301 Multiple Sites to Main Site
-
Over the past couple years I had 3 sites that sold basically the same products and content. I later realized this had no value to my customers or Google so I 301 redirected Site 2 and Site 3 to my main site (Site 1). Of course this pushed a lot of page rank over to Site 1 and the site has been ranking great.
About a week ago I moved my main site to a new eCommerce platform which required me to 301 redirect all the url's to the new platform url's which I did for all the main site links (Site 1). During this time I decided it was probably better off if I DID NOT 301 redirect all the links from the other 2 sites as well. I just didn't see the need as I figured Google realized at this point those sites were gone and I started fearing Google would get me for Page Rank munipulation for 301 redirecting 2 whole sites to my main site.
Now I am getting over 1,000 404 crawl errors in GWT as Google can no longer find the URL's for Site 2 and Site 3. Plus my rankings have dropped substantially over the past week, part of which I know is from switching platforms.
Question, did I make a mistake not 301 redirecting the url's from the old sites (Site 2 and Site 3) to my new ecommerce url's at Site 1?
-
Good luck. Would love to get a follow-up on this later to see how it all works out. Either post here or send a PM.
-
Thanks for the responses. I spent this morning 301 redirecting the most important pages from Site 1 and Site 2. Hopefully this will help.
-
I agree!
In addition (more long term), you should look into trying to get the external links pointing towards Site 2 and 3 redirected to site 1 (get them to change the links), so that link value is not lost in the redirects.
Good luck!
Anders
-
Yes. Put those 301s back. If you have sites linking to version 1 and version 2 of your site still, Google will crawl those old URLs and look for the site. You were probably getting some link equity from those old sites still that was being passed to the new site via the 301s.
Google will crawl them again, so put the 301s back up and see what happens. It may be a little while, but you should see traffic come back as the rankings come back and the 404 errors go down.
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
-
Moving site from html to Wordpress site: Should I port all old pages and redirect?
Any help would be appreciated. I am porting an old legacy .html site, which has about 500,000 visitors/month and over 10,000 pages to a new custom Wordpress site with a responsive design (long overdue, of course) that has been written and only needs a few finishing touches, and which includes many database features to generate new pages that did not previously exist. My questions are: Should I bother to port over older pages that are "thin" and have no incoming links, such that reworking them would take time away from the need to port quickly? I will be restructuring the legacy URLs to be lean and clean, so 301 redirects will be necessary. I know that there will be link juice loss, but how long does it usually take for the redirects to "take hold?" I will be moving to https at the same time to avoid yet another porting issue. Many thanks for any advice and opinions as I embark on this massive data entry project.
Technical SEO | | gheh20130 -
301 Redirects in subfolders
Hi, we're making our site into a static site but I would like to transfer the Google juice. Most of the links and database exist on subfolders though. Could I simply do 301 redirects on the subfolders and retain the value or does it have to be on the full domain?
Technical SEO | | Therealmattyd0 -
Internal Ads on A Site
We serve ads on our site using a sub-domain. All ads use a re-direct from ads.domain before redirecting users to the proper, normal, internal url. Most the content on our home page is ad block driven. Is it possible and does it make sense to enter the sub-domain as url parameter in Google Webmaster tools, letting Google know that this is something to be ignored. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
How to link site.com/blog or site.com/blog/
Hello friends, I have a very basic question but I can not find the right answer... I have made my blog linkbuilding using the adress "mysite.com/blog" but now im not sure if is better to do the linkbuilding to "mysite.com**/blog/ "** Is there any diference? Thanks...
Technical SEO | | lans27870 -
Can we use our existing site content on new site?
We added 1000s of pages unique content on our site and soon after google release penguin and we loose our ranking for major keywords and after months of efforts we decided to start a new site. If we use all the existing site content on new domain does google going to penalized the site for duplicate content or it will be treated as unique? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mozfreak0 -
Prestashop, language and 301
Hello, A question about Prestashop: I noticed that there are some Prestashop websites, with only one language, that work with a redirection from the main domain (for exemple, www.domain-name.com) with a 301 redirection to the main language url (for example, www.domain-name.com/fr ) Here is an example: http://prestaplayers.com/fr/ Assuming that French is the only language on that website, and knowing that links are generally made to www.domain-name.com (and not to www.domain-name.com/fr) I assume that some netlinking juice is lost for no reason, due to the 301 redirect ? In this case, and if the website exists for some years, what should be done ? Change all the urls because of that problem ? Or maybe change the stronger links to make them point to the real address (www.domain-name.com/fr) ? Thank you in advance for yout help dans suggestions !
Technical SEO | | Spleen0
