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 Redirects After Company Acquisition
-
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long?
Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible?
Thanks!
-
Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible?
Be sure that you don't save ten bucks on hosting but toss away thousand in content and the value of a redirect.
I would sniff the entire site for gems of content. Anything that is better than what you currently have or supplemental to it. If you can get new pages on your site that target keywords that have been off of your radar that could be a huge win.
Now... just saying what I do rather than disagree with others.... I keep an .htaccess file on that old domain for a long time - meaning forever.... you can do that inexpensively by getting a hosting service that will allow you to place multiple domains in different folders of a single account and redirect them. Since I don't know exactly how long it will take for search engines to permanently remember I make it impossible for them to miss.
-
Hi pbhatt,
I agree with Ryan on this one. I would recommend using a combination one of the following tools to keep an eye on any broken links or 404 pages on the new site:
- Xenu Link Sleuth
- Screaming Frog
- Google Webmaster Tools
- SEO Moz crawler tool
Hope this helps
-
Once the redirect is in place and you have confirmed it is working, you can immediately remove the old site.
I would highly recommend monitoring your sites on a daily basis for 404 errors after the move. Also ensure your 404 page is as helpful as possible. It should contain your normal site's navigation and a search function.
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 in breadcrumb. How bad is it?
Hi all, How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects? We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb. SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404. However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months. could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
Default Wordpress 301 Redirects of JS and CSS files. Bad for SEO & How to Fix?
Hi there: We are developers with some digital marketing expertise, but a current issue has us perplexed. An outside SEO firm has asked us to clean up a large number of 301 redirects. Most of these are 'default' Wordpress behavior that relate to calling the latest version of a JS or CSS file. For instance, a JS file is called with this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js?ver=4.9.1 but ultimately redirects to this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js. We are being asked to prevent the redirect from happening by, presumably, calling the ultimate file to begin with. The issue is that, as far as we know, there's no easy way to alter WP behavior to call the ultimate file to begin with. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
301 redirect hops from non-https and www
It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop. It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain. The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not In which case, you could have: Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page. Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud0 -
Hacked website - Dealing with 301 redirects and a large .htaccess file
One of my client's websites was recently hacked and I've been dealing with the after effects of it. The website is now clean of malware and I already appealed to Google about the malware issue. The current issue I have is dealing with the 20, 000+ crawl errors which are garbage links that were created from the hacking. How does one go about dealing with all the 301 redirects I need to create for all the 404 crawl errors? I'm already noticing an increased load time on the website due to having a rather large .htaccess file with a couple thousand 301 redirects done already which I fear will result in my client's website performance and SEO performance taking a hit as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK0 -
Problem with redirects in coldfusion
How to redirect pages in cold fusion? If using ColdFusion and modrewrite, the URL will never be redirected from ModRewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexkatalkin0 -
301 vs 410 redirect: What to use when removing a URL from the website
We are in the process of detemining how to handle URLs that are completely removed from our website? Think of these as listings that have an expiration date (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/test-prep/tphU3/sat-group-course). What is the best practice for removing these listings (assuming not many people are linking to them externally). 301 to a general page (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/search/test-prep) Do nothing and leave them up but remove from the site map (as they are no longer useful from a user perspective) return a 404 or 410?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abargmann0 -
Can I make 301 redirects on a Windows server (without access to IIS)?
Hey everyone, I've been trying to figure out a way to set up some 301 redirects to handle the broken links left behind after a site restructuring, but I can only ever find information on 2 methods that I can't use (as far as I can tell). The first method is to do some stuff with an htaccess file, but that looks like it only works on Linux-based servers. The method described for Windows servers is generally to install this IIS rewrite/redirect module and run that, but I don't think our web hosting company allows users to log directly into the server, so I wouldn't be able to use the IIS thing. Is there any other way to get a 301 redirect set up? And is this uncommon for a web hosting company to do, or do you all just run your sites on Linux-based servers or your own Windows machines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrianAlpert780 -
301 Redirect - What happens to backlinks
Hello... One of my sites is losing rankings in G. I received the webmaster notification of unnatural links... My question is, should i do a 301 redirect of every page on my site to a new domain? If so, do the backlinks (which i believe are causing my rankings to drop) carry over? How about the good backlinks? Also, what would happen to the rankings i currently have on page 1? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850