301 an old site to a newer site...
-
Hi
First, to be upfront - these are not my websites, I'm asking because they are trying to compete in my niche.
Here's the details, then the questions...
There is a website that is a few months old with about 200 indexed pages and about 20 links, call this newsite.com
There is a website that is a few years old with over 10,000 indexed pages and over 20,000 links, call this oldsite.com
newsite.com acquired oldsite.com and set a 301 redirect so every page of oldsite.com is re-directed to the front page of newsite.com
newsite.com & oldsite.com are on the same topic, the 301 occurred in the past week.
Now, oldsite.com is out of the SERPs and newsite.com is pretty much ranking in the same spot (top 10) for the main term.
Here are my questions;
1. The 10,000 pages on oldsite.com had plenty of internal links - they no longer exists, so I imagine when the dust settles - it will be like oldsite.com is a one page site that re-diretcts to newsite.com ... How long will a ranking boost last for?
2. With the re-direct setup to completely forget about the structure and content of oldsite.com, it's clear to me that it was setup to pass the 'Link Juice' from oldsite.com to newsite.com ... Do the major SE's see this as a form of SPAM (manipulating the rankings), or do they see it as a good way to combine two or more websites?
3. Does this work? Is everybody doing it? Should I be doing it? ... or are there better ways for me to combat this type of competition (eg we could make a lot of great content for the money spent buying oldsite.com - but we certainly wouldn't get such an immediate increase to traffic)?
-
Welcome to the world of competitive tactics based on real or perceived return on investment, and where ethics is a matter personal belief. Some people believe they matter, others claim ethics are irrelevant, because obviously, they will do whatever they can, in attempts to make as much money by any means necessary as they think they can get away with.
-
Thanks for the quick reply's... I can see that it's probably not a long term solution, but as mentioned I was surprised how well it's working now.
And because of this, I worry newsite.com will continue to buy and re-direct sites every few months (weeks / years) or however long the results last.
-
When I run into issues like this It's best not to go outside of the webmaster guidelines for moving a site. (updated 3/20/2011) Clearly they have not applied best practices for user experience and missed a golden opportunity in my opinion. Be grateful that they did. With some more work they could be dominating even more. The similar content issue mentioned in GWT guidelines link above will bite them I'm sure. But like Alan said, when is up to the algorithm.
I would stay the course and make your site the best it can be. The competition and the SE are both out of your control.
-
It doesn't hold the same value as if every page on oldsite.com were redirected to the proper equivalent page on newsite.com - the long term value would be in links pointing to those redirecting to the new ones, combined with the links pointing to the old site's home page redirecting to the new site's home page.
How much value it gets that will last depends on how many links pointed to oldsite.com's home page. Yet ultimately, if no new signals are generated and newsite.com doesn't build out in depth or spread of keywords, it's going to fall off over time.
Exactly how much time is anybody's guess.
The vast majority of people who do such things do it for the short (whatever that means) term boost, and if there are ads on newsite.com, the clicks on those ads.
Good question as to whether the search engines know about this and if so, how they deal with it. Ultimately they don't say exactly.
In the past couple years I have not heard of anyone doing such things as their primary path to long-term success.
The actual length of time it lasts would definitely depend on the market it's in. Are many other sites actively doing across-the-board SEO - both on-site and off-site? If so, it'd last less time than if the market was relatively quiet.
How long it would take you to bypass newsite.com is also an unknown factor, regardless of method you chose. SEO best practices call for putting in the footwork to do best practices and trusting that over time, you'll see value. And you may or may not overcome newsite.com depending on what they do and the rest of the market.
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
-
Unique URLs for each local office 301 to parent site
I have a dentist who has multiple locations and a unique domain for each location. www.DentalCareofLacey.com www.DentalCareofSumner.com www.DentalCareofVashon.com The current plan is to setup 301s to redirect to the parent site (www.atlasdentistry.com/locations/lacey). Would there be any negative impact if we continue to purchase a unique domain for each branch office and just set it as a 301 to the parent site? Does having too many 301 redirects look too spammy to Google?
Technical SEO | | marlattts0 -
Site Blacklisted
Good morning. Just done my WMT ritual morning check and one of my sites has been blacklisted for malware. It's a wordpress site - I've run various scans, e.g. http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and also installed wordfence and scanned with that and wordfence produced some offending files which I have now deleted. I've also installed website defender in the hope that it wont happen again. I'm pretty good with staying on top of updates and rarely let a few days pass without upgrading new version of wordpress or plugins etc. I've also checked my users to make sure no new admins or anything and also changes passwords. I've asked for a review from Google and just wondered how long these reviews take? Also, has anybody got any advice, is there anything else I should be doing? Thanks
Technical SEO | | littlesthobo0 -
Can we use our existing site content on new site?
We added 1000s of pages unique content on our site and soon after google release penguin and we loose our ranking for major keywords and after months of efforts we decided to start a new site. If we use all the existing site content on new domain does google going to penalized the site for duplicate content or it will be treated as unique? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mozfreak0 -
Rebuilding an old website
Since we have a strong website; meaning high traffic, but we got 2 issues 1. the framework of the design is not user friendly. 2. the current platform is really old; therefor it comes up with technical problems daily/ We are worried about our links which will affect in our new design, what would be wise to do? Thanks
Technical SEO | | apexcue0 -
What to do if my site was De-indexed?
Hello fellow SEOs, I have been doing SEO for about a year now, I'm not expert, but I know enough to get the job done. I'm learning everyday about better techniques. So enough about that... Tonight I noticed that my site has, I believe, been de-indexed. Its a fairly new site, as we just launched it a few days ago and I went in and did all the title tags and meta. I still have to go in to do the h1 and h2 tags...plus add some alt tags and anchor text. Well anyways, after a couple of days after the title tags were implemented. I was propagating all over the place. Using my keyword tool here...I was number on the first page in Google for 71 or the 88 keywords. My new site was just indexed yesterday and thats when i noticed all my keywords. Well today I noticed that I am no where to be found, even if i type in my company's name. PLEASE help me out...any advice would be appreciated. Thank you. p.s. could my competitors could have done something to my site? just wondering... The website is www.eggheadconsultants.com
Technical SEO | | Jegghead1 -
Young site trying hard, but banging head against the wall -- Site Review
Hi All New to PRO but we're seriously committed to getting this working. And firstly thank you to anyone who offers any useful thoughts and insights. We've launched a new site, unfortunately late to the market for the season and are really struggling to get search engine recognition. Site: http://www.ignitehats.co.uk/ We're continuously adding new content, slowly gathering more links and working hard to promote socially. But even on our clearest search terms like "Ignite hats" we're down on page 4. Both GWT and the Seomoz tools highlight no big problems (a few titles that are too long) but otherwise nothing. Maybe wrongly we requested that the Google spam team review our site incase it was being penalised, but got a template response saying the site was not in their spam system (phew, there wasn't a reason it should be we believe). We're wondering if this is just that our site is just too young? It's been live for 6 weeks. But worry maybe this is not the case. We've had success with another site we run much sooner than this. Any help or pointers would be really appreciated. Similar stories and what others have done, at least to give us some confidence to carry on would be great. Thanks for reading.
Technical SEO | | JHill0 -
Double 301 redirect
Hi together, due to some technical reasons I have redirect (301) an existing link two times. Example: www.mydomain.com/root/site.html > 301 > www.mydomain.com/site.html > 301 www.mydomain.com/site_new.html Is there anybody how has got some experience like doing a double redirect? What about link juice? Best regards Steffen
Technical SEO | | steffen_0 -
Optimize flash site
Hello, How can we optimize a site like this - http://www.ziba.com.au/ . The whole site is in flash. What are the alternatives ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050