Web developer won't 301 redirect to my new website....what can I do?
-
I want to come away from our third party web developer and use a new website with different web developers, however the web developer wont 301 redirect the old url's to the new ones. Is he required to do this by law? Is there away of doing the 301 redirects without him?
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Many thanks,Tom
-
Thanks EGOL, Shane and Peter.
The good news is that we own the domain, what isn't so great is that we don't own the hosting (Big lesson learned here).
Some how I need to take control of the hosting.
Thanks everyone for all your help, I'm truly grateful.
Tom
-
First see who owns the domain. You check the WHOIS to learn that. To check WHOis.... Go here, type your domain in the blank and see who is the "registrant". That person is the official "owner". If it is not you then you will have to ask them to make you the registrant. If they refuse then you have a legal matter.
Sometimes people hide their name from public view in the WHOIS. If the name is not visible then you have a problem.
After that, there are two parts of controlling a domain.
-
Domain registration access: This is done by having an account with the registrar who administers the domain. Places like godaddy, networksolutions are registrars. Look at the WHOIS again and see who is the... Registrar URL You will need a domain registration account with them to control DNS. (DNS points the domain to a server at a hosting company.)
-
Hosting Access: This is where the files of the website are on a webserver. Your .htaccess file is there. Go back to the WHOIS and look at the **Name Server **That will sometimes reveal the hosting company such as godaddy,com networksolutions.com pair.com etc.
-
-
I would highly suggest as EGOl points out looking into hiring a reputable firm to help you with this - As, what I have suggested will only get your domain under your control, to then configure it as you wish.
.htaccess is an Apache server side technology, this is what controls the actual 301 redirect (or through Vhost) but the nameservers of the domain must be pointed to a server you can control first.
http://www.thesitewizard.com/domain/reclaim-website-from-bad-web-designer-host.shtml
This might help clear it up
-
Thanks Shane, that's great advice.
From what I understand to be able to implement 301 redirects I need access to the .htaccess file. Would domain control rights / name servers provide me with this?
-
"If you do, then you can change the nameservers for that domain to your where your new website will be hosted once that website is ready to go live."
Crackingmedia nails it.
Get control of the nameservers - by getting exclusive access to the domain registration account. If you don't know how to do that then hire an experienced webdeveloper or SEO to do it for you.
The problem can be... that the current developer registered the domain in his name. So you might have a legal fight to get it.
In my opinion, 301s must be held in place for a long time. You don't want to trust your current weasel to do this for you.
Take control of the domain.
-
Hi Tom
Along similar lines to Shane's answer but the critical questions is do you own the current domain?
If you do, then you can change the nameservers for that domain to your where your new website will be hosted once that website is ready to go live.
If you are keeping the same domain for your new site, that will be even easier, because your new developers will be able to capture a sitemap of your current site with your current developer and create a list of 301 redirections needed to point the current URL to the new URL for each page. Then, prior to the new site going live when the nameservers are switched to your new host, as long as the 301 redirections are active on the server where your new site is hosted, everything should work smoothly.
I hope that helps based on the info you have given, but do post back if you have more info or need more explanation.
Peter
PS. And as far as I know there is no legal requirement for a developer to provide 301 redirects.
-
If you own the domain - you have the rights to do with it as you please. If he owns it then he does.
I would not say he is "required by law" to do a 301 redirect, but you can forcibly take domain and registrar control, to then do with it as you please - by contacting your domain name registrar or current host. (unless developer is your host, then you will need to go straight to the registrar.
Be sure to have the new host/environment setup prior to this though as you will need to tell the registrar where to send domain control rights (name servers) then at that point you will have domain control at a Host/registrar of you choosing.
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
-
When searching for related:katom.com on google, why isn't our website coming up?
A lot of our competitors come up but we aren't coming up. What do we need to do so that google considers us related? Our website is culinarydepotinc.com And I believe not being related to those big competitors affects our SEO, is that correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sammyh2 -
Relaunching website in two phases - 301 redirect approach
Hey Mozzers, Interested to know your thoughts on the following situation. I am relaunching a website with an updated URL structure in TWO phases. Phase one will be a much smaller version of the site, with 30% of the pages going live - the remaining 70% of page won't be available until Phase two. In Phase one, these 30% of pages will be 301 redirected from their like-for-like versions - old site to new site. The remaining 70%... because the like-for-like pages won't be available until Phase two, which is likely to be launched in 3 months time, should I do a temporary redirect on these pages (302) to the new homepage for the time being, until the new versions of the pages are live - and then implement the 301 from old url to new url. A bit of a messy situation, and not ideal for SEO, but my hands are tied as the organisation is pushing ahead with this phased approach. So, interested to hear your thoughts on an appropriate 301 migration plan.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWesley0 -
Pages that did NOT 301 redirect to the new site
Hi, Is there a tool out there that can tell me what pages did NOT 301 redirect to the new sites? I need something rather than going into google.com and typing in site:oldsite.com to see if it's still indexed and if it's not 301 redirecting.. I'm not sure if screaming frog can do that. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
301 Redirect from unused domain
Hi All First question here so go easy.. I have a property site which is working well so far considering it;s early days, unfortunately some of my earlier efforts did not go so well and one in particular I pretty much destroyed in my attempts to improve the site SEO. Lucky enough my SEO skills have improved quite a bit lately, largely thanks to the great tools, tutorials and experts here at Moz 🙂 My question is whether I can use a 301 redirect to pass the domain authority and any link equity from an unused site to the one that ive done a better job on? it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy... Thanks everyone and thanks for all the help over the last 6 months or so.. Wes Dunn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wesdunn19771 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Multiple 301 Redirects on the same domain name
Hi, I'd appreciate some advice ont he below. I have a website, say www.site.co.uk that has just been redesigned using a new CMS. Previously it had URLs in the format /article.php?id=123, the new site has more friendly urls in the format /articles/article-slug. I have been able to import the old articles into my CMS using the same article IDs and I have created a unique slug for each post. So now in my database, I have the article id (from the querystring) and a slug. However, I have hundreds of old URLs indexed by Google in the format /article.php?id=123 and need to redirect these. My plan was to do the following. 301 Redirect /article.php?id=123 to an intermediate page, in this case /redirect/123. On this intermediate page I would do a database lookup for the article slug, based on the ID from the querystring, create a new URL and perform a second 301 redirect to my new URL E.g. /articles/article-slug-from-database. Whilst this works and keeps the site usable for visitors the two 301 redirects do worry me, as I don;t want Google indexing lots of /redirect/[article id] urls. The other solution is to generate hundreds of htaccess redirect rules that map old url to the new url. The first solution is much cleaner, but the two 301's worry me. Will Google work this out on it's own, is there a better way? Any advice is much appreciated. Cheers Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyCrompton1 -
Is there anything wrong with this 301 redirect?
I'll keep this one short and sweet 🙂 Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL. The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results. This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages. I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
How to move website to new domain?
We have a website that has run under the same domain name for the past 10 years. We have built up a decent amount of SEO "mojo" (and traffic) over time, however, the original domain name no longer applies to the business model. A little over 1 year ago we started using a new brand name for the website and created a landing page for that domain name. Everything on that landing page links over to pages on the original domain name (to preserve the SEO value that we have built up over the years). We would like to move all (or most) of the pages/content to the new domain name. Would using 301 redirects be the safest, most effective way of doing this? I have heard of other people doing it this way, and often they will see their traffic drop for a few weeks before it eventually comes back. Anyone else had experience with this? What worked? What didn't? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-mojo0