Domain Forwarding
-
I have a client who previously registered 20 unique domain names that tied to their company name and services. They use all of these domains to forward to their main website to try and capture additional traffic. Would you suggest that we remove all of the domains by 301 redirecting them all the the main website? I am trying to find a good article that shows the implications on SEO by using many domains that forward to a main website. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
-
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down?
When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems and improve user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking power.
When done wrong, the results can be disastrous.
In the past year, because Google cracked down hard on low quality links, the potential damage from 301 mistakes increased dramatically. There's also evidence that Google has slightly changed how they handle non-relevant redirects, which makes proper implementation more important than ever.
<center>
From Dr. Pete's post - An SEO's Guide to HTTP Status Codes
</center>
Semantic relevance 101: anatomy of a "perfect" redirect
A perfect 301 redirect works as a simple “change of address” for your content. Ideally, this means everything about the page except the URL stays the same including content, title tag, images, and layout.
When done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a 301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity.
The new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity, but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link juice.
For example, if you have a page about “labrador,” then redirecting to a page about “dogs” makes sense, but redirecting to a page about “tacos” does not.
<center></center>
301 redirecting everything to the home page
Savvy SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s, or soft 404s at best.
This means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity at all.
While it’s difficult to prove exactly how search engines handle mass home page redirects, it’s fair to say that any time you 301 a large number of pages to a single questionably relevant URL, you shouldn’t expect those redirects to significantly boost your SEO efforts.
<center></center>
**Better alternative: **When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.
If the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410 status code.
-
Thank you very much Chris! That was my assumption but I wanted to make sure before making the updates.
-
Oh, so there's no content on those other domains? Then 301 them. Simple as that.
-
All of the domains seem to cloak the URL in the browser and then add a "register.com" banner at the bottom of the page. So the browser will show www.abc.com no matter which page you navigate, but the links preview www.xyz.com/whatever/. I can do one of the following:
- Leave it as it is and keep getting some traffic.
- 301 redirect the sites to the main home page.
- Keep ownership of the domains but remove them from online.
Thoughts?
-
It depends on numerous variables--the main one being are you continuously putting effort into all the domains or are they just stagnating with their existing content, links and social media activity?
If the sites are established and have links and search traffic going to them and are of decent quality, there may not be an immediate good reason to take them down, other than to consolidate limited resources to build authority for the main domain. In the future, those niche sites may provide less and less value to the main site if you're not maintaining on-page and off-page optimization, leaving you a year or two years behind the competition, who may have been continuing to build the authority of a primary domain.
There lots of questions and answers on that topic here in Moz and on the web. Here are a couple:
http://moz.com/community/q/multiple-domain-names-point-to-one-site
-
Hi Thomas,
Thank you very much for the quick response. My concern is that the client has been receiving a considerable amount of traffic to their main website from the other domains that forward to their site. If I just get rid of them, then they are going to lose a lot of potential traffic. How should I fix this?
-
Concentrate on one domain cannot even begin to 301 redirect any of the other domains to whatever good domain you have left. Hopefully you will choose a domain warehouse domain that has not been affected yet or has not been turned into a what is called a link farm you need to keep the domain's separate and you should only really have a second domain for a good reason would be a staging server another would be a completely separate business that has different relevancy to whatever your existing business or clients existing businesses now. Long story short use acicular domain get rid of the other ones.
Do not 301 redirect to anything that you want to have any kind of just to get links Google will you severely.
I hope was of help,
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
-
Is there a way to forward banklink benefits from one domain to another without a redirect?
In this situation I have SiteA, and SiteB on completely separate domains. SiteA is the marketing front for the company and SiteB is an app that company owns. SiteB receives a fair amount of backlinks as it has the login page of the application where customers link to a branded version for their members to login. Additionally none of that domain is indexable including the login page. SiteB's domain can't be changed to be a subdomain of SiteA as it isn't technically feasible. Initially I was reluctant to use canonical because as it isn't really duplicate content. Is there a method for forwarding any link-juice from SiteB to SiteA without the use of a redirect and would canonical be appropriate in this case? Additionally would SiteB's not being indexed negate any link benefit? Edit: Typo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OCN0 -
Nice Domain Authority but Not Ranking
Hi, A client of mine who owns a website reached out to me. He got penalized a while ago and has long since recovered (not sure exactly, but for sure a year). His domain authority is in the upper 30s but is still not ranking for many of his keywords that he ranked on the first page. I am not so familiar with the technical aspects of penalties and such, but is this a common scenario? Why is his domain authority great but his ranking downright awful? Does he have a chance if he builds great links, or is something else wrong that we can't figure out?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rachel_J0 -
Domain Authority
Hi I wanted to find out if anyone knew how to discover why DA may have dropped? Ours has gone from 26 to 25 - I know it's not much, but I wanted to find the reason. One thing which happened was our developer company wiped redirects, which did impact rankings - would this also have affected domain authority or do I need to review our backlinks again? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Root Domain v Subdomain
Hi, Just doing some analysis on a domain, and the (external) linking root domains show as:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
21 to Root Domain
4 to Subdomain The site is hosted under the www. subdomain version and there is no 301 from domain to www.domain Should the site be: Hosted on the root domain instead of subdomain 301 all incoming requests on domain to point to www.domain (subdomain) Any comments and experience on this type of situation appreciated!0 -
Age of a re-directed domain same as age of a static domain?
I know domain age plays a role in SEO--but, I am wondering if a domain is set up to 301 re-direct to another domain if it builds the same amount of authority over time as the static domain--just looking at age as a ranking factor, not links accumulated over time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
Evaluate the value of domain
We have a chance to purchase a domain with our main KW dot net. We are already a competitor for this KW in its other variations. This domain is currently being used as a re-direct to another site. What are the risks associated with changing domain names and how to best evaluate if this domain will even help us win that KW in Google results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | devonkrusich0 -
Sub domain versus separate domains, which is better for Search engine purposes?
We are pitching to a hotel client to build two new websites, a summer website and a winter website, two completely different looking websites. The client wants to automatically switch their domain name to point to one or the other, depending on the time of year. The customer does not want to use a landing page where you would choose which site to visit; they want the domain name to go directly to the relevant website. Our options: Set up two new domain names and optimise each website based on the holiday season and facilities offered at that time of year. Then change the exisiting domain name to point at the website that is in season. Or Use the existing domain name and setup two sub domains, switching the home page as necessary. We have been chewing this one over for a couple of days, the concern that we have with both options is loss of search visibility. The current website performs well in search engines, it has a home page rank of 4 and sub-pages ranking 2 and 3’s, when we point the domain at the summer site (the client only has a winter website at present) then we will lose all of the search engine benefits already gained. The new summer content will be significantly different to the winter content. We then work hard for six months optimising the summer site and switch back to the Winter site, the content will be wrong. Maybe because it's Friday afternoon we cannot see the light for the smoke of the cars leaving the car park for the weekend, or maybe there is no right or wrong approach. Is there another option? Are we not seeing the wood for the trees? Your comments highly welcome. Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bill-Duff0