Ranking EMD to 301 for branding is it better to leave it as or 301 it?
-
We have a client about to enroll with us for SEO. The client has about 50 EMD sites, out of which 9 are ranking. An EMD has [Exact] match anchoring naturally, the sites in question are all EMDs the link profiles show it.
The client wants to 301 the EMDs to a brand page.. We would want to 301, 9 EMD sites to the new site. Here is the thing, if the site domain has an exact match to the anchor text profile, when we 301 the page to www.brand.com/EMD will the link profile matter?
One of the EMDs is on page one spot 2 if we do this change, will Google look at the new brand page (www.brand.com/EMD) as an unnatural link profile?
-
Hello Bryan,
Every page on the 9 old domains should redirect to the same page on on the new domain (.com/301#1/page1 and .com/301#1/page2) instead of redirecting them all to a single page.
Yes, the anchor text should carry through and it is worth being concerned about. This is a tough choice to make and I'm afraid I can't say for sure what would happen. I will leave this open as a discussion in case some other folks have experienced this exact scenario.
If it were me I would do one domain at a time, leaving a few weeks or months between them just to be sure. I would also make sure the link profiles for the redirecting domains were sparkle-clean.
-
The EMDs are all geo targeted CityKeyword etc.. They would be placed in new directories, .com/301#1 .com/301#2 with approx 9 domains. However, once this is completed does the link profile including anchors carry through? If so a site that has only a brand name will have a bunch of other anchors added to new pages via 301 and may look unnatural once the domain is different from the majority of anchors. This is our concern...
The anchor link profiles of the pages we want to 301 mostly match the EMDs and the pages are ranking high, we do not want to lose the current rankings.
-
Generally speaking, I think it's a good idea to move from EMD to a branded domain, especially if you can take the link profile with you. However, I'm not so sure about 301 redirecting 50 of them. Google supposedly treats mass-redirects to the home page as "soft 404s" and they may treat mass redirects to a single /EMD page the same. If you are going to replicate the site on the branded domain and redirect each page to its specific counterpart on the branded domain then you will probably be fine. If the goal is merely to redirect every page on a domain to a single page on another domain you may run into problems because all of that pagerank may not transfer over. Doing that 50 times could even bring on an unnatural link penalty for the branded domain.
If you could share some specifics the community may be able to help you device the best plan of action. Would each EMD redirect to a new directory (ie .com/edm1, .com/emd2) or would they all redirect to a single directory (i.e. .com/EMDs)? Would each page on the EMDs redirect to its specific counterpart on the branded domain, or would the entire EMD redirect to a single page on the branded domain? How many links do each of the EMDs have? Are we talking dozens, hundreds or thousands? What are the quality of those links? Out of the 41 that are NOT ranking well, is there any reason to suspect that they have a link-related penalty?
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
-
Lost ALL my rankings
Dear experts, We have suddenly lost all our positions on our keywords, I’m talking for example from position 2 to 35 in one huge drop ☹ . Even when you search for our name and domain name namely “KV16”, the main page does NOT come up. (We do however still get the local business / map result on the right side!) I have looked in google search console, but nothing to see here – no penalty. However, I need to mention, that we just now, after the issue, setup the google search console – so maybe that is why there is no information about a penalty!? (If the problem is a penalty, btw we have not been doing any link building!) One year ago, we made a permanent redirect from our old site, www.kontoret-gammeltorv.dk, because we moved our coworking office, to a new location, and needed a new name – (because the old name is referring to a location, hence no longer made sense.) This worked flawlessly, and we got all the link juice, and the new site ranked just as good as the old one. Aprox four months ago, we made some changes to the site, where we amongst other things, changed the title description on the frontpage, focusing more on another keyword – and doing this we unknowingly change the permalink to the frontpage (in WordPress). I have read that this can do some real damage, however its so long ago, that it seems unlikely to be the cause!? Please help!? Thanks a million, in advance. Cheers, Christian pJp4Uyx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Christian_T0 -
How do i rank for 1000 keywords?
i have dr 25 and 200 referring domains and ranking for 90 kws in usa. i saw this trend that if you rank for more kws then chances are that you can rank for those high traffic kws in 1 to 5 positions. what i mean is that it increases your odds ? possible answer1 :increase dr and da both and ur and pa ( ahrefs and moz) i know pagerank matters but these are some metrics we can look at for right now possible answer 2 : get a lot of backlinks maybe from same site but how does my backlinks can help me to rank for 1000 kws so that i can have at least 100 kws to rank in position 1 to 5? detailed answers will defi be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
Is it normal to initially rank low in the SERPs, then over time gain rank?
We just released a very targeted page for a specific item about 18 hours ago. For the main keyword as well as multiple variations, we currently are ranking around # 40 to # 50 depending on what the exact query is. Is it normal to initially rank lower in the SERPs and then as the page ages, gain? Thank you for your insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1231 -
301 Redirection problems
A couple of days ago we did a restructure of our e-commerce site (wordpress + woocomerce) where some product categories needed to change names. I used Yoast SEO plugin to do 301 redirects in the .htaccess file.Today I noticed that we had two hits in the SERP on the phrase "dildos med vibrator". See the attached screenshot (first two results).One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibrator/ which is the right URL. One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildosdildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ which is a corrupt URL that has never been in use. The old one we did a redirect from was /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/The command in the .htaccess file was: Redirect 301 /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibratorWhat has happened here? Why does the 301 create entirely new URL:s in the SERP?Tz0TULT.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
Why is my blog out-ranking my main site?
Please see attached ranking history chart. On June 5th the chart shows that my main site is not coming up under our main keyword "door hangers" From then on, our blog took over. Any ideas why? Thanks Andrea lpEBciu.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Rank on specific Google
Hi folks, a website is hosted with a TLD like .com in the USA. The content etc. is obviously all english but now we want to focus on a specific Google like .co.uk What must be necessarily be done to rank better? Is it enough just to buy a .co.uk domain and set the nameserver up or do we need to get a british hosting? Thanks in advance. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
My site rank is not consistent. Once it at first page , then for the next week it is not found in top 100 position. Again two/ three weeks later it ranked automatically without any work. Why this is happening?
Here's the following are available in my site: robot.txt file is included sitemap available Natural link building going on. in a week total 100 links we are creating. 30 social bookmarks, 30 directory submission, 20 blog comments, 20 forum links All the blog and forum links are from relevant sources. Please help me ..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coldfireinc0 -
Pages On Subfolder Not Ranking
A subdirectory/folder on our website doesn't seem to rank for any keywords where the same type of pages on the same competition level keywords rank perfectly fine. For awhile the pages weren't getting indexed but were crawled regularly. Can't seem to figure the problem out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bprimeelitellc0