Do my redirects on my homepage need to be 301?
-
Our domain name is something like www.I-am-cool.com but most people just type in iamcool.com After doing some research I found that those are 302 redirects and I think they should be 301. If I am correct do I need to redirect www.iamcool.com and iamcool.com or just one or the other?
-
That is exactly what I was looking for. Thank You.
-
Sorry, Niners, I wasn't clear you were talking about two different spellings of the domain as well as the www and non www versions. I had assumed that was just a typo. Sorry 'bout that.
So... if you own iamcool.com and i-am-cool-com, you essentially have four variations for the domain URL you need to address. The Search Engines consider each of these to be different sites:
- www.i-am-cool-com
- i-am-cool.com
- www.iamcool.com
- iamcool.com
Out of all of these, you're going to pick the one that is your primary site address. This will become what's known as your FQDN - Fully Qualified Domain Name. This will be the URL you use for EVERYTHING you control. All links will use this full version, it's what you'll put on business cards, in bio links on guest posts, everything.
Since you say that the version with the hyphens has been in existence the longest, I would recommend that become your primary. And further, I suspect that the www version of it probably has the most incoming links.
So,,, www.i-am-cool.com will become your primary site address - your FQDN. (Assuming you agree with what's stated above.)
Once that's decided, you now need to 301-redirect each of the other versions directly to that www.i-am-cool.com URL. (For example, you specifically want to avoid a situation where iamcoolcom redirects to www.iamcool,com, which then redirects again to the final www.i-am-cool.com.)
Once you've done the redirects, you'll want to keep a close eye on your Webmaster Tools and Analytics to make sure you're not getting 404s from pages not being caught by the redirects correctly. In addition, you can use the hostnames report in Analytics to make sure that only your FQDN is showing up, indicating all the other versions are redirecting correctly.
Hope that clears things up a little more.
Paul
-
definitely keep it then!
-
Changing it to a 301 makes sense. Do I need to change for both with the www and without? I have never quite figured out if that counts as two different urls or not.
-
The only reason we still use the one with the hyphens is because we have been using the same domain name for over ten years.
-
You definitely need to change the 302 to a 301 redirect, Niners. Typically, you check which version has the most incoming links already (since it's an existing site) and make that the primary address. Then you use the 301 redirect to point the other URL to the primary one.
Even though many people may directly type in the URL without the www, most people who are writing it as a link on a webpage will do it including the www. Having those incoming links avoid needing a redirect is more important than the folks typing in direct (since even 301s don't pass absolutely all the link authority.)
Make sense?
Paul
-
302 redirects do not pass PR so you need to 301 the site instead, if there is PR on that site. if not you can just point that domain at the DNS level and it will resolve.
but i would think the version without the hyphens is more desirable. why isn't that your main domain name? obviously you own both domains. people only use the hyphens when the domain name they want is already taken.
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
-
Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO
I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts? Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
301 redirects broken - problems - please help!
Hi, I have a bit of an issue... Around a year ago we launched a new company. This company was launched out of a trading style of another company owned by our parent group (the trading style no longer exists). We used a lot of the content from the old trading style website, carefully mapping page-to-page 301 redirects, using the change of address tool in webmaster tools and generally did a good job of it. The reason I know we did a good job is that although we lost some traffic in the month we rebranded, we didn't lose rankings. We have since gained traffic exponentially and have managed to increase our organic traffic by over 200% over the last year. All well and good. However, a mistake has recently occurred whereby the old trading style website domain was deleted from the server for a period of around 2-3 weeks. It has since been reinstated. Since then, although we haven't lost rankings for the keywords we track I can see in webmaster tools that a number of our pages have been deindexed (around 100+). It has been suggested that we put the old homepage back up, and include a link to the XML sitemap to get Google to recrawl the old URLs and reinstate our 301 redirects. I'm OK with this (up to a point - personally I don't think it's an elegant solution) however I always thought you didn't need a link to the xml sitemap from the website and that the crawlers should just find it? Our current plan is not to put the homepage up exactly as it was (I don't believe this would make good business sense given that the company no longer exists), but to make it live with an explanation that the website has moved to a different domain with a big old button pointing to the new site. I'm wondering if we also need a button to the xml sitemap or not? I know I can put a sitemap link in the robots file, but I wonder if that would be enough for Google to find it? Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
301 redirects in Wordpress vs. making old posts that you no longer want your audience to see private.
I'm working on Wordpress at the moment changing the content of a page on my website. The page has a lot of educational information and each section is unique. I had to go through and edit each section on google documents and now I'm posting all the new pages and making the old pages private on wordpress. Is this a good idea? I'm worried google will still crawl my private education pages and think these are duplicates since the new pages somewhat resemble the old. Also, should I be 301 redirecting all the old education pages to the corresponding new ones even if they are private on wordpress? I understand that the 301 redirect should only be used if you want the old page to go to a new one. What i don't understand id weather this will still be relevant or work if I've already made the old page private on wordpress. Thank You!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SapphireCo0 -
(Australia) Changing .net.au to .com.au - web dev is refusing to do a 301 redirect and wants to run two sites?
After years using a .net.au site, my client has purchased the .com.au version of the same domain. I've now set up a new, responsive website using a wordpress template with new content, but used a similar page structure. I've asked their web developer to now do a 301 permanent redirect on each old page from .net.au site to it's new .com.au page, but he has refused, saying it would be bad for long term SEO. Instead, he says they should run both sites (which I thought would cause duplicate content issues). Both domains are hosted with the same company. I thought as long as the 301 redirects were done on a page by page basis, there were no issues? I'm no SEO expert, (which he claims to be), so I just wanted to get another opinion on what best practice would be in this instance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | carolineraad0 -
Does this require site-wide 301 redirects?
I have an old site that we are re-building, and also moving form Yahoo Stores to Big Commerce. yahoo uses site.com/page.html and BC uses site.com/page. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the old .html format? some of the pages on the old site have no links to them from external sites. Do they even need re-directs, or should I just let Google find the new page equivalents when they crawl the new version of the site? While some of the old pages (primarily product pages) have OK urls, others have obscure product numbers as the URL. Obviously the latter need re-directing to a more relevant page, but what about situations like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grabapple
_/accessory-product.html _ > product-accessory
In this example, the existing URL is fine, except for the .html extention. If I just used the old URL, would having a mix of /sample.html and /sample pages hurt me? Thanks in advance for your help and input! Dave0 -
301 Redirecting an Entire Site
I have a question which has had me thinking for hours..... If SITE A is ranking well on a number of search phrases and you 301 that site to another (SITE B). The site will change on the Google SERPs to the site which you've re-directed to... In this case SITE B. But how do you maintain the rankings of SITE A?. Do you keep the rankings of SITE A forever? Or will your rankings of SITE A (now SITE B) gradually slip as other sites rank higher? As you can no longer edit SITE A does Google take into consideration the content on SITE B and no longer take anything that SITE A had to offer into consideration? SITE B has simply replaced it in the SERPs??...... Please can anybody help? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | karl620 -
How to 301 redirect all URLs with /? in?
I want to redirect all URLs that have /? in it. Indexed in Google is a bunch of urls lik: mysite.com/?674764 mysite.com/?rtf8y78 I want all these URLs to be redirected to my home page. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
SEOMOZ found basically all my articles and says they need a 301 redirect ?
Hope someone can HELP. So my site looks like it has the proper 301 redirect to www. for the main domain. But for some reason my articles that have a /trackback on them redirect to same address with out the trackback at the end. How do i fix this? seomoz is saying all my articles need a 301 redirect .all like 100. Thanks any help would be great
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jstgobig0