Will rankings for my micro site rank better if I 301 redirect it to my main site?
-
This is my first time asking so I will try to be as clear as possible.
Ok, I have a micro site that is an (exact match domain) and the domain is a couple 3-4 years old and ranks very well for several search terms. The main two terms it ranks for are like this.
houses for rent in XXXXX
XXXXX homes for rent
(XXXXX equals a city name)
The issue is this site has no backlinks, zero advanced SEO, I only did basic optimization to it when i set the site up. Even site structure, url structure all are not good.
The only page I have ever even seen rank is the main root url. But with all that the site does really good in the top 1-2 results for key search terms.Now, I have a main site that is a very big site that has steadily been climbing in search terms every month with great backlinks, optimized for the city and all.
It currently ranks on second page for the listed search terms listed above.What I want to do is 301 redirect this microsite to my city page on my main site that is much better optimized for the key city terms.
The 301 redirect would point this "root domain" (mymicrosite.com) to my city page that looks like this.www.mymaindomain.com/city/XXXXXXX
If I do this will Google rank my main URL city page as well as it ranks this microsite with zero links, seo, etc, etc. What happens if it does not? Will I be able to turn off the 301 redirect and keep the microsite rankings?
My main reason for wanting this is I want this city page to rank well and I only want to optimize one site instead of both.
Any help would be great!
-
Glad to help Robbie and it is great to get a report back on what happened. Thanks so much.
-
Robert,
Thanks for your help and great input for this issue. The 301 redirect so far worked just as I expected it would. Actually after the redirect the new site ranks better than the old site.
One thing I have heard many times is a "301 redirect does not transfer rankings" Well now I have solid proof that this statement is totally incorrect. Because as of today my 301 redirect has launched my target page to page one and ranks better than the old site.
Either way I do appreciate your time and input for this topic.
Thanks!
-
Thank Robert,
Your first paragraph may have answered my question. Although I have seen this proved completely wrong a few years ago when a major competitor was bought out and they did 301 redirects and it did rank them for the terms for the site that they bought.
The only reason I do not post my url's publicly is our competitors do use SEOmoz so I keep it private. I will send you a private message so you can see the urls directly.
-
A 301 redirect does not transfer rankings. So if your home page on micro site is ranked first for a given term, it does not mean a 301 will get you ranked first for that term.
You have to compare the sites two pages (it sounds as if you are saying home page to home page). If one is ranking first for a term XYZ rental and the other is not, what are the content differences, title tag & other on page differences, etc. Have you looked at Google analytics to see if there is info there? Etc.I would suggest putting the two url's out there and letting a mozzer assist. Or use your private question and get one of the associates to help (they are quite knowledgeable and like what they do - or are great actors!). You get one private question a monty.
Many people get worried that if they put their site URL's up someone is in someway going to learn from you ,etc and get ahead of you. It is really quite the opposite: You ask questions that you think you should know already and someone comes along who has been there and helps you out. Occasionally, there is an incorrect or incomplete answer and someone comes along and corrects the answer (I know, I have had some corrective assistance to a couple of answers I gave... but I manned up and thanked them If the sites are a client site as opposed to an owned site that is a bit different. But I have clients that allow me to post information about some of their sites and I do.
I have yet to see perfection in the SEO world. I have found some pretty smart people here though.
-
Thanks for the reply Robert.
The main reason I think personally my main site will rank better for these search terms is the microsite is a city specific site and pretty small with no back links or content other than listings so i will not suffer any loss there.
So I want to take this city specific site that currently ranks on first page of Google for many terms and redirect it to my city specific page on my main site. The microsite does not get any traffic to internal pages so I think redirecting the main URL of it to the city specific page on my main site should transfer the page #1 rankings to my main site. I think i will just try it and see what happens.
-
Robbie,
The 301 redirect would point this "root domain" (mymicrosite.com) to www.mymaindomain.com/city/XXXXXXX
The key to this redirect is that you want to insure you 301 each url on the micro site to a specific url on the main site. You want to do this in the .htaccess file. You don't redirect the root domain to root domain.
Also you state the "site has no back links, no advance SEO", does it have any DA/PA? If the site has a PA 1, DA of 7 for example, I do not see where it will help you. When you redirect, you are trying to move the links to the main site so that you maintain that link juice to the new site (you will lose a bit 5 to10%). This way, when you change a domain name, sell a business, etc. you do not need to try to go to each site linking to the "old" site and ask them to link to the new.
With "what happens if it doesn't work, can I change back?" While I cannot say I have ever tried to, I can tell you that I have done a few redirects of sites and I always watched the old site to see if it lost value and the other gained.
I have a site we did a full redirect to new site in late August. When we initially did it, the old site home page had a PA 44 and a DA of 39, the new had PA 1 and DA 1. Today 3.5 months later Old site is PA 33 DA 31 and new site is PA 44 DA 33. The big difference is there are only two links showing for the old site now.
Since we handle a lot of Real Estate business, one thing you want to be sure of is that your Google Places and Bing Bus. Portal, Yahoo Local. Have the new site if at all possible. It may be fine for a short run, but you will gain more from having a correct, thorough local presence. Do the same with any citation sites.
Good Luck.
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
-
How do I redirect old html pages to new site?
Im seeing in my Google search console some of my old html pages. I never redirecting them and now they get 404 errors. Below is my current htaccess file, how would I changed it so that any html page i.e. intercallsystems.com/index.html forwards to my new site intercallsystems.com ? I have about 5 html pages that I want to redirect. Thank you for the help! Rena Currently my htaccess says: BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | palila
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress0 -
301 redirection for e-commerce website
Hi moz community, I am the web agency for a e-commerce website. Its current domain is https://www.liquorland.co.nz but now all the e-commerce part will be moved to a sub-domain https://shop.liquorland.co.nz. There are thousands of e-commerce current being indexed in Google (i.e., 15,500) plus they also have a mobile version of the page like /mobile/default.aspx. Is it necessary to 301 redirect all the pages? We are afraid it may slow down the website because the request will go through thousands of filters. Is it OK to just redirect the main categories? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | russellbrown0 -
301 Redirect Url Within a Canonical Tag
So this might sounds like a silly question... A client of mine has a duplicate content issue which will be fixed using canonical tags. We are also providing them with an updated URL structure meaning rwe will be having to do lots of 301 redirects. The URL structure is a much larger task that than the duplicate content so i planned to set up the canonicals first. Then it occurred to me id be updating the canonical tags with the urls from the old structure which brings me to my question. Will the canonical tags with the old urls redirect credit to the new urls with the 301? Or should i just wait until we have the new url structure in place and use these new urls in the canonicals? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
301 Redirects on Large Real Estate Website
Hi guys,We are about to move over to a new website and need advice on handling the 301 redirects.We have a large real estate website with around 12,000 pages, a lot of these are properties (about 10,000)On our old website, the url structure for each property is as follows -domainname.com/property/view?property=14863on our new site, the url structure isdomainname.com/properties/view/6137The property ID number is always different from old site to new. The way we see it, we have two options. a.) a manual redirect of each and every property url. A very very long jobb.) a folder level redirect, so redirect the 'property' folder on the old site into the 'properties' folder on new. The con with this one is we are not sure if this is the best route to take, if it is how we would go about it?Some advice would be really appreciated guys. I know there are some hyper intelligent SEO's in here and we need to make sure we handle this right!Many thanks in advance.Mark
Technical SEO | | Nextman0 -
Should I do a 301 redirect
Hi Everyone, Hope you can help me out here. I have .co.uk & .ie website with similar content. On a particular section of the .co.uk website it is updated daily (Q&As, Blog posts etc) .ie does have this section but to a lesser degree, no daily updates etc, I was wondering if we should simply do a 301 redirect when someone is on the .ie website to .co.uk, it means the user is getting a much better experience however not entirely the consequences from search engines on this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Paul781 -
Will Google index a site with white text? Will it give it bad ratings?
Will google not rank a site bc pretty much all the copy is white (and the background is all white)? Here's the site in question: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6w24f6h5p0zaxhg/Garrison_PLAY.vs2-static.pdf https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fwudppvwy2khpau/t43NozpG3E/Garrison_PLAY.vs3.jpg thanks--if you need me to clarify more let me know TM Humphries LocalSearched.com
Technical SEO | | CloudGuys0 -
301 Redirect
The SEOmoz crawl campaign found some 404 errors in my Joomla site poker-brands.ca. So, I figured I would set up 301 redirects in my hosting account to make sure bots don't read that there is a page missing. For example: This link gave a 404 error in the crawl: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager I redirected it to: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pt3-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager-hem-hm2 However, when I visit the first link it doesn't send me to the second link. Am I supposed to get forwarded to the second link now?
Technical SEO | | Uramark0 -
Setup 301 Redirects
I have been asked to transfer a clients old domain over to a new domain with a new site. All of the inbound links basically go to the homepage, and the few links that dont go to the homepage on the old site, might as well be redirected to the homepage on the new site. I'm wondering is there a "catch all" sort of redirect such as www.oldsite.com/* redirects to newsite.com. So any redirects we havent set up will automatically go to the new site homepage? And secondly, whats the easiest way to the redirects up? Can I just add it as a parked domain or addon domain in cpanel, and do the redirects in there? Or does it needs its own hosting for the old domain with its own htaccess file? Any help appreciated! 🙂
Technical SEO | | timscullin0