Or is this a unique scenario that I'd have to do other steps/procedures?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
What to do about old urls that don't logically 301 redirect to current site?
Mozzers, I have changed my site url structure several times. As a result, I now have a lot of old URLs that don't really logically redirect to anything in the current site. I started out 404-ing them, but it seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate AND it wasn't removing them from the index after being crawled several times. There are way too many (>100k) to use the URL removal tool even at a directory level. So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this. Should I (a) just 404 them and wait for Google to remove (b) keep the 200, noindex or (c) are there other things I can do? 410 maybe? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Can there be to many 301 redirects
Is it possible to have to many 301 redirects. I am currently looking at 156 of them. Does this create any quality issues with regard to site performance or any other issues. Thank you for your consideration!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | APICDA0 -
How to handle the 301 of a complete domain on URL level
We will be shutting down an old website with many (good) links, since the site has no strategic relevance anymore. We do have many other sites, but none of them has exactly the same content/topic. Nonetheless, I would like to keep the juice and redirect the site to another newer project. However, I want to redirect certain URLs of the old site to probably even different domains, depending on which content matches best with the alternative newer site. Does this make sense? Or would youjust redirect the whole domain to one other domain although they don't really have the same topic And how would you handle the URL redirects if the old site has more than 50k URLs? Because that is the case. Thanks for any advice
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Windex0