Several personal websites moving to one domain - 301 or 302?
-
I feel like I've thought about this so much that now I'm thinking in circles and can't figure this out, so I hope someone can help!
We have a group of physicians who currently practice privately, but are going to become one entity with one website. However, they are going to look like sub-entities, if this makes sense - instead of every practice being "One Practice Medical Group" they'll be "Lakeside Primary Care - A One Practice Medical Group Company," and then the other guy will be "Red Mountain Primary Care - A One Practice Medical Group Company" and so on for about a half dozen practices.
They all have personal sites already, and many are concerned that they will lose any history for their personal sites and will not rank as well in Google as they do right now.
One doctor really wants to keep his own site, and then just have a link on his profile page of the new entity's website. Isn't this counterproductive?
Also, if we do redirect all the personal websites to the new entity's domain, it will pass any page rank they already have, correct? Should these be 301 redirects, or 302 redirects? None of the current sites really have a lot of "link juice" but we're working with several strong personalities who want the benefits of the big entity but the autonomy of a private practice.
-
Ryan has offered some great ideas. Lots of those are not normally considered until after the problems hit.
As a general rule, if you merge multiple websites, you unite their strengths and assets. This is done by placing a 301 redirect on each of the existing domains so that any traffic that enters the site will be redirected to a destination on the combined site.
If you have a main website like LakesidePrimaryCare.com, then each physician would have a personal profile page on that site. I would redirect each of their former sites to their personal page on the combined site. If you do that, their personal page will receive the strength from their previous site and help their personal page rank for queries like... "Dr Egol in scranton PA". (Some benefit would also go into the entire site for any query that they are optimized to rank for.)
If all of the redirects go to the homepage of the site it will give maximum power for the new site rank for "doctors in Scranton PA". Which might be more beneficial for all but might be less satisfying individually. (I would want this if I was one of the physicians, but I tend to be a team player rather than looking for maximum individual benefits.) I believe that this option gives maximum benefit to everyone.
In my opinion, and others will disagree, the old domains must remain on hosting with DNS pointing at them permanently and that 301 redirect must be in place permanently. This can be done without paying hosting for all of the domains, if you have a server where multiple domains can be routed. If this is not done any link popularity will be lost.
-
Outside of redirection you might be able to accomplish this via redesign and branding. Still, I'd ask questions like these moving forward...
- Are their email address going to change? (i.e. from doctor@privatepractice.org to doctor@medicalgroup.org?
- Will their billing and call handling change? (again, from one to the other)
- Will they have to present their business as "...part of the Medical Group?"
- Will the web team be working for the Medical Group or individual doctors?
- And so on...
Ultimately it looks like the answer is going to be The Medical Group. As such, redirecting the old individual sites to the corresponding section of the new medical group site is the likely conclusion, so individualdoctor.com >> 301 >> medicalgroup.org/individualdoctor.
To ease this transition it'd help you to have a thorough list of all the benefits the new site is going to bring, while also addressing how they can integrate their old work (social media profiles, localized listings, reviews, so on) into the new site. Any other information that you can provide that shows how The Medical Group has helped promote doctors in the past (if it existed prior) would be good as well.
-
301 redirects would be best practice. A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect and it tells the engines to continue indexing the old URL. A 301 redirect will tell the engines to send all traffic to the new URLs because the site has permanently moved.
PS, Migrations turn everyone's brains into mush at one point. Hang in there!
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
-
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
301 with nofollow ?
Hi, our ecommerce link penalty was revoked by google back in Feb 26th 2013, but to this day we have not seen any improvement on our rankings. Due to 80% revenue loss we had to layoff quite a few people to stay alive. Situation now is more dire then ever for our company. We have millions of dollars invested in our business and google just busted it for some "low quality" or "spammy links" as they call it. We want to try to move to a different domain and do a 301 from the old domain to make sure our previous customers can still find us as a last effort to stay alive. But doing so we do not want to the bad links juice to flow to our new domain. Can we do a 301 with nofollow and will that have any negative impact or any impact at all.? any suggestion is greatly appreciated. Thank you Nick We are planning on moving to a different domain after 10 years, and laying off bunch of people due to loss of revenue.
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Domain Hosting
I'm currently working with a client who provides products in Ireland Is it massively beneficial for the sited to be hosted on an irish server or will there not be much difference with it being hosted in England?
Technical SEO | | Sandeep_Matharu0 -
Redirecting old domain to new domain with wordpress
Hi all, I need to change domain name to a website published on wordpress. I'd think to make these steps: trasferring the website (files+db) to a new hosting space to redirect old site (www.oldsite.com) to the new one (www.newsite.com) using rewrite rules. With these steps I'd need to transfer and reinstall files and wordpress so I would like to discover if there's some less time expending procedure to consider. Thanks and ciao Bob
Technical SEO | | bobrock40 -
Is Buying Domains Good For SEO? Can I 301 redirect domains to an Original website?
I have a friend that purchased multiple domains related to their website. Each of these domains have the back ground of the original website and irrelevant content on them. Is is possible to redirect the various domains to certain pages on the original website. For example if the website is www.shoes.com and they purchased domains such as www.leathermensshoes.com and a few others related to the website. Is it SEO friendly to link the domains purchased to the original website?
Technical SEO | | TSpike10 -
Sub Domain vs. New Root Domain for New Brand
Would you recommend a new brand be placed as a subdomain to the existing parent company or create a separate root domain for this new brand?
Technical SEO | | ScratchMM0 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0 -
Website has been penalized?
Hey guys, We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010. Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that. Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly. Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central. We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly. Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz. The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links. Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bigtimeseo0