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Hi, thanks for the answer.

An archive of some kind is not possible. The content itself from the old site is not ours and we can't use it.

In a perfect world with lots and lots of free time I would rewrite all 1000 pages and put a 301 on each one of them to the new page. But I don't have the resources to rewrite another 950 pages. And I know I will lose a lot of value because of this. But I want to lose as less as possible.

So my question kind of stays... What should I do with the 950 url's I do not have a specific page to redirect to? Homepage, 404, divide over the new 50 articles or something else?

Hi Moz Community,

I have a 301 redirect question...

I just acquired an old domain:

• Totally in my niche

• Domain is 14 years old

• Website exists of 1000 pages

• Great amount of backlinks

• Website is offline since about 2 weeks

• Will place a new website online asap with new url structure

For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages.

My question: What to do with the 950 other url's?

• Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage?

• Should I forward those pages to the 404 page?

• Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones?

• Another solution maybe?

Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible?

Thanks in advance!

Thank you for your answer Lisa.

Will do.

Hi Donald,

Thank you for your answer. I don't think it can be the combined external and internal links. (see attachment) I have also tried the filters in OSE, but still can't figure out where the links come from. And isn't it strange that Ahrefs and Majestic show a totally different amount of backlinks than Moz?

Thank you.

4K3uACY

Hi there

Moz is showing a +3M backlink rise in the dashboard for one of our domains. The site has always had around 350K backlinks and in Ahrefs and Majestic it still shows this number. But Moz shows a growth of +3M in the last two weeks. Is there a way to see where these backlinks come from in OSE? I can't seem to understand how it is possible to see this somehow. Can it be a mistake of Moz maybe?

Hi David

Thanks for your reply.

This is how we did it:

We redirected our old webshops with a 301 redirect on 07-07-12 to the new webshop. We had a new design, a lot of new content, new url structure, new product images etc. etc (but everything is unique) (we redirected everything to the root 300K pages)

Nothing special happened and we conacted an SEO company to do a page on page redirect for the most important pages and then let the other links 301 to the root.

On 23-07-12 we received our rankings back for 3 days, then there was a massive drop in rankings. Even the brand name is not showing up for the .com version.

Now we changed the 300K redirects into 404 pages.

So this is the situation:

The most important pages from our old webshops are page to page redirected to the new webshop. All other urls are now 404.

We merged our old webshops into one big project. After a few days we received our rankings back and traffic was coming in. Then suddenly we lost almost all rankings overnight.

We did not use any wrong seo techniques and have unique content, written by our own writers.

Is this a penalty or do we have to wait longer?

We now removed all 301 after 2,5 weeks and replaced them with a custom 404 page. Only the most important pages are now redirected. But i guess something happened already.

The .com version is very badly indexed, and it shouldn`t because we directed the 2 most important old webshops to this domain.

All other versions, like the .nl and .de etc. are doing fine.

We changed our tactics and instead of 301 the 300K links we let them run into a 404 page. I think its not the meaning of a 301 redirect to push old pages to the index page.

But now the main question is. Should we have the 404 pages on the old or new domain.

www.oldoldold.com/custom404.php

or

www.newurl.com/custom404.php

If we use the old domein we can put a text on the page that says we are moved to the new location. Google will have the 404 errors in the old webmaster account for the old webpage

If we use the new domain we can use a custom 404 page with links to different pages on the new webshop. But in this case Google will receive the 404 errors in the webmaster account for the new webpage.

I don`t know if Google penalize us for this.

What is the best and most natural way so solve this problem? At the moment we dropped from 2500 organic a day to 400 organic a day.

We recently merged our old webshops to one big webshop. The new webshop is mutlidomain/multilanguage so the English version is at the .com extension and the germand version at  the .de extension etc. etc.

We redirected the 2 best old webshops to the .com extention  with a htaccess 301 redirect. The other old webshops we divided over the other extensions.

We redirected the 200 most importent pages with a page to page redirect and redirected the other indexed pages to the new index page. (300K)

Everything went well and the new website started indexing. All extentions are doing well and even the .com version had very good rankings for a few days.

After a few days we almost lost all rankings to the .com version. We did always clean seo, had 100% unique content written by our own writers and translated by our own translators.

Our old webshops have very good branche related backlinks and i can`t find anything else then the 300K redirects to the homepage that might be the problem.

Hope somebody will help us, or know someone we can hire to check our webmaster account, and check everything we did.

First of all i want to introduce myself. My name is Jennifer and i am a webshop owner from the Netherlands (we sell plants/herbs products)

I have a very important question (and i can`t find a clear answer on the internet). So i hope someone can help me,

At this moment me and 4 other friends own each a seperate webshop. We all started the webshops 5 -7 years ago and work all in the same business. (plants/herbs).

We talked last week, and we want to make one big company and combine all 5 company`s. All 5 webshops have a huge pagerank, lots of organic traffic and very good incomming links.

We registered new domainnames and want to redirect the 5 "old" domains to one new domain to pass over the Google juice.

Our new company is a multilanguage webshop and each language has its own domain. (for example)

(www. plantsandherbs example .nl)
(www. plantsandherbs example .de)
(www. plantsandherbs example .de)
(www. plantsandherbs example .es)
(www. plantsandherbs example .fr)
(www. plantsandherbs example .com)

Does it harm us if we 301 redirect all the 5 "old" websites to the new webshop? And what is the best way to redirect the "old" webshops to the new one?

I am afraid of a Google penalty because it maybe looks like we bought some domains to pass the juice to the new project.