Irrelevant backlinks - will 301 redirect cleanse the relationship?
-
My client has thousands of clients for whom they provided websites that used to reside in a subdirectory of their own domain. They moved them to their own domains but there are tens of thousands of backlinks on those sites pointing back to the original domain. Those backlinks are completely irrelevant and are probably hurting them by sending the wrong signals to Google on what this site really is about.
My question is will the 301 redirect be enough to cleanse the relationship between my client and all their clients' sites or should I ask the client to clean up all those backlinks on their clients' sites and remove their domain from the target urls? That's a huge job, obviously.
-
Thanks everyone. Since 301 redirects are out of the question, what I've done is found all the directories that really shouldn't be on this site at all and noindexed them. None of those pages are good for rank for anything so it doesn't matter. The client is instructing their 'customers' to get their sites off the doubleknot site and onto their own domains. Once those are moved over there will still be lots of links pointing to doubleknot and fixing them will be a nightmare because there are just too many, but I'm going to see if they can do a sitewide edit and add rel="nofollow" to each link pointing to doubleknot's irrelevent directories and also see if we can do a mass search and replace to point the links to the right domain when necessary. If there is not a pattern, that will no be possible and someone will have to do it by hand. With noindex and nofollow working for us, that might be enough
My client is a team of IT and computer science experts, and they've been advised of the problem. They're looking into ways to put their degrees to work to clean the data.
@Richard, to answer your question, their rank is terrible. That's why they called me. Their website is also not at all optimized so I'm restructuring the architecture and asking them to provide new copy. Then I'll do the standard on-site optimization. It could be that might be enough to turn things around. And then it's linkbuilding time. Time will tell. Thanks again!
-
What are your clients rankings like? If they're no good, then all of the above answers are great.
But if your clients rankings are good, I wouldn't touch it. I have a client in a similar situation who has hundreds of bad inbound links from the same site. But .. he continues to rank in position 2 for the most sought after and highly lucrative keyword in his industry. I could fix it with one line in a disavow file using a site wide domain disavow command, but I dare not touch it as long as he ranks. He's been ranking there now for close to two years! In situations like this Seo theory goes out the window. In short, if he's ranking then I wouldn't touch those links as the algo's still nowhere near perfect.
-
Cleaning up the backlinks is by far the best option, and regardless of what else you do I recommend setting that in motion - but it sounds like a 100% success rate is pretty unlikely (and it usually is).
If you don't need any pages in the problem directories to be indexed, I'd definitely consider noindexing the /event/ directory and any other directories that are causing problems. You may also want to disavow the old backlinks on a domain level, which will take less time than doing it on a link-by-link basis. If you are going to do this, be warned that it has the potential to hurt your rankings - these links may be causing a penalty risk now, but they may also be passing value to your domain that, once removed, will cause the domain to slip. If you do decide to go that route, I recommend coupling it with a concerted link building effort - have a plan for several months of link-worthy content and a solid promotion plan to get new, more-relevant links to the domain.
-
I just found out my client can NOT use 301 redirects, something to do with the way their software is setup. I don't get it, but let's assume that is true.
If you do a Google query on site:www.doubleknot.com/event you'll find 64K pages, most of which are no longer in the doubleknot site and have been migrated over to the scout's own url. For example www.doubleknot.com/event/1638783 is in google's index but when you click on it, it goes to http://www.narragansettbsa.org/event/1638783. It is not using a 301 redirect to do that.
Many of those transferred scout pages retain backlinks pointing to the original page on the doubleknot.com website. So not only are those backlinks irrelevant, they would be broken except for the fact they are being redirected.
I gave them the task of cleaning those up, but now here's another question since a 301 redirect doesn't seem to be an option. I have no idea why those doubleknot.com/event pages are still in the index. Must have something to do with the fact they can't use 301s. So let's assume they need to stay. I'm considering asking him to noindex the /event/ directory and a few others that have the same problem. Is this a smart move? I'm thinking it will clear out ten of thousands of girl scout and boy scout pages that might be clouding the waters here. If we do that though, we're still left with thousands of boy scout backlinks pointing to old pages on their root domain unless they somehow manage to clean those all up too.
Thoughts?
-
Hi there
301 redirects will pass link equity - good, bad, or otherwise - roughly around 90-99% of link equity.
If you are seeing irrelevant backlinks in your client's profile, I would suggest going through a proper backlink audit and researching which links you'd like to remove, update, and disavow.
Link equity can be passed from domain to domain, so this is something you are going to look into, especially if there are redirects involved.
Taking the time now will help you in the long run and save you some headaches. Hope this helps - good luck!
-
No, a 301 does not break the links - it will eventually pass most of the bad as well as most of the good.
I think you already know the answer to your question but you want someone to say it so I will. The best answer would be to clean it up properly. The second best answer would be to reinstate the previous subdomain folders and then noindex all of them. You could also do a 301 on all of them to a page you don't want to pass value to, such as yoursite.com/passjuicehere and then just noindex that page. If 301s are your fastest way, at least that doesn't pass it anywhere of value.
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
-
Using a Reverse Proxy and 301 redirect to appear Sub Domain as Sub Directory - what are the SEO Risks?
We’re in process to move WordPress blog URLs from subdomains to sub-directory. We aren’t moving blog physically, but using reverse proxy and 301 redirection to do this. Blog subdomain URL is https://blog.example.com/ and destination sub-directory URL is https://www.example.com/blog/ Our main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL site. This is on Windows server. Due to technical reasons, we can’t physically move our WordPress blog to the main website. Following is our Technical Setup Setup a reverse proxy at https://www.example.com/blog/ pointing to https://blog.example.com/ Use a 301 redirection from https://blog.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/blog/ with an exception if a traffic is coming from main WWW domain then it won’t redirect. Thus, we can eliminate infinite loop. Change all absolute URLs to relative URLs on blog Change the sitemap URL from https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml to https://www.example.com/blog/sitemap.xml and update all URLs mentioned within the sitemap. SEO Risk Evaluation We have individual GA Tracking ID and individual Google Search Console Properties for main website and blog. We will not merge them. Keep them separate as they are. Keeping this in mind, I am evaluating SEO Risks factors Right now when we receive traffic from main website to blog (or vice versa) then it is considered as referral traffic and new cookies are set for Google Analytics. What’s going to happen when its on the same domain? Which type of settings change should I do in Blog’s Google Search Console? (A). Do I need to request “Change of Address” in the Blog’s search console property? (B). Should I re-submit the sitemap? Do I need to re-submit the blog sitemap from the https://www.example.com/ Google Search Console Property? Main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL website, and blog is all about content. So does that impact SEO? Will this dilute SEO link juice or impact on the main website ranking because following are the key SEO Metrices. (A). Main website’s Avg Session Duration is about 10 minutes and bounce rate is around 30% (B). Blog’s Avg Session Duration is 33 seconds and bounce rate is over 92%
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshibhargav_200 -
301 redirect to avoid duplicate content penalty
I have two websites with identical content. Haya and ethnic Both websites have similar products. I would like to get rid of ethniccode I have already started to de-index ethniccode. My question is, Will I get any SEO benefit or Will it be harmful if I 301 direct the below only URL’s https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez -> https://www.hayacreations/collections/salwar-kameez https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez/anarkali-suits - > https://www.hayacreations/collections/anarkali-suits
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
301 redirects aren't passing value.
We recently migrated our shop to a new platform. We are using Wordpress for our main website, but we wanted a separate installation of Wordpress for our shop, so we left the main blog where it was, but moved the shop to a /shop/ sub directory with it's on WP installation. So now we have 2 installations of Wordpress. However, since we've done this, none of the pages on the new shop are ranking for anything. Their page rank is 0, and Moz page authority is 1 for every page on the new site. I've set up the proper 301 redirects, and they're redirecting fine, but none of the page value is coming over. It's been about a week now, and despite re-crawls by google, I'm not seeing any change. Also, one of the original (now re-directed) product pages still has a Page Authority of 13 according to Open Site Explorer. I know it's not high, but it had us ranking in the top 5 for a very important keyword, and now that value is being wasted. For example, one of our product pages that was ranking well was startupfashion.com/product/fashion-brand-line-sheet-template
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inkyj
That page is now redirected to
http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-line-sheet-template I've done 301's plenty of times and I've never seen this issue, so i'm wondering if it could have something to do with having multiple installations of Wordpress. I can't see any obvious issues with it... i have the Yoast SEO plugin configured properly on both installations, and all of the pages ARE being indexed by google. Not sure what is going on. Anyone have any experience with this, or have any ideas? Thanks!!0 -
Will redirecting poor traffic web pages increase web presence
A number of pages on my site have low traffic metrics. I intend to redirect poor performing pages to the most appropriate page with high traffic. Example
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greyshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-redshoes all of the above will be redirected to the following page:
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes Question
Will carrying out htaccess redirects from the above example influence to web positioning of both www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes and www.sampledomomain.co.uk Regards Mark0 -
How do i migrate from Volusion to Magento with the same domain using 301 redirect?
We are thinking about migrating our site from Volusion to Magento due to traffic reasons, our site's been growing and we're going way over the bandwidth limit (40gb) for Volusion every month. It only make sense for us to start on Magento CE where we can host it on our site and use our own bandwidth. We will be using the same domain, and changing our URLs to make things better (we were somewhat restricted by Volusion so we couldn't optimize some of our URL addresses). Here's comes the main question, since we are ranking pretty good for the keywords that we're targeting, we ABSOLUTELY DON'T want to lose any traffic or ranking from our pages, I know that there's something called the 301 redirect that we can use, but how can this be done? When we migrate the site, we will need to point our domain to Magento from Volusion, so basically Volusion store will be down... if we are changing domain names then the 301 redirect makes sense because we can have the original store live while it's redirecting to a completely new address. Is there any method to still setup this 301 redirect, or is there something else I can do to save our rankings??? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s2bkevin0 -
Mass 301 redirect from a sub-domain - using Joomla or htaccess
How is best to mass redirect old domains - Listing the URL's in htaccess? We are looking to use Joomla as a CMS - transferring a blog from a sub-domain to the main site and want to 301 all the sub domain blog posts - any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Do I need to use canonical tags if I'm 301 redirecting pages?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
What happens with a 301 redirected page?
Hi All, What happens with an indexed page that I 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Is it removed from the Google index after a while? Thanks0