1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
-
Hi Moz Community,
I have a 301 redirect question...
I just acquired an old domain:
-
Totally in my niche
-
Domain is 14 years old
-
Website exists of 1000 pages
-
Great amount of backlinks
-
Website is offline since about 2 weeks
-
Will place a new website online asap with new url structure
For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages.
My question: What to do with the 950 other url's?
-
Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage?
-
Should I forward those pages to the 404 page?
-
Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones?
-
Another solution maybe?
Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible?
Thanks in advance!
-
-
Of course, you've acquired the domain and not the old site; that makes sense. If I was desperate I would consider scraping what content I could from cached versions of the site (I'd outsource that)- if there are no legal implications in doing so. If that isn't possible/feasible, I'd direct what you can to the most relevant pages where possible and take the hit. I think your plan to create matching pages for the top 50 pages is sound. Whatever you do beyond that with 301s is of limited value if you can't match the content so in that case, I'd consider saving some time and creating redirecting everything else to your home page (or product overview page, for example, if this is of greater value and has higher engagement potential).
The best you can do in each case is match as closely as you can to the content on the new site, where that isn't possible, consider the user's experience - can you deliver them to a page of interest where you can engage and potentially convert them into customers? You should always but the user's experience first, as this is what Google values most. After all, they want to do exactly the same for their customer - deliver relevant and engaging content.
Worst case, if you've captured the biggest chunk of the value with those top 50 pages, you're going to salvage some value, at least. Consider the rest a bonus.
Good luck
-
Hi, thanks for the answer.
An archive of some kind is not possible. The content itself from the old site is not ours and we can't use it.
In a perfect world with lots and lots of free time I would rewrite all 1000 pages and put a 301 on each one of them to the new page. But I don't have the resources to rewrite another 950 pages. And I know I will lose a lot of value because of this. But I want to lose as less as possible.
So my question kind of stays... What should I do with the 950 url's I do not have a specific page to redirect to? Homepage, 404, divide over the new 50 articles or something else?
-
I'd be extremely reluctant to let any of those old pages die.
I would suggest you move them across to an appropriate section of the site (possibly an archive section, for example, if the content doesn't fit in so well with your new site structure) and create 301s to all of them. (Bear in mind, you will get the best value keeping the content, URL structure, etc. as close to the original as possible to retain the highest value from the redirects - Linking to loosely matched pages is less valuable and matching to unrelated content has negligible value. Remember, the purpose of the 301 is to indicate the content you were looking for now lives somewhere else, and then seamlessly guide your visitor to it. Using it in any other way gives the visitor a poor experience and your engagement statistics will show this. How engaged users are with your content is of significant value in SEO terms.
This assumes, as you state, that the old site was a good match to your new site and there's no detriment to having the old copy in place on your new site. There's no shame in letting links to irrelevant content die - technically, you could create 410 redirects to indicate that the content has been removed, but often you'd just 301 these, too and take a hit on the PR. (https://moz.com/community/q/should-i-implement-301-redirects-vs-410-in-removing-product-pages)
Now that 301 redirects pass on 100% of PageRank, you've got even more reason to maintain the links from old to new. (Caveat: PR is not the only ranking factor, so you're still going to take a bit of a hit when you redirect, but not as much as you will if you let that content wither and die.)
Some useful reading: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
I hope that helps and 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
-
Domain forwarding or redirects for SEO?
Hi all! A client of mine owns several top level domains which are not in use, let's call them example.nu, example.de, example.net and so on. The current website is example.com.
Technical SEO | | JHultqvist
When checking the technical status of the unused domains I realized that all but one are forwarded (via DNS) to example.com and only one has a 301 redirect. Should I redirect all of them by means of 301 or let them stay forwarded? Very few of the domains have any other sites linking to them. Any thoughts would be really appreciated! Jesper0 -
How do I redirect the Author archive page in Wordpress?
If you do a search for my name on Google, the first result is the author archive page of my Wordpress blog. I would like to redirect the author page to my "about me" page but cannot add a 301 as the author page is created dynamically in Wordpress. Anyone know how I can do this?
Technical SEO | | richdan0 -
Undo a 301 or Starting New Domain?
Hi Guys & Gals, I have a question I'd appreciate your input on. Quick History
Technical SEO | | Nobody1560986989723
When I first started in web design it was just me and a couple of clients. I had a website based on my name on the domain moxby.org.uk. The only 'SEO' work done on it was a bit of on-site work, various links based on forum and blog activity I was involved in (genuine involvement not crappy link building) and of course, building websites with a credit in the footer. When we got serious about the business we considered and finally put in place a new website, new branding and 301'd old URLs to their shiny new location on the new domain: _summitweb.net _(put in place about 12 months ago) Ranks were pretty much maintained and until recently we ranked well locally (still figuring the fallout from the last week or so's changes). The Question I would like to build a personal website, well I'm going to anyway. But as it's a personal/showcase website I need a personal URL for it and my natural choice would be my old url moxby.org.uk. However it is not that simple because summitweb.net is benefitting from redirected links and I don't want to harm our business' rankings just to reclaim a personal URL. So... is there benefit or would it be to my detriment to undo the 301 and build a website on moxby.org.uk or would it, in fact, just make more sense to buy a new domain and have a clean slate?0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
How can I perform this 301 redirect?
I am working on a site for a colleague and have installed wordpress on their server in the wp directory, they want the root domain redirecting to the wp directory but everything i have tried seems to throw up errors. i need sample.co.uk to redirect to sample.co.uk/wp/ no matter which html file they are trying to access on the root of the sample.co.uk site help?
Technical SEO | | GrassRootsSEO0 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | | dballari0 -
My home page 301 redirects - is this an SEO problem
When ever a browser calls my site canineconcepts.co.uk, it is automatically 301 redirected to canineconcepts.co.uk/en I am not sure if I should be concerned about this from an SEO perspective or not. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | CanineConcepts0 -
Question about domain redirects
One of my clients has an odd domain redirect situation. See if you can get your head round this: Domain A is set-up as a domain alias of Domain B Entering domain A or domain B takes you to default.asp on domain B. The default.asp includes VB script to check the HTTP_HOST variable. It checks whether the main doman name for domain A is present in the HTTP_HOST and if so redirects it to domain A/sub-folder/index.htm. If not present it redirects to domain B/index.htm. In both cases the redirect uses a response.Redirect clause. I think what is trying to be achieved is to redirect requests to Domain A to a sub-folder of Domain B. It works but seems extremely convoluted. Can anyone see problems with this set-up? Will link juice be lost along the redirect paths?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110