Umbrella company is taking Domain and link strength!
-
Hi everyone! First thanks for reading this, I really appreciate it. The company I work for has two sites one is an event website and the other is a blog. The blog gets a great amount of the traffic and propels sales. The event website doesn't get much traffic but has been around for awhile and has garnered a 6 Google Page rank with a lot of backlinks and referring domains. The event website, though, has the same name of the company and this sometimes gets confusing when talking to businesses so the executives in charge want to make the event website an umbrella site for the company (very similar to Virgin's website). They will keep the event website but rebrand it with a new domain and basically start over. The good news about this is the event website, even though it has high link strength, has a lot of 404s because they had a previous database that they dumped leading to a lot of 404s (I made them change those to 410s).
Here's my issue. I want to keep the SEO strength of the event website for the event website. Could I do a 301 redirect for a couple months and then take it off and make the umbrella site? Would the strength pass? Or would it be possible to do a 301 redirect in the subfolders where most of the content and links are? Or would you recommend another method of transferring the strength of the site?
-
Hi Matt,
In general, my advice would be to achieve permanent 301 redirects at as granular a page/folder level as possible (prioritized by the current number of linking root domains - Open Site Explorer's Top Pages report is a great tool for this).
Where the rebranding & migration is concerned, I would strongly recommend reading through two resources here at Moz:
- Ruth Burr's overview of Moz's own fairly recent move (from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com) and
- Aleyda Solis's handy "Achieving an SEO-Friendly Domain Migration" infographic
Between both, I think you'll have your bases covered.
Best,
Mike -
Thanks Mike. The URL in question is Flavorpill dot com. There's been some talk of moving it to a new domain. Currently the site redirects you to new york or sf or la and all the events live on /events. I was thinking of, if we were to go to a new domain, to do 301 redirects on subfolders (new york, events, etc) and that might save some of the Google equity. There is a huge amount of links to the site and the site has been around for awhile so I'd like to keep that strength. There's also a lot of rebranding going on and I have said that I would like the rebranding to happen first before moving so some advice on that would be good as well.
Thanks,
Matt
-
Hi Matt,
Not sure I have a clear understanding of what you mean by "Could I do a 301 redirect for a couple months and then take it off and make the umbrella site?"
Any 301s you set up to pass link equity must be maintained permanently.
You can absolutely use 301s at the subfolder/page level, and if you can leave those redirects in place permanently this may be a solution for you.
The other option is to reach out to webmasters for your most valuable links and get those changed over to the new events site - can take a lot of time and isn't always successful, but it's often the best option to ensure link equity is maintained.
If you'd like to share more detail, I can circle back and provide more specific info. Hopefully the above helps to some degree.
Best,
Mike -
I see what you mean about the relevancy for the blog now. What would you recommend that I do. Do you know of any way I could keep the SEO strength? Would doing a 301 on subfolders work?
-
If I understand correctly the executives at your company want to use the domain that the current event site is on to create an umbrella site, but you want to keep SEO strength of that site but on a different domain?
I don't think that that would work how you want it to, because as far as I know once you take that 301 off, all of the links leading to the original domain are going to start counting towards that umbrella site and the even site will likely drastically drop in rankings.
The temporary might help to boost the new domain for the event site, but it's definitely a complicated situation and I'm not sure that there's a good way to go about it.
Also, you mentioned a blog at the beginning of your post but after reading it, it kind of seems somewhat irrelevant to your question.
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
-
Can’t put a finger on, what is causing 12 year domain, SEO optimized and decent link profile to rank lower than other less superior domains.
Can’t put a finger on, what is causing 12 year domain, SEO optimized and decent link profile to rank lower than other less superior domains. I have dissected the site and link, content, etc profile using ahrefs tools, still no luck, and unfortunately they do not have a community to ask anyone opinion. Hoping someone on Moz will be able to provide me with a secondary opinion or something I obviously missing here. Looking for any constructive feedback/professional opinion with fresh look on what maybe the cause of our down rankings and what may be a cause of it. Any feedback is very much appreciated. Search Term: 3030 aventura condos / One of our link samples (SE Position #6): https://goo.gl/FbYj4V Competing Domains (SE Position #1): https://goo.gl/fLPKX5 Competing Domains (SE Position #2): https://goo.gl/GqXGse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Im_Jake0 -
Should I revive the old domain or just redirect all the juicy links to my new site?
I'm about to acquire a domain with a lot of great/highly authoritative backlinks. The links pointing to the domain are quite powerful and the domain is an exact match TLD. I have two options (that I know of 😞 1. I could redirect all the links to their new home(s) on my new site which offers the same resources the old site used to offer. or 2. I could rebuild the tools/content on this site. Ideally, I'd transfer to my new site as all those powerful links could help all my rankings. However, I'm worried that some of the powerful links will de-link once they see the site redirects elsewhere, even though it's offering the same content. Also, option one isn't an exact match domain. Which, I know, shouldn't make a difference now-a-days but regardless of what people say, it still seems to help out some sites in less competitive niches. One more thing to note: The domain that I'm purchasing is about 25 years old. I'm leaning toward option one. I want to make sure I put my best foot forward on this investment and thought it wise to consult the SEO gods.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninel_P0 -
Domain Name
Hello everyone Please advice what to do in a situation when searching for a domain: www.domain.com google is recommending domain.org ? when these are completely 2 different sites? Does it has to do with trust rank? Please advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FusionMediaLimited0 -
Pros & Cons of Switching Your Main Domain to Mask Links & Combat EMDs
Hello Mozzers, I'd love to receive some advice for a client of mine and insights you may have regarding pros and cons on changing your main domain to mask links. Within a competitive niche there are about 4 different sites that routinely rank 1-4. Our site crushes all three on just about all metrics except we have a high volume of nofollow links and our site remains at #4. Our site is much older so we have significantly more links than these smaller sites, including pre-penguin penalty spammy links (like blog comments that make up 50+ nofollow links from 1 comment per domain). Obviously we are attempting to remove any toxic links and disavow, however the blog comment nofollow links skew our anchor text ratio pretty intensely and we are worried that we aren't going to make a dent in removing this type of links. Just disavowing them hasn't worked alone, so if we are unable to remove the bulk of these poor quality links (nofollow, off-topic anchor text, etc..) we are considering 301 redirecting the current domain to a new one. We've seen success with this in a couple of scenarios, but wanted to see other insights as to if masking links with a 301 could send fresh signals and positively effect rankings. Also wanted to mention, 2 of the 3 competitors that outrank us have EMD's for the primary keywords. Appreciate your time, insights, and advice on this matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Leadhub0 -
Internal links question
I've read that Google frowns upon large numbers of internal links. We're building a site that helps users browse a list of shows via dozens of genres. If the genres are expose, say, as a pulldown menu as opposed to a list of static links, and selecting the pulldown option filters the list of shows, would those genres count against our internal links count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Should I buy a .co domain if my preferred .com and .co.uk domain are taken by other companies?
I'm looking to boost my website ranking and drive more traffic to it using a keyword rich domain name. I want to have my nearest city followed by the keyword "seo" in the domain name but the .co.uk and .com have already been taken. Should I take the plunge and buy .co at a higher price? What options do I have? Also whilst we're on domains and URL's is it best to separate keywords in url's with a (_) or a (-)? Many thanks for any help with this matter. Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoSheikh0 -
Are sub domains considered completely different than the root domain?
We have a project that is going to generate duplicate content. If we move the new content to a sub-domain (E.g. product.domain.com) will it still be considered duplicate content to the root domain? Or is it like having two completely different domains? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tripled5110 -
Domain migration strategy
Imagine you have a large site on an aged and authoritative domain. For commercial reasons the site has to be moved to a new domain, and in the process is going to be revamped significantly. Not an ideal starting scenario obviously to be biting off so much all at once, but unavoidable. The plan is to run the new site in beta for about 4 weeks, giving users the opportunity to play with it and provide feedback. After that there will be a hard cut over with all URLs permanently redirected to the new domain. The hard cut over is necessary due to business continuity reasons, and real complexity in trying to maintain complex UI and client reporting over multiple domains. Of course we'll endeavour to mitigate the impact of the change by telling G about the change in WMC and ensuring we monitor crawl errors etc etc. My question is whether we should allow the new site to be indexed during the beta period? My gut feeling is yes for the following reasons: It's only 4 weeks and until such time as we start redirecting the old site the new domain won't have much whuffie so there's next to no chance the site will ranking for anything much. Give Googlebot a headstart on indexing a lot of URLs so they won't all be new when we cut over the redirects Is that sound reasoning? Is the duplication during that 4 week beta period likely to have some negative impact that I am underestimating?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlie_Coxhead0