Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Too many 301 redirects?

    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.

    Too many 301 redirects?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    9
    9068
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Stew222
      Stew222 last edited by

      Hey,

      My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website.  These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic.

      I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website?  If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content?

      For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site:

      • 1099softwarepro.com
      • 1099softwarepro.info
      • 1099softwarepro.net
      • 1099softwarepro.biz
      • 1099softwareprofessionals.com
      • 1099softwareprofessionals.info
      • ...you get the point
      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Everett
        Everett @Stew222 last edited by

        Michael I don't think you will get anymore benefit from a 301 than you're getting from the cross-domain rel canonical tags that are already in place.

        However, I think the fact that you already have these cross-domain rel canonical tags i place, and that the content is identical, will make it much less likely that 301 redirecting those domains would be seen as any type of spam.

        If it were me, just so all of my users were on the same domain - and to keep the problem from getting worse over time - I would go ahead and 301 redirect the other domains, but on a page-to-page basis. In other words, each page would link directly to the page it is currently referencing as the rel canonical. This would be much better than redirecting them all to a single landing page, and would send signal that is consistent with the current one you are sending via the cross domain rel canonical.

        You might try this one domain at a time. Let the dust settle on that domain and, if all goes well, move on to the next. It may take a year to complete the project, but it might be the safest way to go.

        Alternatively, you could just continue to leave the other sites up with the cross domain rel canonical tag - but the problem is likely to just worsen over time as more people link to the other domains, and they develop their own sources of traffic via direct links, social, bookmarks, etc... outside of the SERPs.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • BlueprintMarketing
          BlueprintMarketing last edited by

          PS you have a decent thing going with your links already and you are not in a bad spot for page rank.

          | Page Authority (PA) | 53 | Domain Authority (DA) | -- | 46 |
          | MozRank (mR) | 5.94 | Domain MozRank (DmR) | 4.81 | 4.72 |
          | MozTrust (mT) | 5.83 | Domain MozTrust (DmT) | 4.51 | 4.30 |
          | Total Links | 1,635 | Total Links | 15,333 | 52,916 |
          | External Followed Links | 1,589 | External Followed Links | 10,939 | 12,132 |
          | Internal Followed Links | 39 | Linking Root Domains | 566 | 701 |
          | Linking Root Domains | 399

          |

          I would not jeopardize you have that's my $.02.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • BlueprintMarketing
            BlueprintMarketing @Stew222 last edited by

            301 redirecting is not bad at all in itself.

            It is simply a method of redirecting links. However because of the quantity of exact match sites I believe you can only put yourself in danger Google is getting and more aggressive every day I would rather sleep soundly if I were you or myself obviously. And not redirect possibly spamish websites to my main site where I do business.

            If this was not regarding 500 duplicate sites I would say go for it

            unfortunately I believe that you will open yourself up for a possible penalty from Google.

            The immense amount of duplicate or identical content that I don't know if you use Google Webmaster tools am assuming that you do but do have it set up for all 500 websites?

            That will tell you if you have a penalty.

            My thinking on this is you created a bunch of identical websites 500 of them. Whenever you make large changes to a website Google reevaluates it looks at it.

            In my opinion by 301 redirecting 500 sites page 2 page or even to homepage you're just asking for a possible Extremely bad penalty or you might get away with it I don't know but if it were me I would not do it.

            The real question is what is the chief site worth?

            would you be okay with it being penalized because you 301 redirected all of the sites?

            if the answer is this is a valuable website to me I would not risk it.

            The problem is you did something that is very far into the black hat arena I'm not judging however you want to show Google you're not going to continue to try to take advantage of any part of the search engine in order to gain rank when the parts that your talking about our exact match duplicate content that you created.

            I honestly would kill the content on the sites than 302 redirect them if you want to have the traffic from the links.

            What you said about a 301 is pretty much where the money however you're going to open yourself up to a possible penalty or even removal from Google's index which is what happens with most penalties.

            It's up to you however I would not do it.

            Best of luck to you,

            Thomas

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Alex-Harford
              Alex-Harford @Stew222 last edited by

              301 redirecting entire identical sites to different pages sounds extremely dodgy, just to the homepage was bad enough. 😉

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Stew222
                Stew222 @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                So if 301 redirecting all of them is seen as negative, what is the best way to consolidate all of these sites?  I thought the purpose of a 301 redirect was to permanently transfer traffic from one site to another - which would mean that a 301 redirect would be the ideal method for consolidating multiple versions of an identical site.

                In essence, is there a way to gain at least some advantage from the links that these sites of garnered over time?

                BlueprintMarketing Everett 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • BlueprintMarketing
                  BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                  I agree with Alex on a lot of it

                  however 500 of the same website with identical content is extremely black hat

                  it would depend on how much traffic is coming from these domains? Which one of them is performing the best? There must surely be a standout hopefully if it's not a lot of traffic I would delete the content on the other domains and pray that Google is not going to penalize you. By 301 redirecting any of those sites to your current chief site used and only to lose quite a bit from Google this is something that will happen if you are using the same hosting providers or not they will consider this less than good

                  Stew222 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • Stew222
                    Stew222 @Alex-Harford last edited by

                    Hey,

                    I would be redirecting each entire site to a specific page on my chief website.  Admittedly, this means that there is some precision lost because each site is a copy of the chief site but all the affiliated pages on a copy link to only one landing page on the chief site.  For instance:

                    • www.1099softwarepro.com and all affiliated pages would redirect to www.1099pro.com/software.asp
                    • www.W2Professionals.com and all affiliated pages would redirect to www.1099pro.com/prodw2pro.asp
                    Alex-Harford 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • Alex-Harford
                      Alex-Harford last edited by

                      In 2011 Matt Cutts said there isn't a limit. 500-600 sounds A LOT. If I was in this situation I'd just 301 the domains that have the most traffic and best links.

                      Are you redirecting each page on the other websites to the matching page on the chief website?

                      Stew222 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • 1 / 1
                      • First post
                        Last post

                      Got a burning SEO question?

                      Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                      Start my free trial


                      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.

                      • See all categories

                      Related Questions

                      • Caffeine_Marketing

                        We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version?

                        We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version? Thant way all forms of the website are pointing to one version?

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing
                        0
                      • Kahuna_Charles

                        Someone redirected his website to ours

                        Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content  but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us?  Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles
                        1
                      • viatrading1

                        Several 301 Redirects to Same Page

                        Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
                        e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
                        0
                      • Chris_Bishop

                        301 redirect subdirectory to new domain

                        I'm planning on using 301 redirects to spin out a subdirectory of my current website to be its own separate domain. For instance, I currently have a website www.website.com and my writers write tech news at www.website.com/news. Now I want to 301 redirect www.website.com/news to www.technews.com. Will this have any negative impact on SEO? What are some steps that I can take to minimize these impacts?

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Bishop
                        1
                      • kimmiedawn

                        Can an incorrect 301 redirect or .htaccess code cause 500 errors?

                        Google Webmaster Tools is showing the following message: _Googlebot couldn't access the contents of this URL because the server had an internal error when trying to process the request. These errors tend to be with the server itself, not with the request.  _ Before I contact the person who manages the server and hosting (essentially asking if the error is on his end) is there a chance I could have created an issue with an incorrect 301 redirect or other code added to .htaccess incorrectly? Here is the 301 redirect code I am using in .htaccess: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/.]+/)*(index.html|default.asp)\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(([^/.]+/)*)(index|default) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www.example.com)?$ [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] Could adding the following code after that in the .htaccess potentially cause any issues? BEGIN EXPIRES <ifmodule mod_expires.c="">ExpiresActive On
                        ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 days"
                        ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 week"
                        ExpiresByType text/plain "access plus 1 month"
                        ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
                        ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
                        ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
                        ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
                        ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 week"
                        ExpiresByType application/x-icon "access plus 1 year"</ifmodule> END EXPIRES (Edit) I'd like to add that there is a Wordpress blog on the site too at www.example.com/blog with the following code in it's .htaccess: BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
                        RewriteBase /blog/
                        RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
                        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
                        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
                        RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Thanks

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn
                        0
                      • SMG-Texas

                        301 Redirect of subdomain?

                        Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community.  I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them?  I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself.  If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense.  Any thoughts are appreciated.  Thanks for your time.

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas
                        0
                      • SEOTGT

                        301 or 302 Redirects to Mobile Site

                        When it's detected that a mobile device is accessing the site it has the ability to redirect from www.example.com to m.example.com. Does it make more sense to employ a 301 or 302 redirect here? Google says a 301 but does not explain why (although usually I stick to "when in doubt, 301") . It seems like a 302 would prevent passing link juice to the mobile site and having mobile-optimized results also showing up in Google's index. What is the preference here?

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTGT
                        0
                      • pbhatt

                        301 Redirects After Company Acquisition

                        We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!

                        Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt
                        1

                      Get started with Moz Pro!

                      Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                      Start my free trial
                      Products
                      • Moz Pro
                      • Moz Local
                      • Moz API
                      • Moz Data
                      • STAT
                      • Product Updates
                      Moz Solutions
                      • SMB Solutions
                      • Agency Solutions
                      • Enterprise Solutions
                      • Digital Marketers
                      Free SEO Tools
                      • Domain Authority Checker
                      • Link Explorer
                      • Keyword Explorer
                      • Competitive Research
                      • Brand Authority Checker
                      • Local Citation Checker
                      • MozBar Extension
                      • MozCast
                      Resources
                      • Blog
                      • SEO Learning Center
                      • Help Hub
                      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                      • How-to Guides
                      • Moz Academy
                      • API Docs
                      About Moz
                      • About
                      • Team
                      • Careers
                      • Contact
                      Why Moz
                      • Case Studies
                      • Testimonials
                      Get Involved
                      • Become an Affiliate
                      • MozCon
                      • Webinars
                      • Practical Marketer Series
                      • MozPod
                      Connect with us

                      Contact the Help team

                      Join our newsletter
                      Moz logo
                      © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                      • Accessibility
                      • Terms of Use
                      • Privacy

                      Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.