How long before I can use a redirected domain without taking back link juice?
-
We recently moved our website to a new domain that better matched our brand. I want to use the old domain at some point for another aspect of our business.
How long after we do the domain redirect will it be safe to use the old domain again--without affecting the seo of the new domain?
Thanks!
Harriet
-
Thank you, Jane. You rephrased my question much better.
You're correct that the old site wasn't being penalized (rebranding was the reason we moved it.)
I have plenty of time to improve the new site before I need to use the old domain.
Thanks again,
Harriet -
This was my impression as well @zharriet. If you haven't yet gotten an answer, letting us further understand the problem will help us to give you a good answer.
-
I didn't get the impression from this question that the old site / domain was penalised. Correct me if I'm wrong, zharriet, but I got the impression that what you're saying is that you changing domains, redirected www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com, but that at some point in the future, you want to use **www.oldsite.com **at some point in the future for another part of the business. As such, you want to know when you can "turn off" the redirect without harming the new rankings of www.newsite.com, using www.oldsite.comfor new content.
The answer to this is really hard to give: some sites don't seem to benefit much from having old domains pointed at them. Others benefit for a period before that benefit seems to disappear (meaning that you will have needed to build a good number of news links to the new domain).
It is impossible to say what the effect of removing a 301 redirect at some point in the future will be, but the safest way you can ensure that this doesn't harm the new site is by building a robust platform of good on and off site SEO for that new site so that it can withstand having any benefit of the old site's 301 taken away.
-
There really is no expiration date on the link equity that goes through a redirect. If you're worried about penalized links then they will always be present and if you redirect one site to the other then you'll be redirecting all of those links as well.
BeanstalkSEO's solution probably would work. If you want to be able to redirect the site without having a splash page you can also do it by redirecting through an intermediary page that is blocked by robots.txt.
-
Is there a reason that you aren't doing a redirect right away?
-
I assume the old domain has a penalty and thus the concern with the redirection (not judging, just noting the premise of the answer). While in these events I am hesitate to connect the dots at all, going back to my affiliate marketing days (when I had a much more cowboyish approach to SEO) I would have done the following:
1 - Put up a one page splash page on the old site.
2 - Disallow the site in the robots.txt file
3 - Put the noindex,nofollow on the splash page
4 - Use a meta refresh on the splash page directed to the new site
5 - if it was a link issue add a disavow file on both domains for the links to the old domainThe splash page should read something like, "This site has been moved to a new domain. If you are not redirected in x seconds (x being however long you've selected for the refresh) please click here." (where "click here is a nofollowed link to your new domain.
This all said, anytime you link two domains there is always the chance the Google will connect the dots now or in the future so there is an element of risk. You have clearly shown that you don't want weight passing so that's a perk but it all depends on risk tolerance.
I'll be interested to hear any additional thoughts or techniques. I haven't done anything like this in many many years.
Good luck !!!
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 does link juice flow through hreflang?
We want to use the hreflang tag on our site (direct users searching for the Spanish version of spanishdict.com to spanishdict.com/traductor). Before doing so, we were wondering how link juice flows through hreflang? Any insight or resources on this would be very helpful. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CuriosityMedia0 -
Is there any benefit in using a subdomain redirected to a single page?
For example if we have a domain www.bobshardware.com.au and we setup a subdomain sydneysupplies.bobshardware.com.au and then brisbanescrewdrivers.bobshardware.com.au and used those in ad campaigns. Each subdomain being redirected back to a single page such as bobshardware.com.au/brisbane-screw-drivers etc. Is there a benefit ? Cheers
Technical SEO | | techdesign0 -
Redirecting a Few URLS from One Domain to Another
Hello, I have two websites within a similar niche...some of the top organic traffic driving pages on Website B I'd like to redirect to a similar page on Website A. The reason is Website A is a bigger and better and is monetized much better as well. I only want to redirect a few of the main URLS on Website A and also only those that I have similar content on my main Website B. Is this process safe for SEO? What is the best way to go about this process. I am not really concerned with Website B and what happens to it's rankings, but in the meantime, I'd like to redirect the traffic from some of it's main organic traffic driving pages to my main website A and to it's similar pages. I am also concerned with making sure my main website A stays white hat and doesn't receive any negativity from these redirects. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | juicyresults0 -
Using the same domain for two websites (for different geographical locations)
Hi all, My client has a new E-commerce site coming out in few months.
Technical SEO | | skifr
His requirement is to use the same domain (lets call it www.domain.com for now) for two seperate websites:
The first site, for users with ip addresses from USA - which will include prices in US dollars.
The second site - for users outside of the US - will not include any prices, and will have different pages and design. Now, lets say that googlebot crawls the websites from different ip ranges. How can i make sure a user from France, for example, won't see crawled pages from the US? Sure, once he will click the result, I can redirect him to a "Sorry, but this content is unavailable in your country" page. The problem is, I don't want a user from France to see the in the search results the meta description snippets of pages related only to users in the US (in some cases, the snippets may include the prices in $).
Is Geotargeting through Webmaster Tools can help in this case? I know I can target a part of the website for a specific country (e.g. - www.domain.com/us/), but how can I make sure global users won't see the pages targeted only to the US in the search results? Thanks in Advance0 -
Should I Remove Thousands of Bad Links over a Short Time or Long Time?
Hey Moz Community! I've got a website that has hundreds of thousands of old links that don't really offer any great content. They need to be removed. Would it be a better idea to remove them in batches of 5000,10000, or more over a long time... or remove them all at the same time because it doesn't matter? Cheers, Alex
Technical SEO | | Anti-Alex0 -
Is it okay to use anchor text almost exclusively for inbound links?
We are not spammy - each link is earned through a long process of relationship building and targeted guest post writing. Because of this, we like each link to have anchor text and they don't point to the same page or have the same anchor text. Is this still something to be worried about? Do we still need to include plain URLs (wwww.example.com) for some of those links?
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Redirecting Parked Domain
I just recently switched hosting. We have 3 domains and 1 being the main domain. Right now they are set up as parked domains. Can I redirect the parked domains under my main websites .htaccess file ? I am just worried that good we will get hit for duplicate content, even though technically the content is only on our main domain. right now if I type in my parked domains in Google, they appear in search. The site is all hand coded and not using a CMS.
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
What is SEO impact of redirecting from domain to https appspot domain ?
Our site is hosted on google and is fully https. But since google's limitation is that all https needs to be on the appspot domain, we are redirecting users from our website to the appspot domain. What is the impact of this on SEO?
Technical SEO | | incandescent0