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,
-
Actually in this case the domain ranks highly but doesn't have many (if any) quality links. So is it likely that we will loose the rankings if we place a 301 redirect on the site?
-
Also don't forget you need to setup a change of address in google webmaster tools
-
If by "How do you maintain the rankings of site A" you mean "what value am I passing over to site B once site A is gone", remember that Site A probably got its ranking through its link portfolio and that isn't going to go away immediately. The purpose of the 301 is to direct crawlers and humans to the content that has superseded the content that was originally linked to.
-
Think of a 301 as a funeral service. Bob Sr is dead and now Bob Jr will carry on the family business. But Bob Jr is not Bob Sr. He needs to be treated as such.
The main problem with a 301 is that the changeover takes time. Your old page may lose its rankings to the new page before the new page inherits the popularity of the old. Eventually A is gone from the index and only B remains. But it's a different site and Google will still treat it as such. B will have to get its own popularity.
Incidentally, moving the entire site can be helped along by using WMT.
-
You won't automatically get the rankings from site A but I have done this in practice 3 times in the past year with whole site redirects and each time we have seen a significant boost in domain authority for the site we redirected to. This boosted our rankings and traffic.
If you do this just make sure you redirect at the page level tans also do outreach to see if you can get your best external followed links changed to your new url.
-
If you are redirecting all of the pages from Site A to Site B, Site A really no longer exists from a content point of view. You are simply passing on some of the authority from Site A to Site B, which will increase the authority of Site B.
You are not keeping Site A's rankings. You are telling Google, "I don't use Site A anymore, but the content on Site B is the equivalent... you should use that instead." If you were ranking #5 for a keyword using Site A, you will not automatically rank #5 for Site B when you have the redirect in place.
If you were to completely remove the content from Site A, Google would not care, because you have redirects that immediately redirect users and spiders from Site A to the Site B equivalent.
Does that answer your question?
Mike
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
-
301 redirecting a site that currently links to the target site
I have a personal blog that has a good amount of back links pointing at it from high quality relevant authoritative sites in my niche. I also run a company in the same niche. I link to a page on the company site from the personal blog article that has bunch of relevant links pointing at it (as it's highly relevant to the content on the personal blog). Overview: Relevant personal blog post has a bunch of relevant external links pointing at it (completely organic). Relevant personal blog post then links (externally) to relevant company site page and is helping that page rank. Question: If I do the work to 301 the personal blog to the company site, and then link internally from the blog page to the other relevant company page, will this kill that back link or will the internal link help as much as the current external link does currently? **For clarity: ** External sites => External blog => External link to company page VS External sites => External blog 301 => Blog page (now on company blog) => Internal link to target page I would love to hear from anyone that has performed this in the past 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Keyword_NotProvided0 -
Should I 301 this ecommerce site, or turn it into a blog?
Hey everyone, I have a couple of ecommerce sites - Site 1 (DA33) and Site 2 (DA24). They are in the same niche and have the same products, a relic of how our business started in 2007. But now we just want to manage one brand, Site 1. This is our question: Is it better to 301 Site 2 into Site 1 (page by page redirect), or would it be valuable to instead turn Site 2 into a blog site? Site 2 currently has some good relevant links to it that would be nice to 301 to Site 1, but the value of 301 redirects seems to have been steadily diminishing since roughly 2011. If we take Site 2 and turn it into a WordPress blog, develop some good industry-relevant content on it (and outsource/allow guest posts on it for relevant quality content as well), and sometimes we drop a link or two into the content to help promote Site 1 - would that be more valuable than a 301? Obviously, a lot more "work" goes into creating a content site than just 301'ing it over. I guess the question is: does a page-by-page 301 of a niche-identical and even product-identical site into another have more of a benefit for SEO than getting some content-relevant anchor text links on a blog site? What would you do in my position?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mozUser14692350692210 -
Have You 301 Redirected Domain A to Domain B ?
I only have two questions.... Approximately when did you do it (year is close enough)? Did the rankings of Domain B go up? Any other information that you care to share will be appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
Multiple 301 redirects for a HTTPS URL. Good or bad?
I'm working on an ecommerce website that has a few snags and issues with it's coding. They're using https, and when you access the website through domain.com, theres a 301 redirect to http://www.domain.com and then this, in turn, redirected to https://www.domain.com. Would this have a deterimental effect or is that considered the best way to do it. Have the website redirect to http and then all http access is redirected to the https URL? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Web developer won't 301 redirect to my new website....what can I do?
I want to come away from our third party web developer and use a new website with different web developers, however the web developer wont 301 redirect the old url's to the new ones. Is he required to do this by law? Is there away of doing the 301 redirects without him? Any advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks,Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoGri0 -
Language Detection redirect: 301 or 302?
We have a site offering a voip app in 4 languages. Users are currently 302 redirected from the root page to /language subpages, depending on their browser language. Discussions about the sense of this aside: Is it correct to use a 302 redirect here or should users be 301 redirected to their respective languages? I don't find any guideline on this whatsoever...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner1 -
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 -
Is it ok to use both 301 redirect and rel="canonical' at the same time?
Hi everyone, I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I just wasn't able to find a response in previous questions. To fix the problems in our website regarding duplication I have the possibility to set up 301's and, at the same time, modify our CMS so that it automatically sets a rel="canonical" tag for every page that is generated. Would it be a problem to have both methods set up? Is it a problem to have a on a page that is redirecting to another one? Is it advisable to have a rel="canonical" tag on every single page? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDLOnlineChannel0