Redirecting acquired website: DNS or 301?
-
Hi all,
We have taken down some infringing websites and acquired them, so far we made around 40 websites. We are using DNS to land on our website from the acquired. But I've see that recently that DNS is not a redirect and we must 301 redirect from the old site to the new site. Also there is a potential harm in employing DNS method due to the duplicate content that will harm SERP performance severely. Which is the best way? DNS or 301 redirect?
Thanks
-
Agree with Tom re getting it done with 301 redirects. The other thing to be very careful about though is that the newly acquired websites don't have major quality issues, especially spammy, manipulative backlink profiles. If the infringing sites were using inappropriate SEO methods and were coming under algorithmic pressure/penalties as a result, those issues will also be passed to your "real" site.
Paul
-
+1 to what Tom said.
Also, be careful not to redirect a whole buch of pages/websites to the same page (or the home page).
Here, Matt Cutts said it:
Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site? - Google Webmaster Youtube ChannelBest luck.
GR. -
I'd go ahead and 301 redirect those websites and pages.
With a 301 redirect you will also pass on any link equity the infringing websites once had, which in turn may help your organic ranking performance.
However, in order for that to happen, you need to ensure that you redirect the individual pages on those websites to the most relevant/equivalent versions on your own. Otherwise, you may see those 301 redirects treated as soft 404 errors.
Hope this helps.
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
-
I think this website has been hit by Panda, but I would appreciate your opinion
I've been asked to check a possible SEO problem with a website, that has been loosing organic traffic during more than 2 years. I have attached a screen capture from analytics, showing how the organic traffic impact. This website publishes over 15 articles per week, and 12 of them are news with less than 150 words. I think that maybe Panda is hitting the website because of these practice. You can check the website: crazyminds.es I would like to know your opinion about the cause of this lost of organic traffic. On January, 21st 2013 they changed the website design, but the lost of traffic seems to have started before that date. If panda is hitting the website, what should be the best way to correct this situation? They have began now to write news with more than 200 words, but what happens with the old news? Maybe a no-index tag? blocked by robots? how should they manage those? Thank you! organictraffic.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | teconsite0 -
Does omitted results shown by Google always mean that website has duplicate content?
Google search results for a particular query was appearing in top 10 results but now the page appears but only after clicking on the " omitted results by google." My website lists different businesses in a particular locality and sometimes results for different localities are same because we show results from nearby area if number of businesses in that locality (search by users) are less then 15. Will this be considered as "duplicate content"? If yes then what steps can be taken to resolve this issue?
Algorithm Updates | | prsntsnh0 -
301 redirects
Hi, we have an old site hosted by company A. We rank for certain terms in google for certain brands and products. Now we have developed a new website on a new domain hosted by Company B. If we are 301'ing at brand/product/page level from old to new, who is it that should perform this job? Is it Company A or B, old or new? And does the physical website need to remain hosted for the 301 to work and for our SEO ranks on the old site to not fall apart? Company A think we can do an excel mapping doc for each link from old site to new. Hand file to Company A and they host this file (not the actual website) then we transfer old domain to Company A as well. Then the 301s will work fine. Yet Company B think we should continue hosting with Company A, keep the old physical site live and put the 301s in place. They say if the 301 link has content behind it then it will help or not take the chance of having the SEO affected? Who is right? Do you need the old website to remain live once 301s in place or can this 301 config file hosted on a domain be all we need to do? Any other ideas welcomed. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | YNWA0 -
Has anyone else noticed a major increase in Yelp, BBB, etc. results in local SERPs, pushing business websites further down?
Across multiple cities and markets, this seems to be a trend. "Chicago coffee shop" or "Minneapolis hair salon" or "Sacramento car repair" - outside the local 7-pack, virtually every result is Yelp, BBB, Yellowpages, etc. Is this related to algo changes, or simply a result of those national sites pumping major resources into SEO? It just seems to be suddenly far more prevalent than it was even 6 months ago.
Algorithm Updates | | kpclaypool1 -
How can we start to improve Domain MozRank & MozTrust for our website?
A simple question maybe, but how and where do we start if we want to improve our 'Domain MozRank & Moztrust', 'assuming of course that by improving both these we will improve our rankings with Google plus sales?
Algorithm Updates | | ewanTHH0 -
Google Dropped 3,000+ Pages due to 301 Moved !! Freaking Out !!
We may be the only people stupid enough to accidentally prevent the google bot from indexing our site. In our htaccess file someone recently wrote the following statement RewriteEngine On
Algorithm Updates | | David_C
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301] Its almost funny because it was a rewrite that rewrites back to itself... We found in webmaster tools that the site was not able to be indexed by the google bot due to not detecting the robots.txt file. We didn't have one before as we didn't really have much that needed to be excluded. However we have added one now for kicks really. The robots.txt file though was never the problem with regard to the bot accessing the site. Rather it was the rewrite statement above that was blocking it. We tested the site not knowing what the deal was so we went under webmaster tools then health and then selected "Fetch as Google" to have the website. This was our way of manually requesting the site be re-indexed so we could see what was happening. After doing so we clicked on status and it provided the following: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Length: 250
Content-Type: text/html
Location: http://www.mystie.com/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
MS-Author-Via: MS-FP/4.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 02:27:49 GMT
Connection: close <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> Moved Permanently The document has moved here. We changed the screwed up rewrite mistake in the htaccess file that found its way in there but now our issue is that all of our pages have been severely penalized with regard to where they are now ranking compared to just before the indecent. We are essentially freaking out because we don't know the real time consequences of this and if or how long it will take for the certain pages to regain their prior ranks. Typical pages when down anywhere between 9-40 positions on high volume search terms. So to say the least our company is already discussing the possibilities of fairly large layoffs based on what we anticipate with regard to the drop in traffic. This sucks because this is peoples lives but then again a business must make money and if you sell less you have to cut the overhead and the easiest one is payroll. I'm on a team with three other people that I work with to keep the SEO side up to snuff as much as we can and we sell high ticket items so the potential effects if Google doesn't restore matters could be significant. My question is what would you guys do? Is there any way we can contact Google about such a matter? If you can I've never seen such a thing. I'm sure the pages that are missing from the index now might make their way back in but what will there rank look like next time and with that type of rewrite has it permanently effected every page site wide, including those that are still in the index but severely effected by the index. Would love to see things bounce back quick but I don't know what to expect and neither do my counterparts. Thanks for any speculation, suggestions or insights of any kind!!!0 -
Has anyone notice their website page rankings in Bing and Yahoo slipping lately?
My websites for the most part rank higher in Yahoo and Bing than in Google. Now, ranking within those search engines (Yahoo/Bing) are settling in to where my websites rank in Google. Any thoughts? Anyone else experiencing this? Thank you for your time!
Algorithm Updates | | APICDA0 -
What are the first ten steps you should do with a new website
First of all i would like to say how amazing this forum is, i have learnt a lot with all the great help. I am launching a new site mainly to allow me to learn seo and to understand what is involved in building a new site and get it to the search engines. the site is here which i have started today which is a lifestyle magazine is http://www.womenlifestylemagazine.com/ What i am trying to understand is, what are the first most important steps when trying to get google and traffic to your site. the site will be complete in the next week or so but in the meantime i want to use this site to learn more about seo and how you get the site discovered by visitors and search engines and the time scale behind it. I am hoping that other people who are new to seo and are building a new site will be able to use this post to learn about what is involved and learn like me. Would be great to hear from people who have started their own site so we can all understand what are the important steps to make and which things we should do in which order. thank you everyone
Algorithm Updates | | ClaireH-1848860