Too many 301 redirects?
-
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
301 redirecting entire identical sites to different pages sounds extremely dodgy, just to the homepage was bad enough.
-
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?
-
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
-
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
-
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?
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
-
Redirects Being Removed...
Hi We have a team in France who deal with the backend of the site, only problem is it's not always SEO friendly. I have lots of 404's showing in webmaster tools and I know some of them have previously had redirects. If we update a URL on the site, any links pointing to it on the website are updated straight away to point to the most up to date URL - so the user doesn't have to go through a redirect. However, the team would see this as the redirect not being 'used' after about 30 days and remove it from the database - so this URL no longer has any redirects pointing to it. My question is, surely this is bad for SEO? However I'm a little unsure as they aren't actually going through the redirect. But somewhere in cyber space the authority of this page must drop? Any advice is welcome 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Switching from HTTP to HTTPS: 301 redirect or keep both & rel canonical?
Hey Mozzers, I'll be moving several sites from HTTP to HTTPS in the coming weeks (same brand, multiple ccTLDs). We'll start on a low traffic site and test it for 2-4 weeks to see the impact before rolling out across all 8 sites. Ideally, I'd like to simply 301 redirect the HTTP version page to the HTTPS version of the page (to get that potential SEO rankings boost). However, I'm concerned about the potential drop in rankings, links and traffic. I'm thinking of alternative ways and so instead of the 301 redirect approach, I would keep both sites live and accessible, and then add rel canonical on the HTTPS pages to point towards HTTP so that Google keeps the current pages/ links/ indexed as they are today (in this case, HTTPS is more UX than for SEO). Has anyone tried the rel canonical approach, and if so, what were the results? Do you recommend it? Also, for those who have implemented HTTPS, how long did it take for Google to index those pages over the older HTTP pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steven_Macdonald0 -
What to keep in mind: to 301 redirect every page in an entire online store
Hello, I've got to put a 301 redirect on every page in an entire online store. We're moving to a better premade cart. Who has experience with this? How do I not lose traffic, if that is possible? What do I need to keep in mind? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Should i redirect this page?
Hi I have the following 2 pages: http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Funeral-Planning.aspx http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Funeral-Planning/Funeral-Plans.aspx My dilema is that google sees the words "funeral planning" & "funeral plans" as the same thing, which might explain why the "funeral plan" page is not ranked v well. My issue is that the "funeral planning" page is at category level and introduces the wider subject of funeral planning, which isnt just funeral plans, so if i 301 my "funeral plan" page i will have no where to talk about funeral plans. My question is, Is the "funeral plan" page not ranked v well because of this or do i just need better optimisation of the funeral plan page so google is clear which is the key focus for each page? Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
301 Redirect and Webmaster Central
I've been working on removing canonical issues. My host is Apache. Is this the correct code for my htaccess? RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spkcp111
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^luckygemstones.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] SECOND!!! I have two websites under Google's Webmaster Central; http://luckygemstones.com which gets NO 404 soft errors... AND http://www.luckygemstones.com which has 247 soft 404 errors... I think I should DELETE the http://luckygemstones.com site from Webmaster Central--the 301 redirect handles the"www" thing. Is this correct? I hate to hose things (even worse?) Help! Kathleen0 -
301 redirect Actinic HTML pages to ASP. Achievable?
Hi - I'm hoping someone can help me resolve an issue in relation to setting up 301 redirects. The client to whom I provide SEO services is being told by his developers that setting up 301 redirects is not achievable from old HTML pages to his new site running on a Windows server. My feeling is that it should be fine, and I have found documentation online that seems to support this, however I'm no developer, certainly no server admin, so I was wondering if anyone could advise me? Is it feasible to set up 301 redirects from Actinic sites (HTML pages) to a new site in NOP commerce running on a Windows server (ASP pages). Thank you for your help! Iain
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wynyard0 -
Login redirect 302
Ok - anyone knows what to do with the temporary redirect to the login page? In our e-commerce system we have a checkout page, which requires user to be logged in - if they are not, we redirect them to the login page using simple php header("Locaiton: url"). This however has been found as a Warning as it's a temporary redirect. I can't really put there permanent redirect for obvious reasons so if someone could give me some clue on this situation that would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coremediadesign0 -
Open Site Explorer not Seeing 301 Redirect to non-www
I cannot figure out why open site explorer doesn't see that when you go to http://preferredroofingkc.net/ it redirects to http://www.preferredroofingkc.net/ This is a wordpress installation that uses a cannonical url http://www.preferredroofingkc.net/ The HTACCESS file also has a 301 redirect as follows: RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^preferredroofingkc.net [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.preferredroofingkc.net/$1 [L,R=301] But, open site explorer still shows these sites separately without alerting that there is a 301 redirect.0