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!
-
That helps. So you redirected every url to the matching url on the new domain? Good!
That's all you could've done. Now the problem is: the new domain is new, hasn't built up long time value and probably all the links that are pointing to the old domain, haven't been spidered yet to be redirected to your new domain. That's problem one.
Problem two is a bigger one: all your links are now devalued because they are all being redirected to your new domain.
I'd try to find the low hanging fruit and e-mail them to change the link to the new site and preferrably not to the homepage, but to different pages on you site.
-
Say, if the old domain was xyz.com, and the new one is abc.com, we 301 redirected every url from the old site to the new. So for example, xyz.com/post1 now redirects to abc.com/post1.
Does that help?
-
We look at the old domain's Google Analytic account. All traffic to the new domain is shown there.
-
Leave the old code?
-
Can you explain a bit more about how you did the redirecting? What did you redirect? And how did you do it? So: what url's, based on what assumptions/facts/numbers to what url's did you redirect to.
I don't think there is any reason why you should change the analytics to the new domain.
-
" Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine"
How do You get your new domain traffic data?
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
-
Domain Name Character Amount
I know that best practice is to keep your domain short, but is there an actual suggested character ballpark when coming up with one? Any thoughts are appreciated.
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
HTacess 301 redirect with special characters
Hello moz community ! I would to make a special 301 redirection through my htaccess file. I am a total noob concerning regexp and 301 redirection. I would like to redirect(301) this url : http://www.legipermis.com/stages-points/">http://www.legipermis.com/stages-points/</a></p>; yes yes it's in the index of google, this strange url includes the last ; to http://www.legipermis.com/stages-points/ I have already include a canonical tag by security, i would like to remove url with a 301 redirection and by remove this url through GWT (but the removal tool can't "eat' this kind of URL) Please consider the fact that i am not an expert about 301 redirections and regexps. No 301 redirect generator works properly for such a strange URL (which triggers content duplication corrected anyway with canonical tag). Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | LegiPermis0 -
Redirect URLS with 301 twice
Hello, I had asked my client to ask her web developer to move to a more simplified URL structure. There was a folder called "home" after the root which served no purpose. I asked for the URLs to be redirected using 301 to the new URLs which did not have this structure. However, the web developer didn't agree and decided to just rename the "home" folder "p". I don't know why he did this. We argued the case and he then created the URL structure we wanted. Initially he had 301 redirected the old URLS (the one with "Home") to his new version (the one with the "p"). When we asked for the more simplified URL after arguing, he just redirected all the "p" URLS to the PAGE NOT FOUND. However, remember, all the original URLs are now being redirected to the PAGE NOT FOUND as a result. The problems I see are these unless he redirects again: The new simplified URLS have to start from scratch to rank 2)We have duplicated content - two URLs with the same content Customers clicking products in the SERPs will currently find that they are being redirect to the 404 page. I understand that redirection has to occur but my questions are these: Is it ok to redirect twice with 301 - so old URL to the "p" version then to final simplified version. Will link juice be lost doing this twice? If he redirects from the original URLS to the final version missing out the "p" version, what should happen to the "p" version - they are currently indexed. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
301 redirect and search engines
How long until 301 redirects get recognized by search engines? I noticed my link on Google isn't forwarding over to my new domain even after the 301 redirect. If I go to the site directly, the 301 redirect works. Anyone know how long it takes for search engines to pick it up? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | timeintopixels0 -
301 redirects
Hello. Our site was recently rebuilt, and we switched from using index.php in all the urls to not using it at all. We also changed the names of many of our pages. So the urls have been renamed from "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/". While we were at it, we changed from "_" to "-" as our word separators in the urls. In the .htaccess file, we have a small block of code that strips out "index.php/" from all requests. This code redirects a request for "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/old_page_name/" For your information, the code that strips out "index.php/" is: RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.index.php [NC]
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !/uSZWTLna/.
RewriteRule (.?)index.php/(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L] Then we have 301 redirects from "example.com/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/" QUESTION 1: Is this two-step redirect approach okay, or would it be better to skip the separate index.php stripping code and simply have 301 redirects that include "index.php" in the urls? QUESTION 2: Will we lose some of the benefit of the links that have to pass through a 301 redirect? QUESTION 3: We have 50 or so redirects. Will this affect performance of the site? How many redirects does it take to start affecting performance? Thank you!0 -
How to force a trailing slash after the domain name
My campaign analysis is predictably listing domain.com and domain.com/ as repeated content. I've searched and searched but cannot find a way to force a trailing slash on the end of the domain name unless there's a file or directory after it.. Is there a way to accomplish this using .htaccess
Technical SEO | | JollyBoy0 -
Default.aspx and domain name difference
I am getting duplicate page content and duplicate page title errors for www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/default.aspx. I thought that they were the same page, so I'm not sure how to avoid getting the duplicate content and title errors. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | DMacy0 -
IIS Work Around 301 Redirects
We are redirecting page-level content (about 500 pages) from several sub domains to our main site. With IIS, It’s my understanding that file locations must match. For example: subdomain/pathA/filename1
Technical SEO | | DigitalMkt
mainsite/pathA/filename1 Since the sub domain files are not on the main site, this means we'd create up to 500 zero byte dummy files on the new server and replicate the sub domain directory structure. With IIS is there a work around for handling page level redirects without duplicating the file location? In the case of white papers, videos and case studies, we'll imlement directory level redirection. Thanks in advance.0