Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
-
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains.
There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains.
If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
-
Thanks so much, Amanda!
-
Hi Chris.
As long as the new pages you are 301 redirecting are optimized for the same elements that you are 301ing you should be okay. A couple things you'll also want to do are, look at the backlink profile of the 301 page, and overtime, make it a point to update any external links pointing to the old URL to be updated with the New URL to ensure equity to the new page is maintained overtime, otherwise equity can begin to be lost. You can also use that exercise to request more search friendly (e.g. keyword you are targeting) in the hyper-text.
I would also advise to baseline what the old page is currently getting in existing traffic, so that you can monitor the transition. You might see a little dip while the search engines are reconnecting everything up, but in my experience. It'll all go back to normal as long as similar optimizations are maintained, e.g. folder depth, h1, title tag, content, updated backlink structure, alt-tags.
Hope that helps, holler if you have any other questions, or something is unclear.
~Amanda
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
-
Is domain authority lost if you create a 301 redirect but mark it as noindex, nofollow?
Hi everyone, Our company sells products in various divisions. While we've been selling Product A and Product B under our original brand, we've recently created a new division with a new domain to focus on a Product B. The new domain has virtually no domain authority (3) while the original domain has some (37). We want customers to arrive on the new domain when they search for key search terms related to Product B instead of the pages that previously existed on our main website. If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags? I read a few blog posts from Moz that said there isn't any domain authority lost with 301 redirects but I'm not sure if that is true if the pages are noindex, nonofollow. Do you follow? 🙂 Apologies for the lengthy post. Love this community and the great Moz team. Thanks, Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jgoehring-troy0 -
Images Returning 404 Error Codes. 301 Redirects?
We're working with a site that has gone through a lot of changes over the years - ownership, complete site redesigns, different platforms, etc. - and we are finding that there are both a lot of pages and individual images that are returning 404 error codes in the Moz crawls. We're doing 301 redirects for the pages, but what would the best course of action be for the images? The images obviously don't exist on the site anymore and are therefore returning the 404 error codes. Should we do a 301 redirect to another similar image that is on the site now or redirect the images to an actual page? Or is there another solution that I'm not considering (besides doing nothing)? We'll go through the site to make sure that there aren't any pages within the site that are still linking to those images, which is probably where the 404 errors are coming from. Based on feedback below it sounds like once we do that, leaving them alone is a good option.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
For URLs that require login, should our redirect be 301 or 302?
We have a login required section of our website that is being crawled and reporting as potential issues in Webmaster Tools. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is - is it to make URLs requiring a login noindex/nocrawl? Right now, we have them 302 redirecting to the login page, since it's a temporary redirect, it seems like it isn't the right solution. Is a 301 better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alecfwilson0 -
Php 301 redirect
Hi I am migrating an old wordpress site to a custom PHP site and the URL profiles will be different, so want to retain all link profiles and more importantly if a user visits the old urls via search then they are seamlessly transferred to the new equivalent page For example www.domain.com/about-us is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/aboutus.php www.domain.com/furniture is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/furniture-collections.php etc What is the best way of achieving this apart from .htaccess as not 100% confident of doing this. Could it be done via PHP or using meta tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
301 Redirection and apostrophes in URLs
Hi I am experiencing trouble getting any redirects with apostrophes in the URLs to 301 redirect in order to eliminate 404 errors. I have tried replacing the instance of the apostrophe in the source URL field to %27 and variations of this but to no avail. The site is a wordpress site (the old URLS are legacies from the old Business Catalyst site) and I am using the redirection plug in. I have gone into some detail with a helpful soul here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-deal-with-apostrophes-in-source-url but unfortunately to no result. If anyone has any idea how to solve this puzzle I would be grateful for the help. Example: http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1%E2%80%93_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seamoose0 -
How long should a domain redirect take?
Hi, I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect? I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A. I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:- Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools. It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search. Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point? Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0 -
Any way to find which domains are 301 redirected to competitors' websites?
By looking at the work from an SEO collegue it became clear that his weak linkbuilding graph probably is not the cause for his good rankings for a pretty competitive keyword. (also no social mentions where found) I was wondering what it could be, site structure and other on page optimization factors seems to be ok and I don't think there will be exceptionally good or bad user behavior... Finally I looked at the competitors and found that they have more links, better content en better design, so I got a little stuck. The only reason I can think of is that he is doing 301 redirects (or is rel=canonical tags). Is there a way to trace these redirects back to the source in order to include this important variable in your competitor research? thnx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djingel10 -
301 redirect from .html to non .html?
Previously our site was using this as our URL structure: www.site.com/page.html. A few months ago we updated our URL structure to this: www.site.com/page & we're not using the .html. I've read over this guide & don't see anywhere that discusses this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection. I've currently got a programmer looking into, but am always a bit weary with their workarounds, as I'd previously had them cause more problems then fix it. Here is the solution he is looking to do: The way that I am doing the redirect is fine. The problem is of where to put the code. The issue is that the files are .html files that need to be redirected to the same url with out a .html on them. I can see if I can add that to the 404 redirect page if there is one inside of there and see if that does the trick. That way if there is no page that exists without the .html then it will still be a 404 page. However if it is there then it will work as normal. I will see what I can find and get back. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0