Is it worth redirecting?
-
Hello!
Is there any wisdom or non-wisdom in taking old websites and blogs that may not be very active, but still get some traffic, and redirecting them to a brand new website? The new website would be in the same industry, but not the same niche as the older websites. Would there be any SEO boost to the new website by doing this? Or would it just hurt the credibility of the new website?
-
Thanks. These are good things to consider. I suppose in my case I'm primarily wanting to just find a new home for the old content since eventually I will just get rid of those websites and domain names. And then if it adds a bonus to the new website, then great!
The old content is automotive, diesel truck related, which the new site is too. The difference is the brands. So I think the old readers would just like the content to be live and not be too worried about where it's hosted. And the new readership would probably find it all interesting as well...thanks for helping me think it through!
-
I always use a very simple logic when it comes to redirections. You have an old website and blog that you want to redirect to the brand new website. If this is the case, here are the few things you should consider before coming up to any final decision.
- Users Reaction: You said that old website has some traffic, when you are going to redirect to the brand new website, how users/visitors are going to react? If they will be fine, just go for it, if not just leave the idea immediately.
- Link Profile: If the link profile of the old website/blog is clean just go ahead and 301 redirect to the new domain. But, if the link profile contains some spammy links, you probably should leave the idea as it is.
If users and link profile support the idea, probably search engine will also like it and if not, you probably should avoid the idea as a whole.
Hope this helps!
-
Hello Andrew,
Few things I need to know before answering your query.
1> Is your old site penalized earlier or have low quality backlinks if yes don't do redirects it won't help in fact that will harm your website.
2> if your old website is completely fine I mean no penalty/ no low quality links then it is good practice to do 301 redirect.
3> as you mentioned in your query that your old sites niche is different then current that means if you will redirect that will not serve any value to user and bounce rate will be high and I doubt boost in ranking.
Hope above suggestion helps you in deciding what would be the appropriate steps.
thanks
-
I guess this article answered most of my questions: https://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
I do think that my redirects would be in that 70% relativity he mentioned. However, the main big website I'd want to redirect is a forum, and I'm not going to redirect all the old forum pages to new pages on the website... that would be a massive undertaking. Hmmm...
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
-
Redirection Problem
I have a site that has 2,50,000 pages and I want to redirect to another domain. Is it good practice for SEO and google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari0 -
Should I redirect off topic blog posts?
We launched a store on top of a popular blog. The blog had nothing to do with the store. The blog has a lot of backlinks and traffic, but our store is now our primary business. I am concerned that the off topic blog content may be affecting or ability to rank better for the core store business. Should we delete or redirect the old blog content to another website to improve the SEO for our store?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-mojo1 -
HTTPS 301 Redirect Question
Hi, I've just migrated our previous site (siteA) to our new url (siteB) and I've setup 301 redirects from the old url (siteA) to the new (siteB). However, the old url operated on https and users who try to go to the old url with https (https://siteA.com) receive a message that the server cannot be reached, while the users who go to http://siteA.com are redirected to siteB. Is there a way to 301 redirect https traffic? Also, from an SEO perspective if the site and all the references on Google search are https://siteA.com does a 301 redirect of http pass the domain authority, etc. or is https required? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | opstart0 -
Pages that 301 redirect to a 404
We are going through a website redesign that involves changing URL's for the pages on our site. Currently all our pages are in the format domain.com/example.html and we are moving to stip off the .html file extension so it would just be domain.com/example We have thousands of pages as the site deals with news so building a redirect for each individual page isn't really feasible. My plan is to have a generic rewrite rule that redirects any page that ends .html to the stripped off version of this. A problem I can see with this is that it will also redirect pages that don't exist. So for example, domain.com/non-existant-page.html would 301 to domain.com/non-existant-page which would then return a 404 status. What would the SEO repercussions be for this? Obviously if a page doesn't exist already then it shouldn't show up in the search engine indexes and shouldn't be a problem but I'm a bit worried about how old pages that currently legitimately 404 will be treated when they start to 301 redirect to a 404 instead. Not sure if there any other potential issues from this that I've missed either? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbb0240 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0 -
Mobile alternates and redirects
Hi! We have a desktop version of our site at http://www.domain.com, and some weeks ago, we launched a mobile edition at http://m.domain.com, replicating the most important sections of the site, but not yet all of them. Actually, if you access with a mobile device userAgent to any desktop url you are redirected to the home of the mobile web. This is the only redirect implemented about mobile and desktop versions. A) Shall we also redirect "Googlebot-Mobile" to our mobile site, or it could be considered cloaking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marianoSoler98
B) Its necessary to implement the rel="alternate" media="handheld" tag in all of our Desktop SEO URLs? And in our mobile ones? Can't it be implemented via sitemaps like the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag?
C) Would the linkbuilding job done on the Desktop version affects the Mobile also, or we would still need to do a separate job? Thanks!0 -
Redirect index.php to domain address
The question says it all really. Google analytics shows me that my top 2 pages are my domain address and index.php, which are exactly the same. Is it best to leave it like this or redirect index.php to my domain address?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CompleteOffice0 -
How do I go about changing a 302 redirect to a 301.
Hello Friends! Thanks for viewing my question. Ok,My question today is How do I go about redirecting a 302 link to a 301 link. I understand the benefits of doing this as far as link juice and how the Search Engines views the two Re-Directs. I am wanting to know where I would start to do this. Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0