301 Redirect Domain or 301 Redirect Domain + Interior Pages
-
Hello - My company acquired another company in our industry and our IT team immediately set up the acquired companies domain name as a an alias to our site.
This created a duplicate version of our website under another domain name and Google started ranking interior pages from the aliased acquired site for several top keywords that were previously held by our real site.
Should we 301 redirect just the top level domain name of the acquired site to the real site or 301 redirect the top level domain name and the interior pages on the acquired site to help ensure that our real domain will take back the rankings it once had?
Thanks!
-
Totally - thanks!
-
Yeah so if you want pages on the acquired site to go to corresponding pages on the primary site like you mention above
www.aquired.com/interior-page-1 >> redirects >> www.primary.com/interior-page-1
then you can create 301 redirect with a regular expression pattern with wild card to capture the URL and reuse them in the target URL.
If you have lots URLs then this will be quickest way rather creating an entry for every possible URL.
Hope this helps
-
Thanks for the response. Can you expand on the "wildcard redirect". Our it team set up a 301 redirect so that any URL on the acquired site redirects to the home page of the primary site. So for example:
www.aquired.com/interior-page-1 redirects to www.primary.com
instead of
www.primary.com/interior-page-1
Any thoughts on this set-up.
-
Thanks for the insight Nakul.
-
Ultimately you'll probably want your primary (real site domain) ranking for the keywords so you'll want to 301 redirect the acquired site to the primary domain.
As the site content is essentially one and the same you'll be able to set-up a wildcard 301 redirect, at the server level (Apache/IIS) which will take care of the interior pages
-
Yes, I would recommend you remove the alias.
Next, I would suggest you redirect the specific pages from the old domain/site of the company you acquired to the pages that make most sense for the user on your site. Like if you took over certain products from that company and merged them into your products (or services), a 301 from the products page to your products page would make sense and so on.
This will pass on the SEO value to the respective pages much better rather then a complete redirect from the entire site to just your homepage.
I suggested this based on the fact that you wrote, the acquired company's domain is ranking better, which demonstrates the presence of some sort of authority in terms of backlinks and trust and aging factor in the SERPS.
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 forwarding or redirects for SEO?
Hi all! A client of mine owns several top level domains which are not in use, let's call them example.nu, example.de, example.net and so on. The current website is example.com.
Technical SEO | | JHultqvist
When checking the technical status of the unused domains I realized that all but one are forwarded (via DNS) to example.com and only one has a 301 redirect. Should I redirect all of them by means of 301 or let them stay forwarded? Very few of the domains have any other sites linking to them. Any thoughts would be really appreciated! Jesper0 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
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!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
Redirecting 301 or 302?
Hi, I think the part of this question has been already discussed, but not exactly the same, I think. My site requires authentication for member page. When a user try to go to member area, we redirect to 3rd party to do the authentication. 1. user clicks a link to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html
Technical SEO | | HypermediaSystems
2. www.myauthenticate.com/login?h=somehashuniquehash454859428778545 (enters id/pass)
3. login success => redirect back to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html We are doing it 302, temporary redirect. But moz crawler error seems to suggest we should do it 301.
So my question is:
A. Should we do it 301???
B. If we do 301, what happens to myauthenticate.com? since it has hashtag, I am afraid it could create a lot of duplicate contents on myauthenticate.com side... Thank you so much for your help in advance...0 -
New site: More pages for usability, or fewer more detailed pages for greater domain authority flow?
Ladies and gents! We're building a new site. We have a list of 28 professions, and we're wondering whether or not to include them all on one long and detailed page, or to keep them on their own separate pages. Thinking about the flow of domain authority - I could see 28 pages diluting it quite heavily - but at the same time, I think having the separate pages would be better for the user. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap1 -
301 Redirect Questions
I have a site I built on a wisiwig editing platform that will not allow a 301 redirect. The site has already been remade and I need to point it to another domain. To do the redirect, can I change it to another domain host that will allow a 301 or will that make me loose the authority of the site? I may not be able to move the content of the site. Please help.
Technical SEO | | photoseo10 -
IP address URLs being indexed, 301 to domain?
I apoligize if this question as been asked before, I couldnt' find in the Q&A though. I noticed Google has been indexing our IP address for some pages (ie: 123.123.123.123/page.html instead of domain.com/page.html). I suspect this is possibly due to a few straggler relative links instead of absolute, or possibly something else I'm not thinking of. My less-evasive solution a few months back was to ensure canonical tags were on all pages, and then replaced any relative links w/ absolutes. This does not seem to be fixing the problem though, as recently as today new pages were scooped up with the IP address. My next thought is to 301 redirect any IP address URL to the domain, but I was afraid that may be too drastic and that the canonical should be sufficient (which it doesn't seem to be). Has anyone dealt with this issue? Do you think the 301 would be a safe move, any other suggestions? thanks.
Technical SEO | | KT6840 -
When should you turn off redirects to your new domain?
Our website moved to a new domain a year ago, and we have our original domain to redirect to our new domain. We're working on contacting people who still link to our old domain to ask them to update, but 7% of our traffic is still coming as a redirect from our old domain. My question is, when should we just shut the old domain down entirely and stop redirecting people to our new domain? Or should we just keep it up indefinitely? What would be the positive or negative impact on our new domain's SEO if we shut the old domain down? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | UWPCE0 -
301 Redirect Issue
I'm having an issue with 301 redirects: Let's see if I can verbalize my thoughts on this one... So we just recently moved our site to Wordpress. One of our new 301 commands is redirecting oursite.com/news to oursite.com/blog . However there are other links from our previous site that look like oursite.com/news/XYZ and the issue is that, because wordpress structures its links differently, that URL is not equivalent to oursite.com/blog/XYZ. Instead, it might look something more like oursite.com/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ or something. Does that make sense? The issue is that when I find an old link of ours on google that looks something like "oursite.com/news/XYZ" or "oursite.com/news/ABC" it is automatically replacing "news" with "blog". When I try to go in manually and redirect anything that says "/news/XYZ" to "/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ" it still doesn't work. It still just replaces "news" with "blog." Wow I realize that might not make sense to anyone but if it does - please advise!! Thanks!!!!
Technical SEO | | EntrustSEO0