Redirecting just the homepage of a site to another domain- good/bad idea?
-
TLDR: As part of a corporate rebranding/restructuring, my parent company is asking me to redirect just the homepage of our website to another page on their website. How will this affect rankings of all of the other pages on our site?
I work for an organization (XYZ Corp) that is owned by another company (Big Conglomerate). XYZ Corp's main function is building custom skinned microsites for marketing purposes that live on our domain in a traditional directory structure (no subdomains).
This morning, I get a request to redirect XYZ Corp's homepage to live at bigconglomerate.com/xyzcorp. But all of our original microsites are to remain as is.
Technically, I know how to accomplish this redirection. My question is- should I? Or should I fight this? I searched previous Q&A's, but wasn't able to find someone else who was concerned about losing search rankings for sub-pages due to losing their website's homepage.
A few more details-
- The microsite pages are not linked to from the homepage.
- The microsites do not link back to the homepage.
- We cannot move the microsites to bigconglomerate.com because everything that lives there is a cookie cutter CMS page.
This is my first question ever, please go easy on me! Thanks,
--Mark
-
Thanks Kurt, we're throwing the switch tomorrow, so I'll definitely post an update sometime afterwards!
Thanks again,
--Mark
-
Hi Mark,
There are a couple schools of thought out there on this. One is that search engines consider individual pages and not full websites, the other is that in the eyes of the search engines individual web pages are part of the full website. In other words, is there really domain authority or not?
According to the first group, domains only appear to have authority because of the linking structure of most sites. Because the pages on a domain are generally linked together quite extensively, much of the individual page authority is passed between the pages and thus it looks like the domain has authority, but in reality, Google doesn't care if the pages are on the same domain, it's just giving various amounts of authority to individual pages. For example, the homepage is usually the strongest page on a site not because it's the homepage of a domain, but rather because most of the time the homepage is linked to by every sub-page and the homepage usually has the most external links pointing at it. So, it's a strong page. If this group is correct (and I'd lean in this direction), then redirecting the homepage of XYZ Corp shouldn't affect the microsites since the homepage doesn't link to them and they don't link to the homepage.
According to the other group, not only do pages obtain authority, but the domain they are a part of also has authority and that domain authority is shared to some extent with every page on the site, regardless of the internal linking structure. If this group is correct, then redirecting the homepage would affect the microsites.
Sorry to leave it a little ambiguous, but I haven't seen an experiment which dealt with this specific situation, so I can only speak in theory. Personally, I'd lean towards saying that it shouldn't have an affect on the microsites, but I can't say that for sure.
If you do redirect the homepage, please keep us informed as to what happens. It would be great to learn for sure what kind of impact something like this would have.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com
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 can improve Domain Athturitymy web site
Hi;
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tohid1363b
I have a website that had an authoritative domain of 10 but today it has reached 5. I wanted to know what the reason for these changes was.
need improve my rank in Google my goal keyword . Can you guide my servant? need +5 Domain , and over +50 Page Aithroity .. my site: خریدگیفت کارت0 -
Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect
I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings1 -
How to 301 Redirect /page.php to /page, after a RewriteRule has already made /page.php accessible by /page (Getting errors)
A site has its URLs with php extensions, like this: example.com/page.php I used the following rewrite to remove the extension so that the page can now be accessed from example.com/page RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rcseo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L] It works great. I can access it via the example.com/page URL. However, the problem is the page can still be accessed from example.com/page.php. Because I have external links going to the page, I want to 301 redirect example.com/page.php to example.com/page. I've tried this a couple of ways but I get redirect loops or 500 internal server errors. Is there a way to have both? Remove the extension and 301 the .php to no extension? By the way, if it matters, page.php is an actual file in the root directory (not created through another rewrite or URI routing). I'm hoping I can do this, and not just throw a example.com/page canonical tag on the page. Thanks!0 -
New site. How important is traffic for a new site? And what about domain age?
Hi guys. I've been building a new site because i've seen a real SEO opportunity out there. I'm a mixing professional by trade and so I wanted to take advantage of SEO to help gain more work. Here's the site: www.signalchainstudios.co.uk I'm curious about domain age. This site fairly well optimised for my keywords, and my site got pretty good content on it (i think so anyway). But it's no where to be seen on the SERP's (link at all). Is this just a domain age issue? I'd have though it might be in the top 50 because my site's services are not hard to rank for at all! Also what about traffic? Does Google want to see an 'active' site before it considers 'promoting' it up the ranks? Or are back links and good content the main factor in the equation? Thanks in advance. I love this community to bits 🙂 Isaac.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isaac6631 -
Is it a good idea to remove old blogs?
So I have a site right now that isn't ranking well, and we are trying everything to help it out. One of my areas of concern is we have A LOT of old blogs that were not well written and honestly are not overly relevant. None of them rank for anything, and could be causing a lot of duplicate content issues. Our newer blogs are doing better and written in a more Q&A type format and it seems to be doing better. So my thought is basically wipe out all the blogs from 2010-2012 -- probably 450+ blog posts. What do you guys think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper1 -
Redirecting a redirect - thoughts?
Hi! A client has just had 14k 404s pop up in his WMT. I think this is because a page that they redirected to had moved. My question is, can I clean these up by redirecting the page the original redirect was one? If so, will it have any negative impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site?
A client site has thousands of pages with unoptimized urls. I want to change the url structure to make them a little more search friendly. Many of the pages I want to update have backlinks to them and good PR so I don't want to delete them entirely. If I change the urls on thousands of pages, that means a lot of 301 redirects. Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site? Thanks, Dino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dino641 -
Any Good Ideas on Promoting a Contest?
Does anyone have any good advice on how to promote a contest? Has anyone hosted a contest and had a lot of good luck that could offer some pointers on how to get the word out? The contest consists of people uploading a 60 second or less WildBlue commercial video that they have created. The video with the most votes will win the competition, and we are giving the winner a $50 cash prize. So far I have been Tweeting about it, and I have sent out a press release. Any other advice will be appreciated. The link to the contest page is http://www.mybluedish.com/lp/contest/ if you want to take a look at it. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0