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
-
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Helping finding a link
Hi So Ive done a crawl of the site using screaming frog. There are a few old category and sub category pages which don't exist any more but somehow the crawler is finding them. An example is below: http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Home-Appliances/cat/Health-&-Beauty/subcat/Male-Grooming Just wondering if anybody had any ideas about how I could go and find these urls and remove them off the site. Any ideas would be really appreciated. Thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Where is the 301 redirect?
Hi, in the last week I take an issue for 301 permanent redirect for a subfolder in the main website! In that folder i have a index.php file for a google map fullscreen edition and the only link who connects the wordpress website with the subfolder is only a direct link! Is that an error of seomoz app or something else? Thanks 1.jpg
Technical SEO | | petrospan0 -
SEO Yoast Help Needed
Anyone familar with SEO Yoast and interested in being hired to check out my settings for SEO. Thinking about 30 minute screen sharing session an helping me figure out what I am am doing wrong? Just cleaned up duplicates because of tags and now I see the images are getting duplicated as well as some of the titles. So new to Wordpress here I shine. Message me if you can help. Much Appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
301 from old domain to new domain
Hi, I need to create a 301 redirect for all internal pages located on organic7thheaven.com to the homepage of our new site at http://www.7thheavennaturals.com/ Currently internal pages of the old site such as the following are returning a page not found www.organic7thheaven.com/products/deepcleansing/miraclemud.asp Can anyone help me in setting up a .htaccess file for this problem please? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MJMarketing0 -
Video Sitemap Help
MOZ Helpers, Currently our clients videos are hosted on Viemo and that will not change as our client likes the creative/artist vibe and community via Viemo. That being said we need to create a video sitemap. BTW, Our site uses wordpress. When someone in house uploads a video in the future we want them to be able to enter the video title, description, and tags on the video and when they hit "update" the video and information will get added to our video site map. Wistia has this option here http://wistia.com/doc/video-seo , but like I mentioned above our client has all videos via Viemo. I found a Google XML wordpress plugin, but that said it only works for Youtube video's. The Jr. developer is not confident in creating one himself from the Google webmaster instructions and asked me to search for another solution. Check out the attached pic, that is what I am looking for. Is their a plugin or another option where we can use for easy sitemap updating and management for our Viemo videos? Thanks in advance! M video-seo-dialog.png?id=video-seo video-seo-dialog.png?id=video-seo
Technical SEO | | matthew-2202000 -
Help with domain redirect advice please!
I run the website http://buildyourjacket.com. We have other domains as well, most importantly www.buildyourjacket.com and cvcsports.com. If you Google "letterman jackets" (our primary search term) cvcsports.com shows up as the first result (yay!). But that is not what we want. Until a few weeks ago, Google would show http://buildyourjacket.com as the domain for the first search result from "letterman jackets". But then a few weeks that changed. I don't know how that could have happened. There are two reasons why we want the domain http://buildyourjacket.com to be the one that shows up: 1) It's a better sounding/looking domain and 2) When it was showing up, Google also showed right below the domain another link of our that said "Build Your Own Jacket" which definitely helped us get more clicks. Can someone please help me and tell me what I should do? Thank you so much.
Technical SEO | | BrandonDoyle0 -
Mod Rewrite Help
I need some help with doing the Mod Rewrite on our htaccess file. Basically I've a URL like this : www.example.co.uk/new-toy-search?keys=xbox and I want to rewrite the URL into something else (such as new-toy-search-xbox.html) Could someone please take me through the steps of how to do this? I've had a look at the Apache site but it's really confusing the way it's explained!
Technical SEO | | DanHill0