Cannot 301 redirect, alternatives?
-
Hi, the company has changed it's name so now under a different domain. All pages have been 301 redirected on a 1:1 basis apart from the home page. For some reason IT cannot 301 redirect the old home page to the new website home page. At suggestions? Perhaps canonical it? Meantime the old home page copy has been changed to say the company name has changed and a link to the new website. Any help greatly appreciated.
-
Yeah, sorry, would get rid of the 1-to-1s (can't think of a work around just now).
See if you can find out why they can't do it. If it is something like MX records then change those and put the 301 in normally.
You could also put a meta refresh in to take customers to the new page; no real SEO value though.
-
As Barry said, I can't think why a 301 can't be added to the homepage, but the change of address is there for exactly this reason and will help Google retain your site's ranking (their words)
Andy
-
Hi Barry & Andy Many thanks for the replies. Re registrar level - would that not remove the 1:1 301 redirects already in place? Re Webmaster change fo address - indeed, but I was holding off doing that till I had the home page issue sorted. Perhaps I should just do it? Many thanks once again guys!
-
I'd take it out of ITs hands.
Can't think of a reason why they can't 301 it, it but you can forward it (no masking) at registrar level.
If they need to keep the MX records or something they can do that there as well.
-
You could use the Change of Address in Google Webmaster Tools. You will find this under the Configuration heading.
You can read more about this here also:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
Andy
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
-
Hundreds of 301 Redirects. Remove Pages or Not?
Hi Mozers, I have a website that has literally got hundreds of 301 redirects. I had a close look at these URLs and only some of them have backlinks to it and remaining all of them are not indexing in Google and has got not backlinks at all. Based on what I have noticed experts mentioning, loads of 301 redirects can potentially slow down the site speed. In a case like the website I have, should I completely take off the pages from website to reduce the number of 301 redirects or should I leave 301 redirects? There is no traffic or backlinks coming from these URLs. Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
To redirect or not to redirect, that is the question
I work for a software company that is redeveloping the website (same domain.) We have tons of content in the form of articles and documents for support, how to use the product better, case studies, and blog posts. I've downloaded a landing page report and many of these have low impressions and little or no clicks (some ranked high other very low.) Should I redirect all this content to the new site where some of it won't exist or forget about it because of the lack of juice? Is there a rule-of-thumb threshold for redirecting for content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody15969167212220 -
301 Redirecting from Static to Dynamic URLs. I think we messed up
I'm looking for some guidance on an issue I believe we created for ourselves and if we undo what we did. We recently added attributed search to our sites. This of course created a bunch of dynamically generated URLS. For various reasons, it was decided to take some of our existing static URLs and 301 redirect them to their dyanamic counterpart. Ex .../Empire-Paintball-Masks-0Y.aspx now redirects to .../Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles-0Y.aspx?Manufacturer=Empire Many of these stat URLS had top 3 rankings for their associated keywords. Now, we don't rank for anything. I realize that 301 redirecting is the way to go...if you NEED to. My guess is our drop in keyword ranking is directly tied to what we did. I'm looking for an solid argument to be made to my boss as to why we should not have done this and that it, more than likely has resulted in dropped keyword rankings and organic traffic. I welcome any input. Also, if we decided to revert back (remove all 301 redirects and de-index all dynamic URLS), what is the likely hood we can recapture some of this lost organic traffic? Can I disallow indexing in a robot.txt file to remove, say anything with a '?' in the URL? Would the above URL example (which was ranking in the top 3 in SERPs), have a good chance of finding its way back? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Istoresinc1 -
301 redirect recommendations
One of our clients we are working on have two sites the main with a PR5 and a separate one with a PR4. We are planning on doing a 301 from the PR4 to a page on the PR5 Is it best to do: www.PR4.com ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page or www.PR4.com/page ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page Most pages on the PR4 site can fit into one PR5 page logically. However the PR4 has an about us, contact us, blog/with posts, FAQ, Applications, Legal Resources which are all pretty out dated.. The PR4 site is kinda messy and we are not sure if it will be easy to 301 each page individually with the user in mind. can we do a sitewide 301 redirect from the root PR4.com to a page PR/5.com/releveantPR4page and also do deeper 301's? PR4.com/PR4page ---> PR5.com/releveantPR4page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
301 Redirect and Webmaster Central
I've been working on removing canonical issues. My host is Apache. Is this the correct code for my htaccess? RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spkcp111
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^luckygemstones.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] SECOND!!! I have two websites under Google's Webmaster Central; http://luckygemstones.com which gets NO 404 soft errors... AND http://www.luckygemstones.com which has 247 soft 404 errors... I think I should DELETE the http://luckygemstones.com site from Webmaster Central--the 301 redirect handles the"www" thing. Is this correct? I hate to hose things (even worse?) Help! Kathleen0 -
Do I need to use canonical tags if I'm 301 redirecting pages?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
301 Redirect question
Which is the best way to set up the 301 redirect on my main home page? http://horsebuggy.com to http://www.horsebuggy.com Or does it make a difference? Boodreaux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
What happens with a 301 redirected page?
Hi All, What happens with an indexed page that I 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Is it removed from the Google index after a while? Thanks0