Using RewriteRule - SEO Implications
-
Hi There,
My client has a website (www.activeadventures.com) which they relaunched in April 2013. The company sells inbound tourism trips to New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. Previously, the websites for these destinations were on their own domains (activenewzealand.com, activehimalayas.com, activesouthamerica.com).
With the launch of the new website those domains were all retired (but had 301 redirects put into place to the new site), and moved into sub directories of the activeadventures.com domain (eg: activeadventures.com/new-zealand).
There has been no indication that this strategy has improved organic search results (based on analytics) and in my opinion I believe that having this structure has been detrimental to their results. My opinion is based off the following:
- Visitors to the websites are coming into the site with a specific destination in mind that they want to travel to. Thus... having the destination in the URL I believe provides more immediate relevancy and should result in a higher CTR.
- I also feel that having the sites on their own URL's will provide a more concentrated theme for the destination based search phrases.
The new site is a custom Joomla build and I want to find the easiest way to keep the current Joomla set up AND move the country specific sections of the site back onto their original URL's.
It seems on the face of it that the easiest way to get this done is to use the htaccess file and use "RewriteRule" to push all the relevant pages back onto their original domains. Obviously we will ensure we also cover off pointing the existing 301's from the new site and the old sites to this new structure.
My question is, are their any potential negative SEO implications of using the RewriteRule in the htaccess file to achieve this?
Many thanks in advance.
Kind Regards
Conrad Cranfield -
you need to tell people where you can take them in the section above the fold in your website. I would have a very large text that is clickable stating
We give guided tours to then allow people to click on their destination of choice.
New Zealand,
South America
Himalayas
If you want to get clients that are in the United States for instance, and you use a New Zealand TLD you will be unable to geo-target in Google Webmaster tools therefore it will rank better in New Zealand than the states.
Moosa
is right on the money asking about what you did prior to changing your domain.
Then you converted everything to one site did you use a tool similar to screaming frog let you 301 redirect all the pages perfectly to their new domain?
Did you tell Google you are moving domains in all 3 instances?
Try using screaming frog with this guide http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide
this post as well should be of help to you.
http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch
&
http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic
I hope this is of some help,
sincerely,
Thomas
PS if the photograph is too small use this link
-
I don’t see any negative SEO effect with what you have explained here but just to tell you what I have encountered with my client’s website in the past!
When working with .htaccess file try to use it carefully because this can even lead to a big disaster if something gone wrong! (Just sharing my experience).
Also, plan the redirections prior to the switch because without it you might see a big drop in traffic obviously shifting URL will hit you a bit in rankings and traffic but that will be mostly temporary.
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
-
Multiregional SEO - different website designs
Hello, when it comes to location & language targeting, is it possible to have different website page designs for their respective regions? So let's say we have one design for www.example.com/product-1 and a completely different design for www.example.com/us/product-1? Our branding is different for the US so would ideally like to use specific US designs for US pages. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | SEOCT0 -
The use of Markup language
Hi, We were thinking of adding markup language to our site. We have been reading about it to understand the actual benefits of doing so (we have seen many brands are not using it, including moz.com). So I have two questions: 1- Would you recommend using it for our site? www.memoq.com 2- If yes, would it be better to create a snippet of code for our home page as an "organization" and then different snippets for our product pages as "products". Looking forward to your comments,
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Should I use the Google disavow tool?
Hi I'm a bit new to SEO and am looking for some guidance. Although there is no indication in Webmaster tools that my site is being penalised for bad links, I have noticed that I have over 200 spam links for "Pay Day Loans" pointing to my site. (This was due to a hack on my site several years ago). So my question is two fold. Firstly, is it normal to have spammy links pointing to your site and secondly, should I bother to do anything about it? I did some research into the Disavow tool in Webmaster tools wonder I should use it to block all these links. Thanks
Technical SEO | | hotchilidamo0 -
Curious about quick SEO results showing up...
Recently, I did a couple of major SEO mods on our e-commerce site. Here's what I did: A. No-indexed hundreds of thousands of Search Results pages. B. Changed the URL structure for the better of our product pages. I literally made these changes about 3 weeks ago and I am seeing some very interesting results in such a short period of time. Here is one example. My product pages increased impressions by about 20% or so, but the real crazy thing is the increase in click through rate on my product pages. All of a sudden I am getting about a 95% clickthrough rate!??!?! Previously I was getting around 58%. Any ideas on this? Is it a normal fluctuation that goes away? Or can I expect it to stay or even improve? Thanks! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Ajax, SEO and Angular
Hi all! We have a platform which includes a housing area which is created by ajax and angular. You can see a sample here:
Technical SEO | | Eurasmus.com
eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-antwerp/student-room-accommodation It has a static version under which shows the first 18 rooms, the rest are generated by angular.
Also this static version has a dynamic text with around 400 characters. Is this the right procedure?
How would you suggest to do it?0 -
Coming soon SEO
Hi, I was wondering what is the best practice to redirect all the links juice by redirecting all the pages of your website to a coming soon page. The coming soon page will point to the domain.com, not to a subfolder. Should I move the entire website to a subfolder and redirect this folder to the coming soon page? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Domain name SEO
I would like to hear your opinion about which between robotics.kawasaki.com and www.kawasakirobotics.com is more effective for SEO of keyword robotics and kawasaki. We have been using kawasaki.com domain name for more than 15 years.
Technical SEO | | Iwashima0 -
Should I use www. or not in my main URL?
I have backlinks coming into my homepage, which has both a www. URL and one that's merely http://mysite.com. Which is the preferred URL for best optimization for search engines and how do I find this out?
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0