Domain Forwarding
-
I have a client who previously registered 20 unique domain names that tied to their company name and services. They use all of these domains to forward to their main website to try and capture additional traffic. Would you suggest that we remove all of the domains by 301 redirecting them all the the main website? I am trying to find a good article that shows the implications on SEO by using many domains that forward to a main website. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
-
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down?
When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems and improve user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking power.
When done wrong, the results can be disastrous.
In the past year, because Google cracked down hard on low quality links, the potential damage from 301 mistakes increased dramatically. There's also evidence that Google has slightly changed how they handle non-relevant redirects, which makes proper implementation more important than ever.
<center>
From Dr. Pete's post - An SEO's Guide to HTTP Status Codes
</center>
Semantic relevance 101: anatomy of a "perfect" redirect
A perfect 301 redirect works as a simple “change of address” for your content. Ideally, this means everything about the page except the URL stays the same including content, title tag, images, and layout.
When done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a 301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity.
The new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity, but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link juice.
For example, if you have a page about “labrador,” then redirecting to a page about “dogs” makes sense, but redirecting to a page about “tacos” does not.
<center></center>
301 redirecting everything to the home page
Savvy SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s, or soft 404s at best.
This means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity at all.
While it’s difficult to prove exactly how search engines handle mass home page redirects, it’s fair to say that any time you 301 a large number of pages to a single questionably relevant URL, you shouldn’t expect those redirects to significantly boost your SEO efforts.
<center></center>
**Better alternative: **When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.
If the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410 status code.
-
Thank you very much Chris! That was my assumption but I wanted to make sure before making the updates.
-
Oh, so there's no content on those other domains? Then 301 them. Simple as that.
-
All of the domains seem to cloak the URL in the browser and then add a "register.com" banner at the bottom of the page. So the browser will show www.abc.com no matter which page you navigate, but the links preview www.xyz.com/whatever/. I can do one of the following:
- Leave it as it is and keep getting some traffic.
- 301 redirect the sites to the main home page.
- Keep ownership of the domains but remove them from online.
Thoughts?
-
It depends on numerous variables--the main one being are you continuously putting effort into all the domains or are they just stagnating with their existing content, links and social media activity?
If the sites are established and have links and search traffic going to them and are of decent quality, there may not be an immediate good reason to take them down, other than to consolidate limited resources to build authority for the main domain. In the future, those niche sites may provide less and less value to the main site if you're not maintaining on-page and off-page optimization, leaving you a year or two years behind the competition, who may have been continuing to build the authority of a primary domain.
There lots of questions and answers on that topic here in Moz and on the web. Here are a couple:
http://moz.com/community/q/multiple-domain-names-point-to-one-site
-
Hi Thomas,
Thank you very much for the quick response. My concern is that the client has been receiving a considerable amount of traffic to their main website from the other domains that forward to their site. If I just get rid of them, then they are going to lose a lot of potential traffic. How should I fix this?
-
Concentrate on one domain cannot even begin to 301 redirect any of the other domains to whatever good domain you have left. Hopefully you will choose a domain warehouse domain that has not been affected yet or has not been turned into a what is called a link farm you need to keep the domain's separate and you should only really have a second domain for a good reason would be a staging server another would be a completely separate business that has different relevancy to whatever your existing business or clients existing businesses now. Long story short use acicular domain get rid of the other ones.
Do not 301 redirect to anything that you want to have any kind of just to get links Google will you severely.
I hope was 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
-
Can new domain extensions rank?
Hi Does anybody know if it's possible to get domains with extensions like .party or .world to rank? Even for high competitive keywords? Can they rank over .com?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeWU0 -
Reverting back to old domain name.
I've recently been asked by a client if I can foresee any issues with reverting back to their original domain name. With the original domain name they had a pretty decent DA for their sector which they have now lost. Although I do appreciate that over time this might come back, the CEO is very keen to switch back to the old domain. They do currently have 301 redirects from the old domain to the new and have implemented rel canonical. As yet they have not notified Google of the change of address using Webmaster Tools. Can anyone forsee any issues with returning back to the old domain name? They have only been using the new domain name for a couple of months which currently has a DA for 1.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Macrofireball0 -
Practical steps to increase Domain Authority
Having read the Neil Patel's guide to DA, I am still at a loss as to practical steps, I can do to help improve my Domain Authority. This is a summary of findings / action plan so far: 1. Building quality incoming links by producing excellent content that people will love! 2. Having "related articles" to keep users on site for longer, and provide more information I am certain I am missing some more steps? More worryingly my DA has gone down from 8 to 5! I do not know how to improve it? Please help with real practical steps that I can use.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | propertysaviour0 -
Subdomains and Forwarding Domains
Will someone who has experience chime in on these two issues below: Do sub-domain links which link back to the main site count as a new link from a new site; or would they be considered more of an internal link? Basically, would a sub-domain link to the main site be like a link from a unique website, or treated like any other internal link on the main site? I am speaking in terms of link juice. Should we 301 sub-domains to the main site internally? Thank you, we really appreciate any input you have!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1230 -
How to Find problem domain history
Hi I have what most of you may think is a dumb question but here goes. please be nice... 🙂 So I have a client (http://www,ace-alarms.co.uk) who are having a real problem ranking for ANY of their key words. I know it's a reasonably competitive area but I've not seen such a stubborn domain and it seems that no matter what we do there's nothing listed. i'm thinking that there may be a problem with the domain name. My question is; how can I find out if this is a problem domain. Thanks in advance Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevecounsell0 -
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 -
Multi domain redirect to single domain
Hello, all SEOers. Today, I would like to get some ideas about handling multiple domains. I have a client who bought numerous domains under purpose of prevent abuse of their brand name and at the same time for future uses. This client bought more than 100 domains. Some domains are paused, parked, lived and redirected to other site. I don't worry too much of parked domains and paused domains. However, what I am worrying is that there are about 40 different domains are now redirected to single domain and meta refresh was used for redirections. As far as I know, this can raise red flag for Google. I asked clients to clean up unnecessary domains, yet they want to keep them all. So now I have to figure out how to handle all domains which are redirect to single domain. So far, I came up with following ideas. 1. Build gateway page which shows lists of my client sites and redirect all domains to gateway page. 2. Implement robots.txt file to all different domains 3. Delete the redirects and leave it as parked domains. Could anyone can share other ideas in order to handling current status? Please people, share your ideas for me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Artience0 -
Hosting images on multiple domains
I'm taking the following from http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html "Splitting components allows you to maximize parallel downloads. Make sure you're using not more than 2-4 domains because of the DNS lookup penalty. For example, you can host your HTML and dynamic content on www.example.org and split static components between static1.example.org and static2.example.org" What I want to do is load page images (it's an eCommerce site) from multiple sub domains to reduce load times. I'm assuming that this is perfectly OK to do - I cannot think of any reason that this wouldn't be a good tactic to go with. Does anyone know of (or can think of) a reason why taking this approach could be in any way detrimental. Cheers mozzers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob0