What to do with a 302 redirect after a while
-
Hi guys,
A client of ours has a website with a very bad linkprofile. We adressed this issue and we migrated the website to another domain.
We redirected the bad website (cornelisbedding.be) to the new domain (cornelisbedding.com) with a 302 redirect. We didn't want to pass the bad link juice. The problem we are having now is that we can't afford to lose the redirect on cornelisbedding.be. We would lose to much traffic because the old domain still has alot of links that generate good quality traffic.
I have read that Google will treat 302 redirects as 301's in the long run. We really want to avoid this.
We were thinking of using a meta refresh with a delay on, but in Google's eyes that would be considered spammy.Are their any other suggestions on how to handle this?
Thanks you!
-
Hi,
Sorry I'm late - I must have missed the notification on this one. I recommend against using any redirects that pass link equity so long as there's a manual penalty on the site.
I have seen penalties transfer - usually Panda or Penguin will only be re-applied on the refresh, but if the signal is fairly strong or the penalty is manual the penalty can transfer within days. Sometimes the penalty doesn't transfer, and it's usually because either the content is significantly different from what was penalized (in which case the links just don't count) or because the new site has a bunch of good links to balance things out.
If I were you, I'd keep marketing the new site, build some awareness, and avoid passing link equity until the old site is clean.
-
I'd second that motion!
-
True, I guess I'd also test this with some other domain before doing it on an important corporate site. Would be great to read about someone's experience with this!
-
In theory, absolutely. I just think the disavow tool and its effectiveness is a bit of a grey area.
Call me paranoid, but I'd rather not associate any old domain that has had a penalty, lifted or otherwise, with a new domain in any way shape or form. Like I say though, that could be overkill.
-
Couldn't an alternative be to disavow all links in Webmaster Tools pointing to the OLD domain and then still use 301 redirects? By using the disavow tool, the old domain should be in the clear, no?
-
If you don't want the link profile to eventually pass, but still rely on the redirect to drive traffic to the site, then the simple answer is that you need to market the new site more.
Obviously, this includes promoting the new .com domain's search visibility more, but the other option is to put a notice on the old .be domain. If you put up a one page site with a good graphic design along the lines of "We have moved, please find our new site at" etc - without a link, I hasten to add - you're giving people the chance to recognise the move, update their bookmarks and not visit the old site any more. You could even put a notice saying "This site will cease to exist from XXXX" to really let people know you've permanently moved.
It's probably the clearest way to show that the domain has moved, without passing any of the old link profile to the new domain.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Redirect to http to https - Pros and Cons
Hi, I know its best practice to redirect a website from http to https, instead of having many entry point to your website. When a website has been running for a long time on http and https, what are the SEO Pros and Cons of implementing a redirect from Http to Https?
Technical SEO | | FreddyKgapza1 -
Bulk redirection of blogs
Hi all, we're going to changing the url structure of our website. Moving from: /news-and-views/blog/thisistheblogpost to /blog/thisistheblogpost (ie removing the /news-and-views/ portion of the url). There's approximately 300 posts. I have 2 questions - will this have an impact on domain wide authority? and is bulk 301 redirects the best solution? The blogs themselves don't get a huge amount of traffic but we just want to make sure we don't do something that will be penalized by search engines.
Technical SEO | | francisclark2 -
How to set up redirects with a company takeover
Hi there, We are about to take over a player in the market with some good DA en PA's. We choose to redirect all the pages from the domain we take over to our main domain for now, later we want to redirect all categories to relevant and similar categories on our own domain. The company we take over is using a server which will be cancelled in a while. For now we set up the 301 redirect(s) on their server we take over. Because of the extra costs we will cancel the server in a few weeks/months. What is a common way to keep 301 redirects alive after cancelling the server of company we take over? I hope someone can give me the help I need in this one. Thanks in advance! Cheers,
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
Marcel0 -
Max Number of 301 Redirections?
Hi, We currently made a re-design of a website and we changed all our urls to make them shorter. I made more than 300 permanent redirections but plenty more are needed since WMT is showing some more 404s from old urls that I hadn't seen because they were dynamic. The question is, please, is there a limit? I think we have more than 600 already. We don't want to create a php commando to redirect all the old ones to our home, we are redirecting them to their correspondent url. By the way, Im doing them with the 301 method in .htaccess. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Does 301 redirect cause penalty
Good Morning, I am considering doing a 301 (permanent) re-direct of roughly 100 domains, split between my 3 main e-commerce sites. Would taking an action like this put any of the 100 domains or any of the 3 recipient domains at risk of violating G's guidelines? Thanks...
Technical SEO | | Prime851 -
CNAME redirect for Press Releases
Our company is moving our press release section over to Business Wire. Business Wire will be hosting the press releases on their servers http//ourcompany.newshq.businesswire.com, but we want it to display as if these are hosted on our site www.ourcompany/press-releases/. This is where our press releases are hosted now. They are recommending using a CNAME redirect to essentially mask their URL and display ours. We don't want to lose out on the search value that our press release area has built up over time. Will the CNAME redirect cause any SEO problems?
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0 -
Worth Changing Redirect From 302 to 301?
Hi, I'm doing an audit on a site that had a redesign in Dec 2009. For some reason I looked to see what kind of redirects were used from the old pages to the current ones, and it looks like they used 302s, which obviously isn't ideal. Given that it's been so long and those pages have looong since been de-indexed, is it worth me suggesting that they change those old redirects to 301s? My thinking is that if those old pages were linked to externally then I should recommend it, but I can't find any link info on Linkscape/OSE, Majestic SEO or YSE. Any comments appreciated.
Technical SEO | | The_Heavies0 -
Are asp redirects permanent?
I need to redirect a windows-hosted domain with permanent (301) redirects so as to preserve most of the link juice. I would be using asp page-level redirects, as there are only about 50 relevant pages. Are these as effective as linux-based 301 redirects in conserving link juice?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0