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.
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?
-
Hi Guys,
I know this topic's a little old but my e-commerce website is basically at the verge of undergoing the same changes, and I've got a lot of ranking-based concerns here.
Our website ist called absinthes.com. It's available in 3 languages, so we created sub directories absinthes.com/de and absinthes.com/fr. The English version basically is always the default version when visiting absinthes.com.
For various reasons, our company decided to split absinthes.com into 3 separate shops: absinthes.com for English, absinthes.fr for French, and absinthes.de for German.
Now here's where I start getting worried: We're moving contents from a subdirectory (absinthes.com/de) via 301 page-by-page redirects to this new domain, absinthes.de. Am I supposed to let Google through Search Console know about this move, or will it think the entire site (absinthes.com, absinthes.com/fr) has then moved to absinthes.de?
Is it enough to put rel=canonical tags and 301 redirects in place to make sure we're not losing any of our rankings on both ends?
Would really appreciate your quick opinion on this, thanks so much!
-
Hi Chris,
Happy to be of help.
Thomas
-
Thanks for the thorough response Thomas!
-
Thank you Moosa,
I just took a look at where www.technews.com links to and that gave me the vastly more insight to what they are trying to accomplish and makes me believe that they will survive without the tech section
unfortunately, the non-www.version takes you to a dead page.
I would not worry too much about losing page rank based on the site it links to most likely being the new site you are speaking of I doubt this is a secret because you showed us the domain that points to it. of course I will not put that URL on here out of respect for you but I have placed the URL you mentioned above so people will know what you are referring to.
However, if you are going to go through with this I would place quality content on technews.com and take away the 301 redirect that points back to the main news site
I would then do something similar to what Moz did when they moved from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com they made http://moz.com/rand/ a live site that contained high-quality unique content in order to warm up the audience to the domain as well as Google
only if you are going to splice these things into two different sites would I go ahead and move your technology information over to technews.com domain and place all that content on it.
I would also want to inform your current readers of exactly what is going to occur.
In less you are going to really start going crazy on technology and have an entire business plan based around it which I am pretty sure you do if you are planning on doing this.
Then I would move forward with changing the tech section of your current site to become the beginning of technews.com ( I have made this a live link to where the www. version of it links so people can be of better help by under understanding the scale of this change.)
Unfortunately, any traffic, links, social media approvals, page rank and everything that is currently helping you rank with your news technology section will disappear. as soon as Google crawls the site and notices the 301 redirects.
Because you are not changing domains like when SEOmoz.org became Moz.com it is very unique that this type of thing occurs. Though I can understand now why you would want to do it.
I would recommend taking a tool like http://deepcrawl.co.uk/ and having it run a universal index on your current news site the reason I recommend Deep Crawl is I have used it with great success on extremely large sites over 1 million URI's it has the ability to scale Because it is not based on how much your local workstation or desktop has for RAM I believe it is hosted on AWS regardless because it is hosted it allows it to process the data on huge sites I usedit on the one Fortune 500 that I cannot name however it did a fantastic job.
if you read the information on this site you will see just how capable and indispensable tool like this is when making changes to a site a as large as your news site
http://deepcrawl.co.uk/features/advanced-processing
Another tool you should not be without my opinion is Screaming Frog SEO Spider though for the amount of pages that you will need to crawl you will need a workstation with a lot of RAM as it does many of the same things deep crawl does however requires you to install it on your local workstation or desktop it can be installed on Mac, PC and Linux though I have placed it on a Verizon Terremark server running Ubuntu with 24 gigs of RAM with a lot of success there are other things you will want it around for checking. I would purchase the Pro version Of
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
I would then use a combination of Moz http://moz.com/researchtools/ose , https://ahrefs.com/ , http://www.majesticseo.com/ & Google Webmaster tools or www.google.com/webmasters/ to look at the back links pointing to technology.
http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic
http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105?
http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic
http://builtvisible.com/domain-migration/
http://builtvisible.com/surviving-seo-site-migration/
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067216/The-10-Step-Site-Migration-Process
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html
a larger version of the photo below is right here
http://www.aleydasolis.com/images/seo-website-domain-migration.gif
I would follow the directions that are laid out in the URLs below because making a mistake when doing this will be costly to your new satellite business.
Hosting your new site on a server that you trust to have the capability to host it protect it is paramount to it surviving
Peek Hosting http://www.peakhosting.com/
Terremark http://www.terremark.com/
FireHost http://www.firehost.com/
To gain speed and reliability I would recommend not using the current DNS setup
ns-1027.awsdns-00.org
pdns6.ultradns.co.uksimply because AWS route 53 or ns-1027.awsdns-00.org depends on both DynECT Dyn.com & UltraDNS http://www.neustar.biz/services/dns-services is to keep itself alive and meaning if in the extremely unlikely instance of both of them going down you are out of luck.
However, your current setup depends on a secondary DNS that depends on your primary DNS being up I hope that makes sense.
I would simply do what many other companies that do not want down time and need very fast name servers do use DynECT along with UltraDNS or combine DynECT with EdgeCast Route DNS
Amazon.com is not backed up by AWS Route 53 as you can see below it is a combination of DynECT & UltraDNS two keep your site from having issues so it is not a good
use
ns1.p1.dynect.net & ns1.edgecastdns.net
or
ns1.p1.dynect.net & pdns1.ultradns.net
or just ns1.p1.dynect.net
UltraDNS had a bout of downtime less than a month ago on salesforce
Dyn has never been down ever look At the Way, Amazon configures their server DNS.
http://who.is/whois/amazon.com
Name Server: ns4.p31.dynect.net
Name Server: pdns6.ultradns.co.uk
Name Server: pdns1.ultradns.net
Name Server: ns3.p31.dynect.net
Name Server: ns2.p31.dynect.net
Name Server: ns1.p31.dynect.net
http://who.is/whois/technews.com
Name Server: pdns3.ultradns.org
Name Server: pdns1.ultradns.net
Name Server: pdns5.ultradns.info
Name Server: pdns2.ultradns.net
Name Server: pdns6.ultradns.co.uk
Name Server: pdns4.ultradns.org
Sincerely,
Thomas
PS large version of the photograph below his right here http://imgur.com/X3AiQNi.gif
-
Very Detailed answer y Thomas!!
If I have the similar kind of situation the first thing I would do is to audit the current website and will make sure the area that I am going to redirect have what kind of links and what impact they are producing to the website whole website.
If the section, I want to redirect have a major impact on rankings, now I have to make a decision. Can I afford a dip in ranking? And how users will react and respond to the new separate website.
I will recommend you to do your analysis and as there not much in your hand make sure what you want to achieve and what you can put at risk, make a back -up plan and start doing it.
Hope this helps!!
-
Some of the negative things that will happen to your current site include losing whatever page rank your current links that will be redirected contained.
When you 301 redirect a link to another site that is off of a subfolder it will impact your entire site's ability to rank if those 301s were helping you at all.
Are you going to continue to operate the first site as it was?
I would have to see the page rank of the site how many links you have that you are talking about redirecting and much more to actually tell you whether or not it is worth
harming their old site
it may not be worth it and it might be best to simply move the /news content and not redirect the pages themselves. To technews.com
There is not much that you can really do to in the impact of losing links of value to your current site except for build new exceptional content that gains the same quality and amount of links that you will be redirecting to the other site.
Also remember you will be losing any social media likes thumbs up's whatever when you 301 redirect.
I assume the first domain has nothing to do with tech news that is why you are splicing it off?
I would choose between creating a new site with the old site's content and of course deleting that content has to not have duplicate content because remember whichever domain has the highest page rank wins meaning your existing domain if it has a page rank will take away the technews.com site's ability to rank for that content. I would place information telling somebody that this page is now able to be found at technews.com/what-ever-the-pages
I hope you know not to just 301 redirect /news to the new domains homepage and think that will be the best way of doing things because it will not. Redirects are done page by page meaning if you had a news/opinions/ you could place it in technews.com/opinions/
That would more or less help the new site more than it would the old site.
If I could see the domain of the first site if you want to send it to me via private message I am more than happy to look at it that way if you are uncomfortable showing it in the form.
I hope this is of help,
Thomas
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
-
Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?
Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaiaslastlaugh0 -
301 redirect hops from non-https and www
It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop. It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain. The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not In which case, you could have: Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page. Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud0 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
Primary Domain or Redirect?
We are starting a new travel guide for a resort town. I have bought an expired domain with decent related links and PR (which seems to have survived the transfer (4 months ago). Beofre we launch the new site I am trying to decide if we should use this expired domain as the primary URL for the new site or just do a permanent redirect and buy a new domain that better matches the theme of the site. I am obviously concerned with starting from scatch with a new domain. I am confident we can build some good rellevant links in a short time but this space is very competetive. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Locals0 -
Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
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 | | SEOTGT0 -
Buying an existing domain with higher ranks for redirecting
I've recently came across one of my competitors who's looking to sell their domain. Now they currently rank higher than my primary site for a few keywords we are targeting. Would it be wise to buy the domain and do a name server change over to my primary domain? Would it even help boost ranks for the keywords they rank higher for? Or will the link juice be minimal? Any thoughts would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | upick-1623910