Multiple domain level redirects to unique sub-folder on one domain...
-
Hi, I have a restaurant menu directory listing website (for example www.menus.com).
Restaurant can have there menu listed on this site along with other details such as opening hours, photos ect. An example of a restaurant url might be www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza.
A feature i would like to offer is the ability for Bob's pizza to use the menus.com website listing as his own website (let assume he has no website currently). I would like to purchase www.bobspizza.com and 301 redirect to www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza
Why?
So bob can then list bobspizza.com on his advertising material (business cards etc, rather than www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza).I was considering using a 301 redirect for this though have been told that too many domain level redirects to one single domain can be flagged as spam by Google.
Is there any other way to achieve this outcome without being penalised? Rel canonical url, url masking?
Other things to note:
- It is fine if www.bobspizza.com is NOT listed in search results.
- I would ideally like any link juice pointing to www.bobspizza.com to pass onto www.menus.com though this is a nice to have. If it comes at the cost of being penalised i can live without the link juice from this.
Thanks
-
That's a good point you make Cyrus in regards to linking to a site that has competitors on it also. I have considered this and my idea was to pass in a url param that would not show anything else only the restaurants own menu. For example, menus.com/bobs-pizza?ads=0 would not show a search bar or any other links (simply just their own menu). This page would have rel-canonical link to menus.com/bobs-pizza so as to maintain link juice...
Other option i was thinking was to include an iframe on the restaurants page that would source data from menus.com. I guess i could have a link pointing back to menus.com at the bottom of the menu in the iframe.
I think the link idea makes sense rather the redirect for the reasons you mentioned. Maybe i could have a popup on mobile devices that contains a link to the menu's site (again this would be in javascript - not sure if this is a good idea though).
Any other ideas on how i may be able to show a link (only on mobile devices) that could point to menus.com (in a SEO friendly way)?
-
Without getting into the technical details, I have to address the bigger question of why a business owner would want to redirect their site to yours? In all honesty, I have to question the soundness of that business plan. If I'm printing www.bobs-pizza on my business cards, I want my visitors to go to www.bobs-pizza.com, and not redirect to some other site where they can view all my competitors as well.
Regardless, I would think it would be much easier to get a link from these sites than a redirect, and this would mitigate the potential problems of mass 301 redirects.
Another thing to consider, what if the site has been penalized due to poor link building practices? Once you 301 redirect to your site, those bad links become yours, and this could effect your entire site.
Regarding the issue of redirecting mobile users, yes, it's possible using browser detection agents, but redirecting to another site runs huge risks of penalties to the point that I wouldn't advise it.
Instead, I think this is a great idea, but I would opt for links instead of redirects. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
+1 URL Shortener
Also, custom URLs for each business might work, i.e. menu.com/bobs-pizza.
-
Thanks for your response Moosa. I like the idea of shorter urls.
On a similar yet slightly different note.
Some restaurants already have an existing and well established websites (eg www.tomspasta.com). For these websites i would like to redirect to www.menus.com/tomspasta (which is mobile optimised), only if the user is viewing the site (www.tomspasta.com) from a mobile device (ie user agent detection would be used in JavaScript to do the redirect).Would this kind of redirect have any impact on SEO (positively/negatively)? Would any link juice be passed? Would i need to notify Google that the content is different for mobile devices?
-
Thanks for your response Moosa. I like the idea of shorter urls.
On a similar yet slightly different note.
Some restaurants already have an existing and well established websites (eg www.tomspasta.com). For these websites i would like to redirect to www.menus.com/tomspasta (which is mobile optimised), only if the user is viewing the site (www.tomspasta.com) from a mobile device (ie user agent detection would be used in JavaScript to do the redirect).Would this kind of redirect have any impact on SEO (positively/negatively)? Would any link juice be passed? Would i need to notify Google that the content is different for mobile devices?
-
Hi Adam,
It is true that too many 301 redirects could look a bit fishy.
If what you want is for people that see bobspizza.com on advertising material and type the url on their browser to be redirected to your site (and have no possible issues with Google), I'd would use a 302 redirect.
The only problem with 302 redirects is that the link juice pointing to bobspizza.com won't pass onto menu.com .
There are many hosting providers that will allow you to park and 301/302 an unlimited number of domains.
Cheers
-
Adam I think a lot about this even before you actually come up with this question and I thought best URL structure you can follow in this case is of about.me
- You cannot park many domains (ideally one domain for each business page)
- Too many domain level redirects might kill your site and at the same time 301 redirect from domain to a specific page will not let main domain stay in SERPs.
- Canonical can work but again you cannot eat the search engine love.
But there is one thing that you cannot do!
How about shortening the URL?
For instance you have a BOB pizza in Ohio so instead of having a URL http://www.menue.com/pizza/OH/bob-pizza/ why not go for a smile and short URL that looks great with branding http://menu.com/bobpizza/
The URL is short so you can easily use in branding plus search engine will not exclude this in Google... when people will share this short version of URL the domain authority of the overall domain will automatically improved.
Hope this idea might work for you...
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
-
Pointing additional domains at your main one
I have two questions: I have bought a domain that is a misspelled version of my domain. I have created an A record with DNS provider to point to my main domain's IP and on my main site I modified .htaccess file to make a 301 redirect if referrer is that misspelled domain. I also bought an expired domain with some relevant backlinks. I intend to create a simple page for that domain and add a link to my main site. Which of those two approaches are best from SEO point of view? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usabiliTEST_ux1 -
Want to get site on same sub-folder but move CMS
Hi guys, We currently have a site which uses WordPress & attached to it is a Woocommerce for its store. We want to just move the store to shopify, but keep the blog on wordpress. We also want to keep the same URL structure for the store the same e.g. www.website.com/store (woocommerce) to www.website.com/store (shopify) Is this even possible? Can you point a domain to two separate servers (servers – one for wordpress, one on shopify) at the same time? This is SEO related as we want to preserve the authority as a sub-folder. See this: https://inbound.org/blog/the-sub-domain-vs-sub-directory-seo-debate-explained-in-one-flow-chart Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cerednicenko0 -
Multiple 301 Redirect Query
Hello all, I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues. I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago. We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's. Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Multiple 301 redirects for a HTTPS URL. Good or bad?
I'm working on an ecommerce website that has a few snags and issues with it's coding. They're using https, and when you access the website through domain.com, theres a 301 redirect to http://www.domain.com and then this, in turn, redirected to https://www.domain.com. Would this have a deterimental effect or is that considered the best way to do it. Have the website redirect to http and then all http access is redirected to the https URL? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Better to have one subdomain or multiple subdomains?
We have quite a bit of content we are considering subdomaining. There are about 13 topic centers that could deserve their own subdomain, but there are about 2000 original articles that we also want to subdomain. We are considering a) putting the 13 centers (i.e. babies.domain.com, acne.domain.com, etc) and the 3000 articles (on a variety of topics) on one subdomain b) putting the 13 centers on their own subdomain and the remaining 3000 articles on their own subdomain as well (14 subdomains total) What do you think is the best solution and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Cross Sub Domain Canonical Links
I currently have 1 website, but am planning on dividing it into sub-domains specific to geographic locations such as xxx.co.uk, xxx.it, xxx.es, etc... We are working on creating original content for the sub-sites, however upon launch many will be duplicate pages. Is there a problem with cross sub-domain canonical links? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)
Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands. An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this) We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend. Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities. Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains. Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site: [Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com] The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3: Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.' Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage0 -
Are sites that leave out www from domain at a disadvantage to domains with www in url
I know this has been discussed but was wondering what would be the best approach from an SEO perspective. I quite like the idea of setting up websites with domains without www but always worry that setting up domains without www has a disadvantage because user are use to referring to sites with the www included. Thus one of my fears are that users would link back using www version which will mean even if you do a 301 redirect that some of the link juice would be lost. I know some famous sites have used this convention such as http://searchenginewatch.com/ so think it would be possible but still concerned that for new sites it would be better to rather stick to conventions. What are your opinions about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SABest0