When should you redirect a domain completely?
-
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects).
So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
-
I've been seeing a fairly long time for Google to catch up with 301s and pass along the link juice....a couple of months. Consensus is that something around 90-95% of the link juice passes through a 301. There's some talk about 301s not passing link juice forever, although I haven't heard any evidence of exactly how long that might be, but seems like it would be in the 1-2 year range at least. Just my opinion & recollection of a whole bunch of other people's opinions though :-).
-
Follow up question - if redirecting a domain completely, how much would doing so affect the rankings? I'm assuming it will take some time for the new domain to catch up to where the old domain was, but how long might that be? And would the links for the old domain still count?
-
Thank you guys, these were very helpful!
-
If I would be at your place, I would have checked the links that are pointing to the old URL and see if the links quality is good and will help the new domain, I would have done the page level 301 redirection. If for some reason the links are not helpful for the new website, I would have done the page level redirection until the old pages get removed from the Google index and new pages get crawled.
Once this happened, I would have reduced the redirections to only one that is domain level redirection and this is to let the audience move to the new website.
P.S: Using Change of Address Idea by Mike King sounds powerful to me!
-
If there are good links out there pointing to the old site, then killing the old site (and its 301s) will throw away that link juice.
If hosting costs are an issue, simply make DNS changes to point the old site at your new servers, then create a little shell of a site on the new servers for the old domain, and 301 redirect just as you are doing today.
There's some thought that 301'ed links don't carry juice forever, but I don't know that I've ever seen that proven out. Regardless, as long as there are real users occasionally landing on those other sites with the old links, you'd want them to end up on the right pages on your new site if they click those old links...and without that 301, they're SOL.
-
You should fill out a Change of Address in Webmaster Tools as well and then confirm that all of the old URLs are out of the index. The redirects however should remain in place as long as you have links pointing from the old site.
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
-
Using a Reverse Proxy and 301 redirect to appear Sub Domain as Sub Directory - what are the SEO Risks?
We’re in process to move WordPress blog URLs from subdomains to sub-directory. We aren’t moving blog physically, but using reverse proxy and 301 redirection to do this. Blog subdomain URL is https://blog.example.com/ and destination sub-directory URL is https://www.example.com/blog/ Our main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL site. This is on Windows server. Due to technical reasons, we can’t physically move our WordPress blog to the main website. Following is our Technical Setup Setup a reverse proxy at https://www.example.com/blog/ pointing to https://blog.example.com/ Use a 301 redirection from https://blog.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/blog/ with an exception if a traffic is coming from main WWW domain then it won’t redirect. Thus, we can eliminate infinite loop. Change all absolute URLs to relative URLs on blog Change the sitemap URL from https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml to https://www.example.com/blog/sitemap.xml and update all URLs mentioned within the sitemap. SEO Risk Evaluation We have individual GA Tracking ID and individual Google Search Console Properties for main website and blog. We will not merge them. Keep them separate as they are. Keeping this in mind, I am evaluating SEO Risks factors Right now when we receive traffic from main website to blog (or vice versa) then it is considered as referral traffic and new cookies are set for Google Analytics. What’s going to happen when its on the same domain? Which type of settings change should I do in Blog’s Google Search Console? (A). Do I need to request “Change of Address” in the Blog’s search console property? (B). Should I re-submit the sitemap? Do I need to re-submit the blog sitemap from the https://www.example.com/ Google Search Console Property? Main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL website, and blog is all about content. So does that impact SEO? Will this dilute SEO link juice or impact on the main website ranking because following are the key SEO Metrices. (A). Main website’s Avg Session Duration is about 10 minutes and bounce rate is around 30% (B). Blog’s Avg Session Duration is 33 seconds and bounce rate is over 92%
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshibhargav_200 -
Flip-Flopping domains - 301 redirect question
We have a client who has had the following domain setup for some time: longdomain.com 301 -> shortdomain.com Now, they would like to go back to the original longdomain.com, and will have the following setup: shortdomain.com 301 -> longdomain.com Obviously, I'm concerned about redirect loops cached in the browser. I plan to have the 301's from longdomain.com changed over to 302's for two weeks ahead of the change, so that hopefully when the change happens, browsers and search engines are more ready to respond. I also plan to establish rel=canonical on the longdomain.com pages after the switch. Is there anything else you'd recommend to help with the changeover? Should we plan for an intermediary period were both domains are serving the content, so that the redirects can be purged, before being re-established the other direction? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bit-Wizards0 -
Lower quality new domain link vs higher quality repeat domain link
First time poster here with a dilemma that head scratching and spreadsheets can't solve! I'm trying to work out whether to focus on getting links from new domains or to nurture relationships with the bigger sites in our business and get more links. Of the two links below which does the community here think would be more valuable a signal to Google? Both would be links from within relevant text/post copy. Link 1. Site DA 30. No links currently from this domain. Link 2. Site DA 60. Many links over last 12 months already from this domain. I suspect link 1 but given the enormous disparity in ranking power am I correct?! Thanks for any considered opinions out there! Matthew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
How do you raise domain authority?
Hey guys, hoping you can help me out here. I've been tasked with raising several sites' domain authority to a level of 30. Right now, many of them are hovering around 20. Three weeks into this project and our numbers have dropped 1-2 points on average but I don't think our efforts would reflect that this quickly. From what I've read online, a good strategy is guest posting on relevant sites and collecting links from sites with higher DAs. I've also read at least one Moz article about this potentially being ineffective. I've read some of the related posts but they seem mostly dated and the answers didn't seem to help me. Hoping someone with some experience with this can help me out, I appreciate it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DustinAB0 -
How do you find all of your 301 redirects?
I would like a full list of 301 redirects that we have on our site. Is there a way to export it? I tried Bing Webmaster tools and the list was incomplete. We use IIS. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
301 redirect
Hi there, I have some good links pointing to one of my web pages at the moment, however we are just about to launch a new design with new URL structure and I am clear that I need to do a 301 redirect on the URL to the new URL. However, do I keep the old URL live forever? or can I remove it after a while? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Redirection - Seo trick?
Hi, After analyzing the site I found several Redirections of exact match domains. With different domain name extensions. Is Seo trick? Is the second website which i fond that is using this technique. Can anyone gives more details? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Redirect gateway domain to main domain?
We have following scenario: Our main website - www.esedirect.co.uk which gets a 1800 visits a day with around half of those from organic search. It's been around since 2004. Our original website - www.ese.co.uk which gets around 30 visits a day and really is nothing more than a doorway page with links to the above site and couple of other sites that belong to the same company. This is an old domain that's had content since 1997 and has good domain authority with some good links. We are considering doing a 301 redirect from www.ese.co.co.uk to www.esedirect.co.uk to redirect the link juice. I welcome opinions to any possible negative effects this could give and how beneficial doing this will be. Thanks, Lee
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ese0