Best Approach to Redirect One Domain to Another
-
So I'm about to migrate one domain to another. Lets say I'm migrating boo.com to foo.com. Boo.com has good organic traffic & has some really well ranked pages. For this reason (I think) I want to send that traffic to some where other than the foo.com homepage. Perhaps a catered landing page. My question is can I redirect some of the specific pages on boo.com to a landing page on foo.com & then redirect the delta to foo.com's homepage? Or am a risking not fully transferring the full credit of one domain to another if I take that approach & therefore I should just redirect one domain to the other in its entirety?
Thanks,
Rich
-
Hi Rich,
Elaborating on FedeEinhorn’s answer, if the page structure is the same you could just redirect all requests to the same URI on your new domain, as he stated. You could do this very easily with a .htaccess file on the root folder of your old domain (providing you’re running an apache webserver like most people). To redirect using regular expressions and capture groups we can use the RedirectMatch directive, which would look like this:
RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com$1
As simple as that, you’ve redirected all existing pages to the same page on the new domain. If you haven't used this before, here's a brief look at how that works for you:
Firstly, RedirectMatch simply tells apache we’re using the RedirectMatch directive from mod_alias.
301 specifies a 301 SEO friendly redirect which passes all that lovely SEO juice to your new site.
^(.*)$ is our regular expression. It states, from the start of the requested URI (^) start capturing the request (using the brackets to show what we want to capture), capture it all (with . meaning any character or symbol and the * meaning 0 or more of the preceding . , which will lead to everything being caught by our capture group (the brackets). And the $ meaning the end of the requested URI.
The final part of this redirect is specifying the page to redirect to, but as we have captured the request in the previous part, we use $1 to append our first capture (only capture in this distance) to the end of our new domain.
If you have completely changed your site, you may wish to redirect all requests to your homepage or another page, it is as easy as modifying the previous code to redirect without appending our capture to the end of your redirection target, so this would be acceptable:
RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com
But since we don’t need to use anything from the requested URI, we should really remove the brackets (the capture group) for the sake of tidiness, resulting in:
RedirectMatch 301 ^.*$ http://www.newsite.com
You could use a mixture of these 2 code, for instance if your blog posts are all identical but your main site pages have all changed - this code would redirect all pages starting with /blog/ to their double on the new domain, but redirect all other pages to a /we-have-moved/ landing page:
RedirectMatch 301 ^(/blog/.*)$ http://www.newsite.com$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^.*$ http://www.newsite.com/we-have-moved/
Hope that's useful,
Tom
-
Hmm... my best guess is that if the content remains the same, that means that you have the same contents on boo.com and foo.com, then just simply do a page by page redirection, that will carry as many value as possible to the new pages.
However, you if you do not have the same pages available on both domains, then there are a couple of things you can do:
- Not the exact same content on the new domain: redirect to what you think is the best match.
- No similar content on the new domain:
- Option 1: Redirect to a page (sort of a landing page) showing similar pages that the user might be interested in.
- Option 2: Redirect to a landing page or homepage.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?
Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaiaslastlaugh0 -
How can another country domain appear in a page title?
I have run into something i have never seen before. A friend has a website with two country domains, so page titles for the homepages of both websites look like this: Rent your care here | carrentals.de Rent your car here | carrentals.co.uk The thing is, both are perfectly well set-up in Yoast. Yet when googling, the different URL's both appear like this: Rent your car here | carrentals.co.uk How could this happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boostability0 -
Best practice to consolidating authority of several SKU pages to one destination
I am looking for input on best practices to the following solution Scenario: I have basic product A (e.g. Yamaha Keyboard Blast) There are 3 SKUs to the product A that deserve their own page content (e.g. Yamaha Keyboard Blast 350, Yamaha Keyboard Blast 450, Yamaha Keyboard Blast 550) Objective: - I want to consolidate the authority of potential links to the 3 SKUs pages into one destination/URL Possible Solutions I can think of: - Query parameters (e.g /yamaha-keyboard-blast?SKU=550) - and tell Google to ignore SKU query parameters when indexing Canonical tag (set the canonical tag of the SKU pages all to one destination URL) Hash tag (e.g. /yamaha-keyboard-blast#SKU=550); load SKU dependent content through javascript; Google only sees the URLs without hashtag Am I missing solutions? Which solutions makes the most sense and will allow me to consolidate authority? Thank you for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | french_soc0 -
Merging Domains
Up until last week, we had separate domains for each of our 3 products. We've now merged two products to sit under one URL. The merge coincided with a CMS upgrade which effectively killed all of our old URLs save for the homepage. Is it best for me to 301 the old homepage to it's new place, as well as the rest of the old site's top pages to according pages on the new site? Or is there a better solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Move webshop domain to the brand domain?
Hello, A client of mine has a brand with a website for over 10 years now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
About 4 years ago the have opened a webshop on an other domain (like www.brandnamewebshop.com). At this moment the brand domain has a seomoz authority of 45.
The webshop domain authority is 25. The question:
Would it not be better to transfer the webshop to the brand domain because of the domain authority? If so, how can this be done the best way? With a 301?
I also think: what a loss of energy of building the authority on the other domain.
Is it an idea to use both domains for a webshop and rewrite the content? Or is there an other way to still make use of the built up domain authority? Would it really help the other domain when I make a 301 redirect (and make use of the pointing links to the webshop domain?). I hope somebody have some experience with this...
Looking forward to the possibilities! Gerjan0 -
Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?
Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names. The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to? It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule0 -
Domain with a Virus History
Hi, I have a domain that I am working on that has a past we did not know about. Doing a bit of research it appears that back in 2010 the domain had a link to a virus or had a virus on the domain – because of this certain anti virus sites are blocking the domain. Interestingly Google, Norton, Firefox say the domain is fine.... IE, Kaspersky and a few still block it. I am going through and manually searching and trying to get them to agree the site is safe BUT I am having a problem with mywot.com. They refuse to take down the “reviews” staying its a virus site. Anything I can do? Any suggestions? Any legal action we can take? Is there anything else I can do or should be doing to check else where? Thanks in advance Fresh Fire One
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Buying an existing domain with higher ranks for redirecting
I've recently came across one of my competitors who's looking to sell their domain. Now they currently rank higher than my primary site for a few keywords we are targeting. Would it be wise to buy the domain and do a name server change over to my primary domain? Would it even help boost ranks for the keywords they rank higher for? Or will the link juice be minimal? Any thoughts would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | upick-1623910