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
-
Will this 301 redirects help me?
Hello, recently, I found out about all the SEO advantages from 301 redirects. I had 3 websites that are now expired, their topic was Counter Strike 1.6 servers. All of these websites were registered 9 years ago and have few good backlinks (from website with 1%-3% spam score and DA 30+). Now I have one website that is not only about Counter Strike 1.6 but also many other Steam shooter games. If I revive these 3 old domains and 301 redirect them to my new one, will it help me with SEO and increase my ranking on Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bonito19930 -
301 Old domain with HTTPS to new domain with HTTPS
I am a bit boggled about https to https we redirected olddomain.com to https://www.newdomain.com, but redirecting https://www.olddomain.com or non-www is not possible. because the certificate does not exist on a level where you are redirecting. only if I setup a new host and add a htaccess file will this work. What should I do? just redirect the rest and hope for the best?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waqid0 -
Google Is Indexing my 301 Redirects to Other sites
Long story but now i have a few links from my site 301 redirecting to youtube videos or eCommerce stores. They carry a considerable amount of traffic that i benefit from so i can't take them down, and that traffic is people from other websites, so basically i have backlinks from places that i don't own, to my redirect urls (Ex. http://example.com/redirect) My problem is that google is indexing them and doesn't let them go, i have tried blocking that url from robots.txt but google is still indexing it uncrawled, i have also tried allowing google to crawl it and adding noindex from robots.txt, i have tried removing it from GWT but it pops back again after a few days. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cuarto7150 -
Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect
I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings1 -
Best Approach to Redirect One Domain to Another
So I'm about to migrate one domain to another. Lets say I'm migrating boo.com to foo.com. Boo.com has good organic traffic & has some really well ranked pages. For this reason (I think) I want to send that traffic to some where other than the foo.com homepage. Perhaps a catered landing page. My question is can I redirect some of the specific pages on boo.com to a landing page on foo.com & then redirect the delta to foo.com's homepage? Or am a risking not fully transferring the full credit of one domain to another if I take that approach & therefore I should just redirect one domain to the other in its entirety? Thanks, Rich
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RPD0 -
Should /node/ URLs be 301 redirect to Clean URLs
Hi All! We are in the process of migrating to Drupal and I know that I want to block any instance of /node/ URLs with my robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing them. My question is, should we set 301 redirects on the /node/ versions of the URLs to redirect to their corresponding "clean" URL, or should the robots.txt blocking and canonical link element be enough? My gut tells me to ask for the 301 redirects, but I just want to hear additional opinions. Thank you! MS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
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 -
Very Puzzled --- 301 ReDirects Did Not Work - Lost Rankings - Any Thoughts?
This one has us stumped and frustrated, hopefully someone out there in SEOMoz land can give us some thoughts and/or suggestions on what's going on and how to remedy. This is a follow-up to a post I made awhile back. Here is an excerpt from the original post -- We currently have 3 different versions of our State Business-for-Sale listings pages - the versions are: Version 1 -- Preferred Version (Links on Homepage www.businessbroker.net) http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Vermont-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx Title = Vermont Business for Sale Ads - Vermont Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker (I realize the title needs work) Version 2: (Links on this page: http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/blistings.ihtml) URL Prior to 301 change --- http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-Vermont.aspx Title = Vermont Business for Sale | 120 Vermont Businesses for Sale | BusinessBroker.net Version 3: (Links on this page: http://www.businessbroker.net/businessesforsale.ihtml) URL Prior to 301 change --- http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/business_for_sale_vermont.ihtml Title = Vermont Businesses for Sale at BusinessBroker.net - Vermont Business for Sale While the page titles and meta data are a bit different, the bulk of the page content (which is the listings rendered) are identical. OK, so we decided to test this on 5 of our State pages - I will use VERMONT in this discussion. We did 301 ReDirects on Version 2 and Version 3 -- they now redirect to Version 1 - we did the redirects and also changed the URL's on the pages. Prior to the change, we were ranking for keywords like "Vermont Business for Sale" and some other similar keywords -- on 1st page of Google --- now, we have lost our rankings big time. Did we do something wrong? I thought when you did 301's the majority of link juice was supposed to be preserved (losing 10% or so) -- this didn't happen in our case. Any help on what we can do would be appreciated. We only did 5 States as a test and also noticed big drops for Maine as well. These were both states where VERSION 2 was the page that was showing up in SERPs. Thanks in advance for wading through this long post and any help you can provide!! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MWM37720