301 with nofollow ?
-
Hi,
our ecommerce link penalty was revoked by google back in Feb 26th 2013, but to this day we have not seen any improvement on our rankings. Due to 80% revenue loss we had to layoff quite a few people to stay alive. Situation now is more dire then ever for our company. We have millions of dollars invested in our business and google just busted it for some "low quality" or "spammy links" as they call it. We want to try to move to a different domain and do a 301 from the old domain to make sure our previous customers can still find us as a last effort to stay alive. But doing so we do not want to the bad links juice to flow to our new domain. Can we do a 301 with nofollow and will that have any negative impact or any impact at all.? any suggestion is greatly appreciated.
Thank you
Nick
We are planning on moving to a different domain after 10 years, and laying off bunch of people due to loss of revenue.
-
Google have said that if you have the same site at a different URL then they may apply the same penalty to the new site as they did to the old one, therefore if you wish to redirect a site, I would recommend doing it at the same as you make some other significant changes to it.
I came up with a way of doing this which should work.
On the old domain redirect everything to the home page and then on the home page create a noindex, nofollow page with the following line of code in it:
Where example.com is your NEW domain name.
This way you're using a redirect at the html level, but telling search engines to not index or follow the page. This should work!
-
Nick
Your 301 redirect will take place on the server level and your nofollow will take place on the page level. The server is going to redirect the bot to the new resource before it gets to the nofollow. As far as whether you can use a 301 to escape a penguin penalty is the subject of substantial debate but it's generally not thought so. Here's one of the most authoritative and interesting threads on that subject: Google 2.0 - How To Recover.
-
Hi Nick,
My hart goes out to you and your company for having to deal with this. However I do believe that you should use a 302 redirect along with a no flow just to be certain. Here's some more information.
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/11285/SEO-Are-Nofollow-Links-Still-Valuable.aspx
http://moz.com/blog/nofollow-is-dying-the-impact-of-microblogging-and-nofollow-on-seo
Google lists the three main intended uses of nofollow as:
- Linking to untrusted content
- Paid links
- Crawl prioritisation (typically linking to yourself with nofollow)
Leaving aside for a second the ability / likelihood of webmasters using nofollow correctly (which means that the search engines need to work even with broken implementations just as they often rank HTML code that doesn't validate), there are two big uses of nofollow that are breaking the model:
- Complete "silo-isation" of large sites
- Domain owner not trusting trusted content authors' links
"Silo-isation"
Disregarding the fact that I just made that word up, there is a very real trend of powerful sites nofollowing all (or nearly all) outbound links even though they are the very definition of editorial links. The site owners have presumably seen the ranking power achieved by Wikipedia nofollowing all outbound links and are trying to form their very own black hole.
Lack of trust
My understanding of the original intent of proffering nofollow as a solution to the problem of linking to untrusted places was that it was mainly intended for situations like blog comments, profile links, etc., where users of your site could create links to wherever they pleased.
This is definitely valuable (as anyone who has ever had to moderate blog comments can attest) but what about once you do trust the commenter? Since so many sites have no mechanism whereby that nofollow is ever removed, we end up in a situation where people are creating huge amounts of really valuable content and the links they create are nofollow.
Sincerely, Thomas
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 Redirect Expert
I have hired two website people from odesk and had bad experience in 301 redirects. One never got it done and the other cause my website to crash on a 500 error code, he load all the redirects in a script on .htaccess on my wordpress site on godaddy, there were 1400 redirect.Can somebody recommend a expert for my redirect problem.
Technical SEO | | tjacquet0 -
301 or 410 a Pop Up Window with a New URL
I asked our development team to 301 Pop Up window URLs back to their complimentary product page as we've changed URLs for all of our Pop Ups. We have 100,000s of products on our site, so the number of rewrites are becoming unmanageable and slows server response times (their words). They want to kill these 301's after a prescribed amount of time. Should they just become 410s, leave them as 404s (current state), or insist that we keep them as 301's?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
Page has Noindex, nofollow, still ranks #1
Hi there, I have a question about a few pages on our site, whom has a no index, nofollow meta tag but they are still indexed and even rank number one in our market for the term. How is that possible or is it that Google just ignores the tags when they think it´s an error from our side? The url is www.drogisterij.net/kilo_killer and the keyword is kilo killer. We rank number 1 if you search from Google.nl Anyone have seen it before and know why this might be? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JaapWillemDrogisterij0 -
How long after google crawl do you need 301 redirects
We have just added 301's when we moved our site. Google has done a crawl & spat back a few errors. How long do I need to keep those 301's in place? I may need to change some. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Paul_MC0 -
Crawl Diagnostic: Notices about 301 redirects
There are detected five 301 redirects on my site and I want to understand why this is happening? And is this important to fix? http://domain.cl/subfolder ---- redirects to ----> http://domain.cl/subfolder/ What does this tell me "/" I am very curious 🙂 Thanks for every answer
Technical SEO | | inlinear
Holger0 -
301 redirect of one site version to new domain
Hello all. I today have domain.com that has 10 language versions and the structure is by folders: domain.com/ru/
Technical SEO | | Gregos
domain.com/pl/ etc. Soon I plan redesign,new CMS and I plan to register 9 new ccTLDs. My question is: Can I 301 redirect domain.com/ru/ to domain.ru without having some bad effect on domain.com? I mean,the main domain,com is not going to be affected by permanent redirect of one url to completly new domain right?0 -
How can I perform this 301 redirect?
I am working on a site for a colleague and have installed wordpress on their server in the wp directory, they want the root domain redirecting to the wp directory but everything i have tried seems to throw up errors. i need sample.co.uk to redirect to sample.co.uk/wp/ no matter which html file they are trying to access on the root of the sample.co.uk site help?
Technical SEO | | GrassRootsSEO0 -
NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW - Any SEO benefit to these pages?
Hi I could use some advice on a site architecture decision. I am developing something akin to an affiliate scheme for my business. However it is not quite as simple as an affliate setup because the products sold through "affiliates" will be slightly different, as a result I intend to run the site from a subdomain of my main domain. I am intending to NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW the subdomained site because it will contain huge amounts of duplication from my main site (it is really a subset of the main site with some slightly different functionality in places). I don't really want or need this subdomain site indexed, hence my decision to NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW it. However given I will, hopefully, be having lots of people link into the subdomain I am hoping to come up with some sort of arrangement that will mean that my main domain derives some sort of benefit from the linking. They are, after all, votes for my business so they feel like "good links". I am assuming here that a direct link into my NOFOLLOW,NOINDEX subdomain is going to provide ZERO benefit to my main domain. Happy to be corrected! The best I can come up with is to have a "landing page" on my main domain which links into parts of my main domain and then provides a link through to the subdomain site. However this feels like a bad experience from the user's point of view (i.e. land on a page and then have to click to get to the real action) and feels a bit spammy, i.e. I don't really have a good reason for this page other than linking! Equally I could NOINDEX,FOLLOW the homepage of the affiliate site and link back to the main domain from there. However this also feels a bit spammy and would be far less beneficial, I guess, because the subdomain homepage would have many more outgoing links than I envisaged for my "landing page" idea above. Also, it also looks a bit spammy (i.e. why follow the homepage and nofollow everything else?)! The trouble, I guess, is that whatever I do feels a bit spammy. I suppose this is because IT IS spammy! 🙂 Has anyone got any good ideas how I could setup an arrangement like I described above and derive benefit to my main domain without it looking (or being) spammy? I just hate to think of all of those links being wasted (in an SEO sense). Thanks Gary
Technical SEO | | gtrotter6660