To redirect or not to redirect, that is the question
-
I work for a software company that is redeveloping the website (same domain.) We have tons of content in the form of articles and documents for support, how to use the product better, case studies, and blog posts. I've downloaded a landing page report and many of these have low impressions and little or no clicks (some ranked high other very low.) Should I redirect all this content to the new site where some of it won't exist or forget about it because of the lack of juice?
Is there a rule-of-thumb threshold for redirecting for content?
-
I would redirect if you can as there may be duplicate content issues if you simply republish without them...
I would also check that your content hasn't been copied by any external sites as well as we neglected this and lost rankings as Google thought we'd nicked the content when we redeveloped our websites. It all worked out OK in the end, we did the DMCA request, and sent letters to the people who copied us asking for removal but it was a pain in the proverbial - and entirely unnecessary if we'd have done this before we switched to a new site hierarchy.
-
Hi there
Based on your research, if you feel it's better to repurpose than to redirect, then go for it! Especially if you feel the content does have value and it's merely some on-site optimization and making sure your content / goals / on-site factors align with your audience goals.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
I've done all of that minus the Google resource. You'll notice I mentioned that most of the content ranks very low and has very low engagement. I'll take it that my research and intuition is that our site won't be harmed by merely re-purposing the content rather than using a redirect for each one.
-
Hi there
I would first run a content audit to see if pages are worth keeping, updating, consolidating, or eliminating.
From there, I would check out this migration resource from Moz to make sure you properly move your website.
Also, take a Google's move your site resource.
All of the above will take some research and conversations, so make sure that you take an inventory, vet it, and know what to do with that content once you do your research.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
How to answer questions when there no questions for my keyword
Hello, Let's say I want to rank on "Alsace bike tour" whatever tool I use Moz keyword explorer, google suggest , keyword.io, answer the public ... there are not questions... so... what do I need to answer ? I imagine that for google there are some questions more relevant than others ? Should I answer do I need to bring my own bike or where will I go... ? and will google give me "points " for answering those questions even though people don't have questions... For the keyword title tag, it is easy, people ask the character limit, title tag generator and so on but for may keywords like that ones I am targeting people have NO Questions ! Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Best practice to redirect all 404s?
Hey is it best practice to redirect all 404 pages. For example if the 404 pages had 0 traffic and no links why would you need to redirect that page? Isn't it best practice just to leave as a 404? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
SEO Menu Question
I have a question regarding to the SEO benefits of different types of menus. Recently, I have noticed an increasing number of websites with the sort of menu like at www.sportsdirect.com, where there is only one main dropdown and then everything is a sub-menu of the sub-menus if that makes sense. Is this approach more, less or equal beneficial to what you see at http://www.wiggle.co.uk/ where there are multiple initial dropdown menus? Appreciate the feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Few question about SEO
HI guys, I have few questions and I always find good answer here. I tried many SEO companies some very expensive and well known some with medium prices and some from India. I’m not an SEO expert but I always get the same things from SEO companies. They're saying you have to stay with us for few months before you’ll see any results. I completely understand however I don’t see the result on the end.1. What exactly Do I need SEO company for, after I do on page optimisation if they don’t work on proper backlinks. Just letting you know I’m getting content from other people.2. Is there something else which is really important after your page is optimised than backlinks? Or we should fully focus on get backlinks from customers, guest post, sharing on social media etc. to increase our DA and PA?3. Any advice about some individual or company who is good in backlink services?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lukas-ST
Thank youLukasThanks a lot.Lukas0 -
Http to https question (SSL)
Hi, I recently made two big changes to a site - www.aerlawgroup.com (not smart, I know). First, I changed from Weebly to Wordpress (WP Engine hosting with CDN + Cloudflare - is that overkill?) and I added SSL (http to https). From a technical perspective, I think I made a better site: (1) blazing fast, (2) mobile responsive, (3) more secure. I'm seeing the rankings fluctuate quite a bit, especially on the important keywords. I added SSL to my other sites, and saw no rankings change (they actually all went up slightly). I'm wondering if anyone has had experience going to SSL and can give me feedback on something I might have overlooked. Again, it's strange that all the other sites responded positively, but the one listed above is going in the opposite direction. Maybe there are other problems, and the SSL is just a coincidence. Any feedback would be appreciated. I followed this guide: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl - which helped tremendously (FYI).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
301 redirect rule
Hi there, I have a website that has hundreds of links with a "question mark" at the end of URLs. For example: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQandil
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory?
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/? I'm want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess file but don't know what exactly to add. Ideally I want the URLs above to be: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/ Any help is most appreciated. Thanks
Issa0 -
Question | Blogger, Godaddy, HostGator
If I buy a new domain and do forwarding with masking to my blogger post URL what would happen to the backlinks that were pointing to my blog post exactly? Will the power link back to this new domain or will it stay there? I have a blogger account, a domain from godaddy, and hosting? People are telling me that forwarding with masking is bad for <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> so I should set blogger with godaddy or something like that I don't know. I need a hosting though in order to do that and free ones don't offer changes to the CNAME records? so I got hostgator. I am up to the part where I need to set the records in the CNAME for hostgator but every time I try to list ghs.google as the whatever, it won't work! It keeps telling me the record is already there when this is my FIRST time using this! How can it be there when I haven't even touched it? Please help me This is the tutorial im using : http://support.google.com/blogger/bi...381&page=ts.cs I get stuck here: Find the control panel on your domain registrar’s website, and locate your DNS (Domain Name System) settings. In order to link your blog to your custom domain, follow the instructions below to enter your "CNAME" and "A-records."
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 678648631264
CNAME
Where it says Name, simply enter "www" and list ghs.google.com as the Host Name. See our detailed instructions on providing CNAMEs for various registrars. If yours isn't listed, or if you run into other difficulties, contact your registrar directly and they can help you out.
A-records (optional)
The following action links your naked domain (example.com) to your actual site (www.example.com). If you skip this step, visitors who leave off the "www" will see an error page.
Enter your domain name in the format example.com, and list the I.P. addresses shown below in the "A" section. You'll need to create four separate A-records which point to four different Google IPs. 216.239.32.21
216.239.34.21
216.239.36.21
216.239.38.21 Could I just leave my forwarding with masking on with my domain + blogger to make everything easier or what? And, is there any benefit in SEO if I don't have an EMD but it's something like this www.General.com/Keyword 1 www.General.com/Keyword 2/Posts/etc0 -
Advanced Question on Synonym Variation Pages!
Hi, This is quite an advanced question, so I'll go through in detail - please bare with me! I launched the new version of our website exactly a week ago - and all the key metrics are in the right direction: Pages / Visit +5% , Time on Site +25%, Bounce rate down 1 %. I work in an industry were our primary keyword has 4 synonyms and our long tail keywords are location related. So as an example I have primary synonyms like: Holiday, Vacation, Break, Trip (Not actually these but they are good enough as an example). Pluralised versions and you have 8 in total. So my longtail keywords are like: Las Vegas Vacation / Las Vegas Vacations
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
Las Vegas Holiday / Las Vegas Holidays
Las Vegas Trip / Las Vegas Trips
Las Vegas Breaks / Las vegas Breaks All these synonyms effectively mean the same thing, so my thinking on my new website was to specifically target each of these synonyms with their own unique page and optimise the meta and page titles, to those exact words. To make these pages truely unique, I therefore got a bunch of copywriters to write about 600 words unique for every long tail synonym (well over 750,000 words in total!). So now at this point I have my page "Las Vegas Holidays" with 600 unique words of content, and "Las Vegas Vactions" with 600 words of unique content etc etc etc. The problem is, when the user is searching for these words, there primary goal is not to read 600 words of content on "Las Vegas Holidays" - their primary goal is to get a list of last vegas holidays that they can search, view purchase (they may want to read 600 words of content, but is not their primary goal). So this puts me in a dilema - I need to display the nuts and bolt (IE the actual holidays in las vegas) to the customer on any page they land on off my synonyms as the primary content. But to make sure these pages are unique I need to also have this unique content on that page. So here's what I did: On every synonym version of the page I display the exact same information. However, on each page I have a "Information" link. and on click this pop's up a layer which contains my unique content for that page. To further optimise using perfect anchors in this content pop-up, I have cross linked the synonym pages (totally naturally) - IE on my "Las Vegas Holidays" page, in the content I may have the words "Las Vegas Breaks" - this would be linked the the "Las Vegas Breaks" synonym page. In theory I don't think there is anything wrong with what I am doing in the eyes of the customer - but I have a big concern that this may well look "fishy" to SE's. IE the pages are almost identical to the user except for this information pop-up layer of unique content, titles and meta. We know that Google at least can get can tell exactly what the user see's when they land on that page ( from their "Preview") and can distinguise between user visible and hidden text. Therefore, even though from a user experience, I think we are making a page that is perfect for them (they get the list of vactions etc as the primary content, and can read infomation if they want by clicking a button), I am concerned that SE's are going to say - hold on a minute there are load of pages here that are identical except for a chuck of text that is not visible to the user (Even though this is visible to the user if they click the "Information" button), and this content cross links to a load of almost identical pages with the same thing. Today I checked our rankings, and we have taken a fair whack from google - I'm not overly concerned at the moment as I expected big fluctuations from ranking for the first few weeks - but I'd be a lot more confident if they were fluctuating in the right direction!! So what do I do?
As far as I can see my options break down as follows: Content Display:
1/. Keep it as it is, and hope the SE's don't see it as spammy. Even though I think what we are doing is the best for customer experience, I'm concerned SE's won't. 2/. On every synonym page, below all the list of products, packages etc that the customer wants to see, display the unique content as a block of subtext text which is visble by default. This however could make the page a bit ugly. 3/. Display a visible snippet of the unique content, below all the packages, and have a more button which expands the rest of the content - IE have a part visible layer. This is slightly better for display, but again I'm only displaying a portion of visible content and the rest will still be flagged as "hidden" by default to the SE's. Cross Linking within the content:
1/. Keep it as it is where synonym keywords link to the synonym version of the page. 2/. Alter it so that every sysnonym keyword links to the "primary" synonym version of the page - EG if I now "Las Vegas Holidays" is my main keyword, then "Las Vegas Vactions" keyword, would not link to my "Las Vegas Vactions" page as current, but would link to my "Las Vegas Holidays" page. I apologise for the indepth questions, but it requires a lot of explanation to get it across clearly. I would be grateful on any of your thoughts. Many thanks in advance.0