Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Setting up 301 Redirects after acquisition?
-
Hello!
The company that I work for has recently acquired two other companies. I was wondering what the best strategy would be as it relates to redirects / authority.
Please help!
Thanks
-
I once worked for what could be described as a "holding company" that's in the Fortune 500. Because everything they owned was so diverse, they either kept separate branches or the companies/brands separate. Especially if the brand was worth money as a name. It's important to do the research on how valuable the brand itself is because even if you decide to have one company to rule them all, you need to figure out how to transition customers.
-
Great response Egol.
I'm always impressed with people who can think outside the box. Our company was recently purchased by a much larger corporation and instead of trying to roll us together they recognized that separately with their additional resources we are more valuable.
-
First thing which one you want to brand ? And as what Ray said, 301 redirect the other domains to the primary domain.
-
Before you redirect... it could be much more profitable to run these sites separately.
A proper analysis could take a few minutes to a few hours to decide that they are not worth much... or it could be worth a lot of money to have someone who knows what they are doing flip these sites and convert them into valuable assets that earn many times more than what their previous owner was doing with them.
-
If your company plans on having the acquired domains redirect to your primary domain, then 301 redirects would be the proper method to use.
You'd set those up in the acquired domains' .htaccess file.
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
-
We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version?
We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version? Thant way all forms of the website are pointing to one version?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Is there any benefit to changing 303 redirects to 301?
A year ago I moved my marketplace website from http to https. I implemented some design changes at the same time, and saw a huge drop in traffic that we have not recovered from. I've been searching for reasons for the organic traffic decline and have noticed that the redirects from http to https URLs are 303 redirects. There's little information available about 303 redirects but most articles say they don't pass link juice. Is it worth changing them to 301 redirects now? Are there risks in making such a change a year later, and is it likely to have any benefits for rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAdeit0 -
302 > 302 > 301 Redirect Chain Issue & Advice
Hi everyone, I recently relaunched our website and everything went well. However, while checking site health, I found a new redirect chain issue (302 > 302 > 301 > 200) when the user requests the HTTP and non-www version of our URL. Here's what's happening: • 302 #1 -- http://domain.com/example/ 302 redirects to http://domain.com/PnVKV/example/ (the 5 characters in the appended "subfolder" are dynamic and change each time)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew_In_Search_of_Answers
• 302 #2 -- http://domain.com/PnVKV/example/ 302 redirects BACK to http://domain.com/example/
• 301 #1 -- http://domain.com/example/ 301 redirects to https://www.domain.com/example/ (as it should have done originally)
• 200 -- https://www.domain.com/example/ resolves properly We're hosted on AWS, and one of my cloud architects investigated and reported GoDaddy was causing the two 302s. That's backed up online by posts like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46307518/random-5-alpha-character-path-appended-to-requests and https://www.godaddy.com/community/Managing-Domains/My-domain-name-not-resolving-correctly-6-random-characters-are/td-p/60782. I reached out to GoDaddy today, expecting them to say it wasn't a problem on their end, but they actually confirmed this was a known bug (as of September 2017) but there is no timeline for a fix. I asked the first rep I spoke with on the phone to send a summary, and here's what he provided in his own words: From the information gathered on my end and I was able to get from our advanced tech support team, the redirect issue is in a bug report and many examples have been logged with the help of customers, but no log will be made in this case due to the destination URL being met. Most issues being logged are site not resolving properly or resolving errors. I realize the redirect can cause SEO issues with the additional redirects occurring. Also no ETA has been logged for the issue being reported. I do feel for you since I now understand more the SEO issues it can cause. I myself will keep an eye out for the bug report and see if any progress is being made any info outside of this I will email you directly. Thanks. Issue being Experienced: Domains that are set to Go Daddy forwarding IPs may sometimes resolve to a url that has extra characters appended to the end of them. Example: domain1.com forwards to http://www.domain2.com/TLYEZ. However it should just forward to http://www.domain2.com. I think this answers what some Moz users may have been experiencing sporadically, especially this previous thread: https://moz.com/community/q/forwarded-vanity-domains-suddenly-resolving-to-404-with-appended-url-s-ending-in-random-5-characters. My question: Given everything stated above and what we know about the impact of redirect chains on SEO, how severe should I rate this? I told my Director that I would recommend we move away from GoDaddy (something I don't want to do, but feel we _**have **_to do), but she viewed it as just another technical SEO issue and one that didn't necessarily need to be prioritized over others related to the relaunch. How would you respond in my shoes? On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the biggest), how big of a technical SEO is this? Would you make it a priority? At the very least, I thought the Moz community would benefit from the GoDaddy confirmation of this issue and knowing about the lack of an ETA on a fix. Thanks!0 -
301 redirect hops from non-https and www
It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop. It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain. The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not In which case, you could have: Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page. Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud0 -
Googlebot being redirected but not users?
Hi, We seem to have a slightly odd issue. We noticed that a number of our location category pages were slipping off 1 page, and onto page 2 in our niche. On inspection, we noticed that our Arizona page had started ranking in place of a number of other location pages - Cali, Idaho, NJ etc. Weirdly, the pages they had replaced were no longer indexed, and would remain so, despite being fetched, tweeted etc. One test was to see when the dropped out pages had been last crawled, or at least cached. When conducting the 'cache:domain.com/category/location' on these pages, we were getting 301 redirected to, you guessed it, the Arizona page. Very odd. However, the dropped out pages were serving 200 OK when run through header checker tools, screaming frog etc. On the face of it, it would seem Googlebot is getting redirected when it is hitting a number of our key location pages, but users are not. Has anyone experienced anything like this? The theming of the pages are quite different in terms of content, meta etc. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers0 -
SEO impact difference between a URL Rewrite and 301 redirect
Hi guys and girls! Just putting a new site live, we changed the URL from one thing to another and I created a 301 file redirecting the urls like for like. The developer installing it has created a different file with columns like: RewriteRule ^page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^/page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] What's the difference? The page redirects but is there a difference between the 301 redirect and this URL rewrite in terms of SEO and link value?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
I have encountered some issue with 301 redirect and htaccess file. I need to redirect the following url: http://www.domain.com/?specifications=colours/page/3 to: http://www.domain.com/colours The 301 redirect command I wrote in htaccess file is as follow: Redirect 301 /?specifications=colours/page/3 http://www.domain.com/colours And it doesn't work at the moment. What is the correct way to set up 301 redirect here? Your help will be sincerely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0 -
Reverse Proxy better than 301 redirect?
Are reverse proxies that much better than 301 redirects? Should I invest the time in doing this? I found out about reverse proxies here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianmcc0