301 Re-direct help
-
Hello Mozzers,
I have a technical question that perhaps someone has experience with and can help with.
I currently have 2 e-commerce websites:
SITE-A.COM (original site) & SITE-B.COM (new site)
SITE-B.COM is the newer site that has a lot of new products and new features and great content and is very user friendly.
We are thinking about funneling all of our visitors and traffic to SITE-B.com since it is the better experience for the users ...
the question is this:
If we want to 301 redirect all traffic from Site-A.com to Site-B.com ... where do we initiate those redirect requests? Would it be on the server for Site-A.com? If so, would i have to keep that server up and running forever if i don't want to lose the re-directs? Also, how do i do this properly without violating Google's guidelines?
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks
-
Not sure if this is the way it should exactly be handled, but here are some thoughts for consideration:
1. I'd consider pointing IP address of domain-A to IP address of domain-B, then set up a general 301 domain redirect for domain-A -> domain-B and then do 301 redirects per URL from domain-A to domain-B as applicable/relevant. The redirects would be setup to be managed on domain-b, as domain-a would be pointing to domain-b's server.
2. Since you're effectively "changing site address" here, so you'd want to ensure you have both sites and all versions setup in GSC (domain-a.com, www.domain-a.com, https://domain-a.com, https://www.domain-a.com domain-b.com, www.domain-b.com, etc., etc.) and then initiate a change of address for domain-a.com to go to domain-b.com.
Cheers
-
Actually, just for clarification:
Both domain names are registered at GoDaddy
Both domain-A & domain-B are hosted at Nexcess (on separate servers)
You wrote: “Now change the nameservers for DomainA from Server 1 > Server 2.”
Do you mean by that… to point both Domain names to the same name server that Domain-B is on?
Thanks again
-
Thank you so much for the detailed explanation.
I will check this out and get back to you with any questions or to report how this worked.
Thanks again - Happy Holidays!
-
Hi
From my understanding of above, SiteA and SiteB are setup on separate servers and I appreciate you won't want to be running two servers for the sake of keeping redirects alive. Firstly, I would recommend making sure you have a full and up to date backup of the sites.
Server 1:
Setup 301 redirects for everything from DomainA > DomainBServer 2:
Create the Addon Domain entry for DomainA to point to DomainB
Setup 301 redirects for everything from DomainA > DomainBNow change the nameservers for DomainA from Server 1 > Server 2.
- At this stage, you may experience some downtime whilst the domain propagates but because everything is setup and ready, any downtime should be minimal.
Once the domain has fully propagated, verify in Server 1 stats that the server is no longer receiving requests for that Domain to serve data and that all requests are being served from Server 2. <--- On confirmation of this, you can then go ahead and delete all data from Server 1 and shut it down.
Now everything is being served from Server 2. Monitor for any new 404 errors that may occur, in case you missed out redirecting any content and get these fixed with redirects as soon as possible.
Providing the structure of the URLs is the same, you shouldn't really encounter any 404 errors and from this point on, the 301 redirects only serve the purpose of maintaining any link juice from backlinks and ensuring your customers who are finding your site through referral links are landing on the correct pages. - If a user visits your site by entering the domain directly, the server will automatically direct them from DomainA to DomainB and from that point on, clicking any links within the site should keep the user on DomainB without having to perform redirects.
Then head over to Google Console and in the configuration tab for your site, there will be an option to notify Google about the "Change of Address" - complete this section.
Finally, to avoid any confusion from your customers I would recommend releasing a notice of some kind to inform your visitors that you have migrated to the new site.
I hope this information is helpful to you and of course if you have any questions at all, feel free to get in touch.
I hope you have a Great Christmas & a Happy New Year.
Best Regards
Ajaz
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
-
Existing content & 301 redirects
Hi All, I will try to keep this to the point. One of our websites was hit by penguin for unnatural linking. We are building a new site (same business, different domain), but we would like to take some of the pages/content off the old website and use it on our new site. Is it just a case of copying each page onto our new site and 301 redirect the old URL? Or should I just be completely rewording/recreating the old content so it is unique? Any help on this would be great, but I am also open to alternate methods too. Thanks Lewis
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
301 redirect not working
Hi there! I have recently moved a domain that has been indexed by google and setup redirects so that it forwards to the new domain. It seems like the only redirect that actually is working is the canonical and main domain but every other page and or page nested within a folder are not working. Here is an example of some of the redirects. Am I doing this wrong? It seems to be going to the new domain but can't find the actual pages.... RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | twotd
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !agoodsweep.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://agoodsweep.com/$1 [L,R=301]
redirect 301 woodstoveservicerepair.html http://agoodsweep.com/woodstoveservicerepair/
redirect 301 /westchesterchimney.html http://agoodsweep.com/west-chester-chimney/ Thanks in advance for any help!!0 -
Empty Meta Robots Directive - Harmful?
Hi, We had a coding update and a side-effect of that was that our directive was emptied, in other words it now reads as: on all of the site. I've since noticed that Google's cache date on all of the pages - at least, the ones I tested - have a Cached date of no later than 17 December '12 - that's the Monday after the directive was removed on mass. So, A, does anyone have solid evidence of an empty directive causing problems? Past experience, Matt Cutts, Fishkin quote, etc. And then B - It seems fairly well correlated but, does my entire site's homogenous Cached date point to this tag removal? Or is it fairly normal to have a particular cache date across a large site (we're a large ecommerce site). Our site: http://www.zando.co.za/ I'm having the directive reinstated as soon as Dev permitting. And then, for extra credit, is there a way with Google's API, or perhaps some other tool, to run an arbitrary list and retrieve Cached dates? I'd want to do this for diagnosis purposes and preferably in a way that OK with Google. I'd avoid CURLing for the cached URL and scraping out that dates with BASH, or any such kind of thing. Cheers,
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
302 to 301
Hello, We have a temporary redirect (302?) from http url to https url. Seomoz has suggested that we change the 302 temporary redirect to a permanent 301 redirect. Sounds good.... but how do we do that?! Appreciate any and all feedback!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
301 on certain url string
I have a few thousand old urls with the string /content/ in them and are looking for a way to 301 batch redirect them. So for all the urls that contain the word 'content' I would like to redirect to 1 specific page. I have tried the methods below without success. Regular 301's are working fine but this particular method is not working for me. I am running a Joomla site but I don't imagine that would have any impact. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Redirect 301 ^content/.*$ http://www.mysite.com Redirect 301 ^content/ http://www.mysite.com
Technical SEO | | omega0 -
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 -
301 redirects twice
We currently have some 301 redirects set up on our site however sometimes a page will redirect twice before reaching the final location. Is this OK from an SEO perspective to have a page redirect twice or should we concentrate on reducing it to one?
Technical SEO | | JohnHillman0 -
Getting a bunch of pages re-crawled?
I added noindex tags to a bunch (1,000+) of paginated category pages on my site. I want Google to recrawl the pages so they will de-index them. Any ideas to speed up the process?
Technical SEO | | AdamThompson0