301 Redirecting an Entire Site
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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,
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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?
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Also don't forget you need to setup a change of address in google webmaster tools
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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 The purpose of the 301 is to direct crawlers and humans to the content that has superseded the content that was originally linked to.
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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.
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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.
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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
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