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
-
Wes,
I would be more than happy to give you my feedback that's awesome that you are starting a YouMoz!
Your right Moz this full of very talented SEO's Can't beat it.
I have one more suggestion this is something I really enjoy and it's helped my career immensely.
I would definitely sign up for SearchLove, MozCon, inbound, SMX and other marketing conferences.
I just returned from SearchLove San Diego and inbound 2014 I can tell you firsthand they are worth every penny. Your enthusiasm for this is fantastic and my best recommendation. I would recommend you do VIP you have the opportunity to have dinner with the speakers and get to know them. This led to more clients and more resources for me. Not to mention a whole lot of fun.
I have attached a photograph of the 3rd day for me but is 2nd day of SearchLove.
My interactive schedule this is something you can watch while you watch the speakers and ask questions and do way more it's really cool. The reason I posted this is you might see somebody familiar at the very bottom is a speaker. He was also a speaker at SearchLove of Boston earlier this year. I have the pleasure of seeing him again at inbound 2014 that ended last week.
Of course MozCon awesome conference I recommend you go to As many as possible.
I love the way Moz teaches I think they do a top-notch job however because when SEOmoz became an SAAS company they needed a partner to give their existing clients to they chose Distilled one of my favorite companies. There has been a very good relationship to say the least between Moz & Distilled making their offerings very complementary in my opinion to each other.
Distilled is a marketing agency that offers a tool that was built to teach their own people.
They released it approximately 3 years ago ( could be off by a year) I of course use both Moz and distilled University because they each offers so much when combined together they offer even more. the 2nd photograph attached is a personal Distilled U page showing what you have done and it's a considerable amount of time that will take to finish all the courses. And they're constantly adding new ones. However, this is great when dealing with clients because you can show them what you have done and in my opinion this is very valuable.
Check out distilled.net/u it is really an awesome way to practice what you've learned as well as obviously take in the always evolving new information in the search marketing world.
I hope that all this is helpful and hopefully I will see you at the next MozCon & SearchLove
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hi Thomas
Thanks a lot, I have read this article briefly before but I need to put some proper time aside to really absorb it, I'm always optimistic and have a background in IT Training so it's in my nature to want to help others improve, The SEO world is so vast, it's great to know there are so many talented SEO's here for me to learn from and hopefully pass what I have learnt down to others.
I will definitely do the Youmoz when I have a little free time, I would love to get some feedback from you and others and the community so stay tuned
Thanks again for your support, it means a great deal
Best regards
Wes Dunn
-
Hi Wes,
In my opinion in my opinion Fruition was more accurate beginning now it seems they try to scare people into purchasing their services. Just my $.02
I would not 301 the old site.
I completely agree link earning is really what this is about regardless of what it's called there is a great how to on link building by http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building
I will definitely read the post if you write it I like energy and optimism it will help you immensely throughout career.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hi Thomas
I appreciate you taking the time to reply, as far I know I was never manually penalized, I used a tool called Fruition to identify if my old site had been affected by any google updates, in most cases my site was affected negatively, to be honest I have still not worked out the best way to build links other than to write high quality content that s worthy of "Earning" links. looking around at the competition there is no doubt in my mind that most are buying links from higher authority domains in order to boost their page rank and domain authority etc.
I have decided not to try and push any of the old rank to the new site via a 301, it just seems a shame that all the hard work will go to waste really, but at least I have learned from the experience.:-)
I will take another look at YouMoz, Ive never been afraid of telling people about things I have done particularly badly, Equally Im happy to broadcast something I have done quite well, it makes for better reading when you read about someone misfortunes though so I could probably patent it and turn it into a worldwide smash, "The SEO Woes of Wes" has a nice ring to it..
Thanks and best regards Thomas
Wes Dunn
-
Hi Wes,
"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?"
Absolutely technically can however in this case does not seem like it would be a wise decision.
I agree with Matt.
I guess I'm wondering if you were manually penalized?
On the whole it would be unwise to 301 redirect something that you believe to be spammy to something that you've worked hard to correct.
Something to keep in mind & very important. How relevant are the back links to what you're doing? if you have powerful links that are relevant you are welcome to ask the webmaster to point them to your "new site"
My hats off to you for doing the right thing. You might think of writing a
YouMoz on all the things you did that were incorrect and learn from. I believe it would get a high amount of readers.
Moz Rocks agree with you 100% on that.
Everything you do that takes patience and time is worth it at the end.
Check out https://www.distilled.net/u/ it complements Moz.
All best,
Thomas
-
Hi Matt
Thanks alot for the reply, there is nothing really wrong with the domain concerning links etc as far as I know, I just made a bit of a mess of the site by changing, category bases, taxonomy names, posts types etc, you are right about the wonderful world of SEO, It has been a frustrating year or so learning by my mistakes but very rewarding as my knowledge and skills improve, I am very grateful to everyone here for that and the Moz Pro tools has been a massive help also.
My old domain seemed to incur 2 penalties due to penguin updates but I just put that down to the mess I had made really, duplicate content was possibly a reason as I had no incline about cannonicalization and the changes I made duplicated just about everything multiple times, If Google issues penalties for providing a poor user experience then I probably got hit with a few of those also.. I could write several pages about bad mistakes I have made previously but so far Ive never had a Manual Action message or anything from Google to indicate Ive really messed up....
Thanks again for the reply, the new site is in much better shape than the old one ever was so perhaps it's best not to try and cut any corners
regards
Wes Dunn
-
Hi Wes - so I take you are asking if you can 301 redirect your old domain that you had a penalty on from dodgy links? Can you clarify what you did and what you think has hurt your old domain? Sudden ranking/traffic drop? Manual action in Google Webmaster Tools?
At the end of the day if you have had a penalty on your old site i wouldn't recommend using a 301 redirect to try and pass authority of your old penalized domain as it is known that the penalty will flow. However if you have done work to clear up the issue and have removed links and done a disavow if required then you should be fine.
As with anything in the wonderful world of SEO if it sounds to good to be true it usually is and I would go with your gut - "it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy..."
I hope this 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
-
301 vs 410 for subdirectory that was moved to a new domain, 2-years later
Hi all, I've read a lot about 301 vs 404 and 410s, but the case is pretty unique so I decided to get some feedback from you. Both websites are travel related but we had one destination as a subdirectory of the other one (two neighboring countries, where more than 90% of business was related to the 'main' destination and the rest to the 'satellite'). This was obviously bad practice and we decided to move the satellite destination to its own domain. Everything was done 2 years ago and we opted for 301s to the new domain as we had some good links pointing to satellite content. (All of the moved content is destination specific and still relevant) Few weeks back we figured out that google still shows our subdirectory when doing specific 'site:' search and looking further into it, we realized we still get traffic for satellite destination through the main website via links acquired before the move. Not a lot of hits, but they still sporadically occur. A decision was made (rather hastily) to 410 pages and see if that will make satellite subdir pages not show in google searches. So 3 weeks in, 410 errors are climbing in GWMT, but satellite subdirectory still shows in google searches. One part of the team is pushing to put back in place 301s. The other part of the team is concerned with the 'health' of the main website as those pages are not relevant for it, and want them gone . What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | halloranc0 -
Purchasing an existing domain + redirecting to company's domain
Let's pretend that competitor.com ranks well for certain search terms and generates some traffic from organic search. If a company were to acquire the competitor (or their domain), what's the smartest way to redirect that SEO value to the acquiring company's website? Does a 301 redirect work between different root domains? Even if it does work, is that the smartest approach? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raleigh0 -
If you do 302 redirect then change to 301 redirect do you lose all link juice?
Hello everyone, I was wondering if you could help me with understanding the following story: A website has been moved from its HTTP version to a HTTPS version. The SEO manager has advised developers that they needed to do 301 redirects. However, in the end, 302 redirects have been put in place instead. Now, 301s should be put in place ASAP. The million dollar question is: has the website lost all of its link juice already given the nature of the redirects? Also, does it depend on whether Google has indexed the new 302 pages or does it depend on something else? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingGH0 -
What to do about old urls that don't logically 301 redirect to current site?
Mozzers, I have changed my site url structure several times. As a result, I now have a lot of old URLs that don't really logically redirect to anything in the current site. I started out 404-ing them, but it seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate AND it wasn't removing them from the index after being crawled several times. There are way too many (>100k) to use the URL removal tool even at a directory level. So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this. Should I (a) just 404 them and wait for Google to remove (b) keep the 200, noindex or (c) are there other things I can do? 410 maybe? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
301 Redirect To Another 301 Redirect
Hi, We have a client with an old domain that they want to redirect to their primary domain. They also have a few older domains pointing to the old domain. Do you recommend leaving them as redirects that point to the old domain? This will create a redirect to a redirect situation. Or, is it better to go ahead and redirect those older domains to the primary one's, removing one layer of redirect? Thank you! Jessie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessieT0 -
Undo a 301 redirect
Hi there, 4 months ago I have done a redirect from one domain to another. Now, after about 120 days I have just a few results from the old domain indexed. The problem is that I believe that the old domain name had a really big impact on rankings, as it had the main keyword in the domain name. I'm wondering now if I could restore the old domain just by taking out the 301 instruction and how will search engines react. Do you have any studies on that? Would it be possible? Matt Cutts himself did it with his own domain, but he doesn't talk specifically on the effect of the rankings: http://www.thedotcomblog.com/seo/redirects-after-change-in-domain-name Thanks in advance for any help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SandraMoZ0 -
2-stage 301 redirects
Dear colleagues, I have quite an unusual situation with one of my client's websites, and I could use an advise from someone who experienced the same circumstances: They are currently planning on launching a new site under the same domain (by September), when several key current pages are intended to be replaced with new equivalent pages under new URLs. So far it's pretty simple, BUT - due to a merger with another company they will be migrating their entire website to a different domain within a year. My question is - what would be the optimal solution for redirects? We are considering a 301 from the current pages to the new pages under the same domain, and once the new domain is activated - aside from defining 301 redirects from the new pages under the same domain to the new domain, we will cancel the original 301 from the old pages to the new pages on the same domain, and instead define new 301 for those pages to the new domain. What do you think? Is there a better solution - like using 302 redirects for the first stage? Has anyone tried such a procedure? Your input will be highly appreciated! Thanks in advance, Omer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Usearch0 -
301 Redirect - How Long Until Recovery?
How long after one moves a page and sets up the 301s should the site take to regain its previous rankings? Context: i've ported a site to a new framework. Along the way, several high ranked pages needed to have new URLs setup, as well as the site moved from www.domain.com to simply domain.com. About 1 week after the change, the site's traffic went down 70% and has been there for about another 2 weeks. I suppose it could be something about the new framework that is causing problems though according to SEOMoz tools, the new framework is checking out pretty well. I assume the problem is reconciling all those old www inbound links with the new non-www location. It is all 301'd however ... so it should be working, but is not. So my questions are: 1. How long should it take Google to reconcile these changes and put us back to original SERP positions 2. is there something inherently problematic with switching from www to non-www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NealCabage0