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.
Can I use a 301 redirect to pass 'back link' juice to a different domain?
-
Hi,
I have a backlink from a high DA/PA Government Website pointing to www.domainA.com which I own and can setup 301 redirects on if necessary.
However my www.domainA.com is not used and has no active website (but has hosting available which can 301 redirect). www.domainA.com is also contextually irrelevant to the backlink.
I want the Government Website link to go to www.domainB.com - which is both the relevant site and which also should be benefiting from from the seo juice from the backlink.
So far I have had no luck to get the Government Website's administrators to change the URL on the link to point to www.domainB.com.
Q1: If i use a 301 redirect on www.domainA.com to redirect to www.domainB.com will most of the backlink's SEO juice still be passed on to www.domainB.com?
Q2: If the answer to the above is yes - would there be benefit to taking this a step further and redirect www.domainA.com to a deeper directory on www.domianB.com which is even more relevant?
ie. redirect www.domainA.com to www.domainB.com/categoryB - passing the link juice deeper. -
It definitely passes link juice, one of my extortion activism groups recently was attempting to stop an individual from monetizing a domain that publicly shames people. What the black hat hacker had done was identify dead links on a NY Times article and wanted the DoFollow links from such a authority
The individual purchased the domains and redirected them to his site and luckily we caught it on a backlink check and one of the group members was a journalist that was able to get them to remove the links.
-
Hi DGAU
There is no doubt that cross-domain 301s do pass link juice and depending on who you listen to you may experience a 15% drop in the juice passed.
The problem is that if it is completely different and irrelevant content then you may do more damage than good.
Your second option, linking to a directory with relevant content is a much better idea and may help you get the link back if you can show them that the destination URL has more relevant content. It also means that you may keep it for longer. I should imagine that no Government department would want to link out to an irrelevant URL!
First, though I would enhance the page to make it as relevant as possible - then request the link back. You'll give yourself a much better chance of getting it!
I hope that helps, Regards Nigel
-
Hi DGAU,
it's a difficult question. I have used this technique 2 times (redirect a broken link on a .gov site to my site) and in my experience it did not work very well, didn't see improvements on rankings, but I'm not really sure about if it can work in some situations.
Probably, if the link was broken for a short period and you redirect it soon, it will be much better that if it has been a long time broken. If it's broken and you inmediately redirect it would be the perfect situation, each day from that I think it will give less link juice.
Just my opinion.
In any case, you don't have anything to lose by doing the redirect to your deeper directory, try it.
Greetings
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
-
301 Redirect for multiple links
I just relaunched my website and changed a permalink structure for several pages where only a subdirectory name changed. What 301 Redirect code do I use to redirect the following? I have dozens of these where I need to change just the directory name from "urban-living" to "urban", and want it to catch the following all in one redirect command. Here is an example of the structure that needs to change. Old
Technical SEO | | shawnbeaird
domain.com/urban-living (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe/the-vale (single page w/ content) New
domain.com/urban
domain.com/urban/tempe
domain.com/urban/tempe/the-vale0 -
How much domain authority is passed on through a link from a page with low authority?
Hello, Let's say that there is a link to site A from site B. The domain authority of site B is 85, but the link is on a page that has a page authority of only 1. Does much authority get passed along from site B to site A? (Let's assume site A has a domain authority of 35, if that's relevant.) Thank you!
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
Redirect root domain to www
I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below. Does anyone have a solution to this? I'm not 100% sure what to do. Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not? Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages. "Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate." Thanks
Technical SEO | | SeaDrive0 -
404 error - but I can't find any broken links on the referrer pages
Hi, My crawl has diagnosed a client's site with eight 404 errors. In my CSV download of the crawl, I have checked the source code of the 'referrer' pages, but can't find where the link to the 404 error page is. Could there be another reason for getting 404 errors? Thanks for your help. Katharine.
Technical SEO | | PooleyK0 -
Do Backlinks to a PDF help with overall authority/link juice for the rest of the domain?
We are working on a website that has some high-quality industry articles available on their website. For each article, there is an abstract with a link to the PDF which is hosted on the domain. We have found in Analytics that a lot of sites link directly to the PDF and not the webpage that has the abstract of the article. Can we get any benefit from a direct PDF link? Or do we need to modify our strategy?
Technical SEO | | MattAaron0 -
301 Redirect with an Exact Domain name Match
My Client had a site that ranked for a pretty competitive two word phrase, but for a variety of reasons had to transfer the site to a different domain name (with none of the previous keywords). We've 301'd everything just fine to the new site, but our traffic for that two word phrase, as well as related long tail traffic, is beginning to drop. Could the drop be related to something that we didn't do well in the transfer? Or is it due to the new domain name now not being an exact match? Sitenote question: Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine. Is there any reason to switch GA to the new domain? What are the pros/cons? Much thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | TrevorMcKendrick0 -
Double 301 redirect
Hi together, due to some technical reasons I have redirect (301) an existing link two times. Example: www.mydomain.com/root/site.html > 301 > www.mydomain.com/site.html > 301 www.mydomain.com/site_new.html Is there anybody how has got some experience like doing a double redirect? What about link juice? Best regards Steffen
Technical SEO | | steffen_0 -
301 Redirect vs Domain Alias
We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?
Technical SEO | | briankb0