Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Transfer link juice from old to new site
-
Hi seomozzers,
The design team is building a new website for one of our clients. My role is to make sure all the link juice is kept.
My first question is, should I just make 301s or is there another technique to preserve all the link juice from the old to new site that I should be focusing on?
Second Question is that ok to transfer link juice using dev urls like www.dev2.example.com (new site) or 182.3456.2333? or should I wait the creation of real urls to do link juice transfer?
Thank you
-
What Justin said! And yes, 301's pass 95-99% of all link juice.
-
Hi Taysir
i would definitely not recommend transferring the link juice until you have the real urls set up, as this may detract from the links when they go live.
also you could use what is known as a canonical link to transfer this link juice.
you can find out more about using these links here, also helps with duplicate content on your site:-
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
hope this helps
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
-
Passing link juice via javascript?
Hello Client got website with javascript generated content. All links there (from mainpage to some deeper page) are js generated. In code there're only javascripts and other basic typical code but no text links (<a href...="" ).<="" p=""></a> <a href...="" ).<="" p="">The question is: are those js links got the same "seo power" as typical html href links?.For example majestic.com can't scan website properly and can't show seo metrics for pages. I know google crawls them (links and pages) but are they as good as typical links?</a> <a href...="" ).<="" p="">Regards,</a>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PenaltyHammer0 -
Switching from Http to Https, but what about images and image link juice?
Hi Ya'll. I'm transitioning our http version website to https. Important question: Do images have to have 301 redirects? If so, how and where? Please send me a link or explain best practices. Best, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1241 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice
I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to: keep each page’s content exactly the same keep the same domain name 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content. The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls. I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.” Here’s my question: 1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic? 2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url? 3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirbyf0 -
Lost 86% of traffic after moving old static site to WordPress
I hired a company to convert an old static website www.rawfoodexplained.com with about 1200 pages of content to WordPress. Four days after launch it lost almost 90% of traffic. It was getting over 60,000 uniques while nobody touched the site for several years. It’s been 21 days since the WordPress launch. I read a lot of stuff prior to moving it (including Moz's case study) and I was expecting to lose in short term 30% of traffic max… I don’t understand what is wrong. The internal link structure is the same, every url is 301 to the same url only without[dot]html (ie www.rawfoodexplained.com/science.html is 301′s to http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/science/ ), it’s added to Google Webmaster tool and Google indexed the new pages… Any ideas what could be possible wrong? I do understand the website is not optimized (meta descriptions etc, but it wasn't before either) .... Do you think putting back the old site would recover the traffic? I would appreciate any thoughts Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JakubH0 -
How to properly link network of microsites and main sites?
Law firm has a main brand site (lawfirmname.com) with lots of content focusing on personal injury related areas of law. They also do other unrelated areas of law such as bankruptcy and divorce. They have a separate website for bankruptcy and a separate one for divorce. These websites have good quality content, a backlinking campaign, and are fairly large websites, with landing pages for different cities. They also have created local microsites in the areas of bankruptcy and divorce that target specific smaller cities that the main bankruptcy site and divorce site do not target well. These microsites have a good deal of original content and the content is mostly specific to the city the website is about, and virtually no backlinks. There are about 15 microsites for cities in bankruptcy and 10 in divorce and they rank pretty well for these city specific local searches. None of these sites are linked at all, and all 28 of the sites are under the same hosting account (all are subdomains of root domain of hosting account). Question, should I link these sites together at all and if so how? I considered making a simple and general page on the lawfirmname.com personal injury site for bankruptcy and divorce (lawfirmname.com/bankruptcy and lawfirmname.com/divorce) and then saying on the page something to the effect of "for more information on bankruptcy go to our main bankruptcy site at ....." and putting the link to the main bankruptcy site. Same for divorce. This way users can go to lawfirmname.com site and find Other Practice Areas, go to bankruptcy page, and link to main bankruptcy site. Is this the best way to link to these two main sites for bankruptcy and divorce or should I be linking upward? Secondly, should I link the city specific microsites to any of the other sites or leave them completely separate? Thirdly, should all of these sites be hosted on the same account or is this something that should be changed? I was considering not linking the city specific sites at all, but if I did this I didn't know if I should create different hosting accounts for them (which could be expensive). The sites work well in themselves without being linked, but wanted to try to network them in some way if possible without getting penalized or causing any issues with the search engines. Any help would be appreciated on how to network and host all of these websites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | broca777110 -
Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
Noindex,follow is a waste of link juice?
On my wordpress shopping cart plugin, I have three pages /account, /checkout and /terms on which I have added “noindex,follow” attribute. But I think I may be wasting link juice on these pages as they are not to be indexed anyway, so is there any point giving them any link juice? I can add “noindex,nofollow” on to the page itself. However, the actual text/anchor link to these pages on the site header will remain “follow” as I have no means of amending that right now. So this presents the following two scenarios – No juice flows from homepage to these 3 pages (GOOD) – This would be perfect then, as the pages themselves have nofollow attribute. Juice flows from homepage to these pages (BAD) - This may mean that the juice flows from homepage anchor text links to these 3 pages BUT then STOPS there as they have “nofollow” attribute on that page. This will be a bigger problem and if this is the case and I cant stop the juice from flowing in, then ill rather let it flow out to other pages. Hope you understand my question, any input is very much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck1