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Thanks Dr Peter! I agree with you! Just wanted to feel shure about it.

Yes, Gary, you can personalize also a 410 page.

Hello,

I have a related question about 301 vs 410.

I have a client who wants to delete a whole category of product from one site.  It's a big amount of product, so a big amount of urls, but this product is not working very well. So the decision is not SEO-related but more as a business decision. It's not for Panda.

If we think about the communication with the user, the best option would be to have a landing page explaining that we decided to remove that product.

Then the question is, do we do a redirect 301 of all those urls to this landing page? I am afraid that a big redirect like this, going from many urls to a single one (even if this is not created to rank on google) can be seen dodgy by Google. Am I right?

Or do I do a 410 for those pages, and I personalize the 410 landing only for these urls in order to communicate with the user (is that even possible?). But I am afraid, because we'll have much 4XX Errors in WMT, and this may have influence to the rankings!

So I don't know what to do! It's a must that we delete this content and that we communicate it well with the users.

Thanks for your help,

Hi Onlinchester,

You are not the only one. I noticed it too. Only in certain group of keywords, and always if there is a local result.

So it is not the Panda update I think (fortunatelly... or not...)

I also found this article from an agency that noticed the same: http://www.1stonthelist.ca/articles/are-your-organic-listings-being-replaced-with-local-listings/

For now, the CTR in local seems to be better for local than in organic, but I'm surprised. We will see..

Thanks Philip,

well, I changed it in first place for branding reasons, now that they seem to be not as important as before, and rankings have fallen from the sky,  I think it might work doing the redirection back to the old domain.

Pretty much all the links have been passed across to the new domain, so in case I would need to change them back. I see your point but I guess the old domain name (and authority) is really playing a big role here.

Have you got any experience on undoing 301 redirects? Should i just take the 301 instruction out or should I treat the domains as if they would be completely different, meaning that I would need to go to Webmaster tool, let google know of the change, re-claim the old domain, etc?

Thank you very much for any help on this!

Hi there, 4 months ago I have done a redirect from one domain to another. Now, after about 120 days I have just a few results from the old domain indexed. The problem is that I believe that the old domain name had a really big impact on rankings, as it had the main keyword in the domain name. I'm wondering now if I could restore the old domain just by taking out the 301 instruction and how will search engines react. Do you have any studies on that? Would it be possible? Matt Cutts himself did it with his own domain, but he doesn't talk specifically on the effect of the rankings: http://www.thedotcomblog.com/seo/redirects-after-change-in-domain-name Thanks in advance for any help,

Thanks Erica, sounds reasonable.

I had seen that article, but just one experiment doesn't make it absolutely true.

I wonder why you said: "you want to move all of it".  Why not moving just an entire subfolder ? Do you think could it harm rankings for the entire site or the part that has moved won't inherit link juice?

Thanks again,

Hi,

I'm thinking of rebranding my website and moving it to a new domain.

Of course I would implement 301 redirects page to page from old-domain.com to new-domain.com. I wonder if you have any real figure based on your experiments on how much link juice I could lose in the process and if it will take time for Google to re-crawl correctly the new page.

I could get some of the backlinks changed as well, so they would point to the new domain. Cutts says it would get changed at least the more important, but how many? which are the more important?

Also, what about if I move just a part of the website that has no backlinks? Supposedly it won't have any link juice to pass through but of course all the pages will be hosted on a brand new domain that won't pass domain-power to those internal pages, so will I lose rankings for these pages?

Thanks for any help,

Best regards