URL redirecting domains
-
Hi
Is there anything wrong/dangerous forwarding a clutch of domains to a sub page (landing page) on a different domain ?
Say Brand X buys Brand Z and wants to close down Brand Z site but have Brand Z domain fwd to a landing page (explaining the company acquisition) on Brand X site. In addition Brand Z had a few related but unused domains forwarding to Brand Z doman & now also wants those fwd'd to the new landing page on brand X
Since the reasons for doing this forwarding are legitimate company reasons relating to an acquisition i would have thought it should be ok but can anyone think of a reason why could be bad since i remember in the old days peeps used to redirect domains for seo reasons so worried fwd'ing a load of domains could cause some sort of negative flag with big G ?
Also do domain redirects transfer the authority/juice from the old site/domain to the new destination page (new landing page on brand x site) similar to how a 301 redirect works ?
Many Thanks
Dan
-
Good stuff ! thanks for all your help Aleyda
-
Your registrar usually gives you the option to choose if it's a temporary or a permanent situation so it forwards with 302 or 301 depending on that. Nonetheless, you can check directly yourself very easily with: http://web-sniffer.net/ by taking a look at the HTTP response header of the forwarded domain (and see if it's a 301). Good luck with the new domain
-
Thanks Aleyda
yes have done this already
Im just trying to establish if this acts like a 301 still in regard to the passing of old domains authority to the new url being fwd'd to ?
Thanks
Dan
-
Hi Dan, my domain registrar let me forward to any URL (not necessarily another domain root) so there shouldn't be an issue to do it. I recommend that you check with your registrar if you can do the same with yours. Thanks
-
Thanks Aleyda
Its going to redirect/forwarding to a specific landing page on the new domain, not the domain itself
Many Thanks
Dan
-
Hi Dan! Thanks for the clarification. This change it all really and is pretty straightforward then: You should directly go to your domain registrar and set the "Domain Forwarding" option to go to the new domain.
-
Hi Aleyda
Thanks so much for spending the time to write such a detailed and informative reply
However its the domain being redirected not the pages, since all the old pages have been removed from the web & hosting shut down (due it being an acquisition & not a migration). This means no opportunity for a .htaccess file as far as i understand since that requires a server to sit on doesnt it? and there isnt one anymore.
So we have just redirected the old domain to a landing page on the acquiring companies website via standard domain forwarding within the dns control panel. Do you know if this will act like a 301 i.e. transfer the old domains authority to the landing page ?
Many Thanks
Dan
-
Hi Dan,
What is is important in these types of scenarios is that you make sure that the redirects are relevant from a user and SEO perspective, since although the link popularity from the old pages will pass by just 301-redirecting them to their new location, what it is important to preserve is also the relevance of these redirects, since these old pages could be already not only externally linked, but also ranking for keywords relevant to their specific content, so if you do a "bulk" redirect to a new page that is not optimized for these keywords (and is very unlikely that a single page is optimized and relevant for a high diverse amount of content and keywords that are at the moment covered through many different pages) you will lose those rankings.
Because of this, take a look at which are the keywords bringing organic traffic to the "old pages" you want to redirect and what you should do to preserve this organic traffic is to redirect them to the new pages on your new domain that also cover these topics, so they will still be relevant for them and when you redirect to them, you won't not only refer the popularity but also keep the rankings and make sure that your users are finding that they were looking for (or at least, something similar).
In case you need to provide information to your users telling them that they're being redirected since the old pages have been migrated because of an acquisition, you can do it so through a message "banner" like the one that Yahoo uses here to warn visitors that they have been redirected to another language version, in a non-intrusive way.
The best way to implement 301-redirects is server side. In case you're using an Apache server then you will need to edit your .htaccess file that you can access easily via FTP for example, and should be located in your root domain.
If you would redirect your old domain pages to a new one preserving the URL structure you would be able to do this with rewriting rules, very straightforward in this case:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]Nonetheless, if you need to implement them in a page to page level, since the URL names of in the new domain are not the same than in the old one, you might need to implement them in a page to page basis:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^oldurl.html$ http://www.newdomain.com/newurl.htmlI hope this helps!
Aleyda
-
Many Thanks Sorina !!
I thought 301 redirects are on the .htaccess file which requires a file lstill to be on a server containing the 301 instruction. Since the server/hosting is being deleted then i cant see how its possible to leave a 301 redirect on there and the redirect hence must take place in/on the dns record ?
-
From what I saw Google makes efforts in identifying sneaky domain redirection techniques, so I believe when you do a legit one like you described above there are no risks.
As for domain redirects/301 redirects - these aren't different redirect types, just different way of saying it. What a consider a "domain redirect" must be a 301 redirect in order to pass link juice. If you have doubts about how these work, contact your hosting provider to make sure what they call "domain redirect" is actually a 301 http responce status code that the server sends out for that domain.
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
-
Search Console - Should I request to index redirected URL or Mark as fixed?
Hi all, Many blog posts used to be showing 404s when doing crawl tests and in search console (despite being there when visited.) I realized it was an issue with URL structure. It used to be example.com/post-name I've fixed the issue by changing the URL structure in Wordpress so that they now follow the structure of example.com/post-type/post-name According to sitemaps, Google has now indexed all posts in /post-type/post-name. My question is what to do with crawl errors in Search Console that are still there for example.com/postname. When I fetch, I get a redirect status (which is accurate). At this point should I request to index or mark as fixed? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | MouthyPR0 -
Htaccess redirects
Annoyingly it's time to play with this beast again. I've been given the task of doing the following. Keeping the homepage live Redirecting categories to the specific categories on the new site Catch all redirects Now i've managed to setup the specific categories and the catch all redirects, however I am unsure how to keep the homepage live (which is like this:www.domain.com/ so I can't just exclude that?) Would appreciate any help.
Technical SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Strange URL redirecting to my new site
Hi all, I recently relaunched a site on a brand new URL - www.boardwarehouse.co.uk. I've spent the last couple of weeks building some backlinks as well as developing a basic content strategy. We've started ranking for a few of our less competitive keywords which is great, however there's a strange site which either redirects or is mirroring our content. I'm at a complete loss as to what's causing this to happen and what i can do to stop it. On the attachment - my content is top and second. The fourth result is the offending site. Any help/ advice would be most helpful! Thanks in advance, Alick 0BSyNn6
Technical SEO | | Alick3000 -
What to do with a 302 redirect after a while
Hi guys, A client of ours has a website with a very bad linkprofile. We adressed this issue and we migrated the website to another domain. We redirected the bad website (cornelisbedding.be) to the new domain (cornelisbedding.com) with a 302 redirect. We didn't want to pass the bad link juice. The problem we are having now is that we can't afford to lose the redirect on cornelisbedding.be. We would lose to much traffic because the old domain still has alot of links that generate good quality traffic. I have read that Google will treat 302 redirects as 301's in the long run. We really want to avoid this.
Technical SEO | | Jacobe
We were thinking of using a meta refresh with a delay on, but in Google's eyes that would be considered spammy. Are their any other suggestions on how to handle this? Thanks you!0 -
If a permanent redirect is supposed to transfer SEO from the old page to the new page, why has my domain authority been impacted?
For example, we redirected our old domain to a new one (leaving no duplicate content on the old domain) and saw a 40% decrease in domain authority. Isn't a permanent redirect supposed to transfer link authority to the place it is redirecting to? Did I do something wrong?
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Should a 301 from a penalised domain to a new domain be removed?
A business traded on a domain let's say example.COM which was heavily penalised due to non-removable spammy back links. Their previous SEO advised them to set up on example.CO.UK but redirected example.COM to example.CO.UK. Example.CO.UK ranks very poorly, presumably due to being 'tarred with the same brush' i.e. attributed with the ills of example.COM. Will it do any good to remove the redirect or is example.CO.UK now doomed as well?
Technical SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy1