Can forwarding users from one domain to a different domain damage rank and authority of first domain?
-
Preliminary Explanation: We launched a new website a couple months back but haven't had much luck in Google taking notice. One of the main attractions to our site is an old flash app that was made nearly a decade ago. As the original developer has long ago moved on and we are unable to figure out how to integrate it with our new site, we've been stuck hosting the flash app on a different domain.
As such, users who come to our site and want to use the app must immediately navigate away from our site to this other domain. This has caused our primary domain's bounce rate and average site time to plummet while raising it for the other domain.
My question: is this damaging our search rank and page authority with Google for this primary domain/site and counter-acting any other positive SEO changes we can make? How much weight does Google give towards bounce rate/average site time spent by users in its overall calculations for search rank and page authority?
Our average site time for this primary domain is resting currently at 50-60 seconds, while for the secondary domain that hosts the old flash app it is 4-5 minutes.
-
You are fully agree with Dmitrii also in the ideal scenario I would recommend getting the app re-developed, ramp up the marketing and try to increase profit to fund it.
Some ideas to increase profit are:-
- Increasing prices
- Reduce overheads
- Introduce extra chargeable service/s
-
Hi there.
Well, to answer your question in title of this question - no. Forwarding by itself doesn't effect rank or authority. However, in your situation, it might be the case due to bouncing or so called pogo-sticking. It's well known that pogo sticking is really bad and nobody wants it. Here is a WBF about it: https://moz.com/blog/solving-the-pogo-stick-problem-whiteboard-friday
Also, since you use flash - and that can be bad by itself due to incompatibility, long loading times and so on - I assume your website is not mobile either. Another bad sign for Google.
Now, my questions to you are:
- How are your rankings for new domain? are they dropping? Is old domain rising?
- If you use old domain that much, can you redesign it + move content from new one and eliminate that redirect?
- can you replicate flash app with non-flash app (js, mysql or whatever)?
- can you redo flash app with new one, which will be integrated with new website?
I understand all my suggestions would require financial investment, but I say it will be worth it.
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
-
Cost Difference Between Coding Custom Theme or Coding Child Theme
Assuming there is an SEO advantage to coding a Wordpress custom theme (wondering if that assumption is correct) versus modifying a child theme, is there a very significant cost difference between the two choices? Competition in my niche (New York City commercial real estate is keen) and I am dealing with competitors such as www.wework.com, 42floors.com and squarefoot.com with optimized sites built with quality code. In the event that we modify a child theme, I am leaning in any case towards have wireframes and illustrations provided to present to the developer. Should I expect a custom theme to be double the cost, triple assuming the design is provided? I have read that code maintenance on a child theme is less costly as modifications get pushed to the parent theme. How substantial are maintenance costs (time to maintain) for a custom theme? Thanks!!!
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Log-in page ranking but not homepage
Our homepage is outranked by log-in page for "primary keyword" in Google search results; for which actually our homepage was optimised. I have gone through the other answers for the same question here. But I couldn't find them related with our website. We are not over optimised. We have link from top navigation menu of blog to our homepage. Does this causing this?
Web Design | | vtmoz1 -
When Site:Domain Search Run on Google, SSL Error Appears on One URL, Will this Harm Ranking
Greetings MOZ Community: When a site:domain search is run on Google, a very strange URL appears in the search results. The URL is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com:2082/ The page displays a "the site's security certificate is not trusted." This only appears for one URL out of 400. Could this indicate a wider problem with the server's configuration? Is this something that needs to be corrected, and if so how? Our ranking has dropped a lot in the last few months. Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com) Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week. One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
What Is The Best Way To Categorize 3 Different Top Level Categories Each With 20 Sub Categories
Hello, We are trying to figure out the best way to categorize our app review website. We have 3 platforms, iPhone, iPad and Android and each platform has several sub categories and numerous apps subcategories totaling around 50 to 60 categories for each platform. Any suggestions how to do this properly? thank you Mike
Web Design | | crazymikesapps10 -
One big page vs. multi-step pages
Hi mozers! Brand new to SEO and LOVING it! Having several key questions that I don't see answered yet, but I'll start with one we've been very curious about. Consider this guide we have for Forming a Delaware Corp.
Web Design | | Mase
https://www.upcounsel.com/Free-Legal/Guide/17/Form-A-Delaware-Corporation This is our overview page, giving you a breakdown of what this process involves. We love this page, but (Question1:) does it lack better real "content" rather than lots of links to the guide process itself? Then, you can start to walk through the guide beginning with step one, where each step has crowd sourced answers to it. But as you see, the step pages are all very similar, except for the answers and step info. (Question 2) Would it be better to put all our answers into the one overview page and skip having separate pages for each step? We like the process and simplicity of seeing one step at a time, but then these pages don't seem to have enough unique content on them. Related, at what point (if any) is a page too big with too much content and considered bad for SEO? We're recovering from a big hit from Google, and slowly recovering by nailing down various SEO mistakes. We DO have great, unique and valueable content - now we just need it to rank!0 -
Usual time to index and rank a new site
Hi Just wondering if anyone knew how long it usually takes for a brand new site to get indexed and ranked? I launched a new site about 5 weeks ago. So far I have had 96,000 pages indexed but the majority haven't ranked particularly well or appeared. The ones that have ranked aren't ranking high even though they have better content than competitors sites... And my old domain. Do I just need to hang tight and wait till my domain authority improves? Is there anything I can do to speed up this process? cheers
Web Design | | DavidLenehan0 -
Using "#" anchors to display different content
If I have a page that has an area on the page that acts like a widget and has three different tabs. These tabs provide 3 different types of information relevant to the page subject matter. By default when someone goes to the page one of the tabs is showing but you have to click on the others to see the info on them. Is it OK to use domain.com/topic#TAB1, domain.com/topic#TAB2, domain.com/topic#TAB3 to create shortcut links so that people can land on the page and have that predetermined tab showing. I'm wondering what search engines might think. Essentially all the content of all three tabs is there for people to see but they'd have to click to see the other tabs. I don't consider the content to be hidden. But I'd like to hear people's thoughts.
Web Design | | Business.com0
