How to do a site migration followed by a domain migration and avoid 301 redirect chains?
-
Hi all,
The current roadmap for our Eng team has us performing a site migration (redirecting one subfolder to another subfolder) and then a domain migration shortly after. The way I see it, I have 2 scenarios (the 1st involves the site migration THEN the domain migration and the 2nd is the site migration and domain migration being done simultaneously):
-
olddomain.com/subfolder-old to olddomain.com/subfolder-new THEN olddomain.com/subfolder-new to newdomain.com/subfolder-new AND olddomain.com/subfolder-old to newdomain.com/subfolder-new
I also understand that there are two best practices for a domain migration and they are 1) keep everything the same that you can to help Google understand it is the same page, just on a different domain and 2) avoid chain redirects.
As you can imagine, scenario 1 requires more Eng costs than scenario 2. So, my question is, is scenario 2 a perfectly viable option or should I make the push to go for scenario 1?
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
-
-
Is there a reason you are considering option 1? Option 2 is simpler to implement and doesn't chain the redirects. Unless there's some other, non-SEO reason for considering option 1, I'd go with the second option.
If you are considering option 1 because you want to only be changing the domain and not also changing the subfolder when you do the domain migration, I wouldn't worry about it. As long as you are setting up 301 redirects for each page to redirect to the new URL for that page, Google and Bing can understand that out just fine.
- Kurt Steinbrueck
-
Brad,
Not reading any time frames into the scenarios, option 2 is your quickest, easiest, and most direct route from where you are now to where you want to be after the domain migration. As far as Google or SEO is concerned, there's no need for the intermediate step of redirecting the directory and then redirecting it again.
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
-
How long should I keep the 301 redirect file
We've setup an new site and many pages don't exist anymore (clean up done). But for many of them we have new pages with new url's. We've monitored the 404 and have now many URL's redirected with 301 (apache file). How long should we keep this in place? Checking all links manually to see of new url is in place of the old url (in google) is too much work. tx!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KBC0 -
Hundreds of 301 Redirects. Remove Pages or Not?
Hi Mozers, I have a website that has literally got hundreds of 301 redirects. I had a close look at these URLs and only some of them have backlinks to it and remaining all of them are not indexing in Google and has got not backlinks at all. Based on what I have noticed experts mentioning, loads of 301 redirects can potentially slow down the site speed. In a case like the website I have, should I completely take off the pages from website to reduce the number of 301 redirects or should I leave 301 redirects? There is no traffic or backlinks coming from these URLs. Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Migrate site from HTML to Wordpress and retain SEO
Hi guys this is a 2 part question so hoping someone is able to assist! 🙂 I own the www.industrytix.com.au/ website which ive been updating manually in Dreamweaver for last 6+ years, it has very high Organic Rankings for most of my targeted keywords which are: industry tix
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IsaCleanse
Industry tickets
breakfest tickets
Stereosonic tickets
CUban Club tickets
etc etc - essentially names of events Im currently about 90% of the way through replicating/improving the content of the website using a Wordpress Theme which is located at www.industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/ so all the URLs/Sites are currently running concurrently. Im using Eventum Theme for hosting events and Woocommerce plugin for products so there is a slighy disconnect between the 'Event Page' and 'Buy tickets/Product page" **For example:
Event page: **http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/breakfest-perth/ Ticket/product page: http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/product/breakfest-ticket-perth/ Next step is to kill off the old outdated homepage and recirrect all the event pages to the new ones - for retaining SEO value is there a best practices for completing this? (I am planning to move the New WP Installation into the root folder from the /buy-tickets/ folder where its currently staged. For example of OLD to NEW redirrection requirements:
OLD http://www.industrytix.com.au/cuban-club-perth-tickets.php
NEW http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/cuban-club-perth-nyd/ OLD http://www.industrytix.com.au/breakfest-tickets.php
NEW EVENT PAGE http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/breakfest-perth/
Nicket/product page: http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/product/breakfest-ticket-perth/ Any other feedback improvements as far as retaining SEO and not keyword stuffing etc? Thanking you all in advance for taking the time to read this 🙂0 -
Existing 301s during site migration - what to do?
Hi - I'm looking at an old website and there are lots of 301s internal to that site - what do I do with these when I move to a new site? Should I list them and adjust them so they redirect to the new site now (instead of from one URL to another URL on the old site) - I'm thinking that if I don't the user will have to travel through one 301 then another to get to the new site, which doesn't seem like a great idea? Your thoughts would be welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Can you redirect specific sub domain URLs?
ello! We host our PDFs, Images, CSS all in a sub domain. For the question, let's call this sub.cyto.com. I've noticed a particular PDF doing really well, infact it has gathered valuable external links from high authoritative sites. To top it off, it gets good visits. I've been going back and forth with our developers to move this PDF to a subfolder structure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs
For example: www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf In my perspective, if I move this and set up a permanent redirect, then all the external links the PDF gathered, link juice and future visits will be attributed to the main website. Since the PDF is existing in the subdomain, I can't even track direct visits nor get the link juice. It appears in top position of Google as well. My developer says it is better to keep images, pdf, css in the subdomain. I see his point and an idea I have is to: convert the pdf to a webpage. Set up a 301 redirect from the existing subdomain to this webpage Upload the pdf with a new name and link to it from the webpage, so users can download if they choose to. This should give me the existing rank juice. However, my question is whether you can set up a 301 redirect for just a single subdomain URL to a folder structure URL? sub.cyto.com/xxx.pdf to www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf?0 -
Should I start new domain and redirect site?
I recently my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) drop off a cliff. Google tells me there's no manual penalty therefore it might be algorithmic. I don't know why my rankings went but I think it could be that I added A LOT of category pages pulling the same content from posts and this could have caused both duplicate content issues and too many on page links causing an algo penalty. Ive deleted the categories and therefore fixed duplicate content issue (perhaps you guys could check out the site and see that you agree with me) but rankings have not improved even thougo most of the pages have been recrawled. I read somewhere its extremely hard to recover from such a penalty so should I move my site to a and domain and redirect all urls? I can't think of another solution. Any help appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
How long do 301 redirects have to stay in place?
For a large retail site we have plenty of "old" pages that are 2-3 years old and still have 301 redirects to a new page. After a search engine has recognized a 301 redirect and dropped the "Old" URL from the index and started displaying the "New" URL, is it safe to delete that old page and thus remove the 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOmoxy0