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Hello,

I'm in the middle of a link reclamation project wherein we're identifying broken links, links pointing to dupe content etc.

I found a forgotten co-brand which is effectively dupe content across 8 sub-domains, some of which have a significant number of links (200+ linking domains | 2k+ in-bound links).

Question for the group is what's the optimal redirect option?

Option 1: set 301 and maintain 1:1 URL mapping

• will pass all equity to applicable PLPs and theoretically improve rank for related keyword(s).

• requires a bit more configuration time and will likely have small effect on rank given links are widely distributed across URLs.

Option 2: set 301 to redirect all requests to the associated sub-domain e.g. foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page1.html and foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page2 both redirect to foo.mybrand.com/

• will accumulate all equity at the sub-domain level which theoretically will be roughly distributed throughout underlying pages and will limit risk of penalty to that sub-domain.

Option 3: set 301 to redirect all requests to our homepage.

• easiest to configure & maintain, will accumulate the maximum equity on a priority page which should positively affect domain authority.

• run risk of being penalized for accumulating links en mass, risk penalty for spammy links on our primary sub-domain www, won't pass keyword specific equity to applicable pages.

To be clear, I've done an initial scrub of anchor text and there were no signs of spam.

I'm leaning towards #3, but interested in others perspectives.

Cheers,
Stefan

Hey John,

I presume you're more interested in external links that are pointing to URL's that are 302'd (temporary redirected) since they are basically missed opportunity along with those URL's that are broken.

Finding both are pretty easy to accomplish once you've run the SEOmoz crawl report.  Once its done it should show up here.  Download the report and open in excel.

When open, setup the following column filters based on section titles on row 6:

1. Filter to only show URL's that have external links pointing at them (column AO on my report)

2. Filter to only show 302 redirects (column S on my report)

3. Take note of resulting list which are those pages that have temp redirects AND which have external links pointing at them.

4. Now remove the 302 filter and apply filters for 4XX and 5XX "client errors" to find URL's that appear broken to the engines AND which have in-bound external links.

I hope that helps.

Cheers,

Stefan

I presume that the engines simply disregard one of the tags vs. building a penalty based rule, but because we'll also use this solution for canonical tags, there's just too much risk with the approach.

I still think it may be a solid (simple) test, so if I manage to get some free time, I'll set something up and post results.

Consensus says...don't do it!

Thanks for confirming my fears

Hey Shane,

I completely agree, code duplication should be avoided wherever possible.  I've found very little recent info on this specific topic so it seems ripe for a quick test.  Stay tuned and thanks for your 2 cents.

Stefan

Interesting, as I suspected.  Looks like they've got a few other issues to e.g. first meta keyword tag was not closed so looks like it includes the meta description.

Thanks for the example!

Obviously duplicate content is never a good thing...on separate URL's.  Question is, how will the engines deal with duplicate meta tags on the same page.

Example Head Tag:

<title>Example Title - #1</title>

<title>Example Title - #2</title>

My assumption is that Google (and others) will take the first instance of the tag, such that "Example Title - #1" and canonical = "http://www.example.com" would be considered for ranking purposes while the others are disregarded.

My assumption is based on how SE's deal with duplicate links on a page.  Is this a correct assumption?

We're building a CMS-like service that will allow our SEO team to change head tag content on the fly.  The easiest solution, from a dev perspective, is to simply place new/updated content above the preexisting elements.  I'm trying to validate/invalidate the approach.

Thanks in advance.

Hey RealSelf,

With regard to your meta description problems, have you tried using a NOODP meta tag on affected pages.  I've used this as a successful tactic for years and looks like other have recently tested it's effectiveness..see this most or search for NOODP http://seogadget.co.uk/the-impact-of-noodp-on-titles-in-serps/ .

Hope that helps.

Hey John,

I presume you're more interested in external links that are pointing to URL's that are 302'd (temporary redirected) since they are basically missed opportunity along with those URL's that are broken.

Finding both are pretty easy to accomplish once you've run the SEOmoz crawl report.  Once its done it should show up here.  Download the report and open in excel.

When open, setup the following column filters based on section titles on row 6:

1. Filter to only show URL's that have external links pointing at them (column AO on my report)

2. Filter to only show 302 redirects (column S on my report)

3. Take note of resulting list which are those pages that have temp redirects AND which have external links pointing at them.

4. Now remove the 302 filter and apply filters for 4XX and 5XX "client errors" to find URL's that appear broken to the engines AND which have in-bound external links.

I hope that helps.

Cheers,

Stefan