Will 301 affect my present Google ranking
-
Hello ,
I am in a fix right now. I have a website which is ranking well for many keywords in search engines.I am redirecting all my pages and blogs to new website with new domain name for better user experience and will be adding more content to new website. If i redirect all pages and posts from present website to new website will it affect my present rankings. What can be the possible effects that my present website will have. I need to fix this as soon as possible. I want to redirect so please tell me what best should be done as well.
Thanks
-
First of all, a quick question: How is a new domain going to influence user experience? Couldn't you redesign the website and keep the current domain?
Domain's build up a track record with search engines, historical data is factored in. So yes, you will see a significant impact to your organic traffic. Anytime there is a brand new domain in the picture, you're essentially starting at ground zero. 301 redirects will pass traffic and authority eventually, and as per Gary Ilyes do not lose PageRank anymore. BUT, that doesn't mean you should add a bunch of redirects without a really good reason.
I strongly recommend you reconsider switching domain names and simply redesign the domain you've already got.
-
Hi Wallace, You should not be so concerned about going ahead with the 301 redirects. While you will see a temporary drop in traffic, your new website will be indexed quickly and should take over your search rankings.
Google webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes recently confirmed that 301 redirects will not cause a loss in PageRank or page authority. The backlinks you have acquired for your old domain name will still benefit your new domain name if the proper 301 redirects are kept in place.
There may be other issues that could affect your rankings such as switching to a new web design or changing your title tags. If you keep everything consistent I believe you should not have any major loss in Google rankings. Best of luck.
-
Hi There,
I can understand, such situation can be confusing at times.
You can understand all the details about 301 redirects on this post and further comments in the discussion. https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
Please feel free to respond if you still have questions about the same.
Regards,
Vijay
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
-
Ranking fluctuation
According to Miles Rank tracking I have a keyword that is fluctuating by 5 or 6 positions in a 24-hour period every time it goes 10 down to 15 and back to 10 again with very little stopping point in between and keeps fluctuating like that. As far as I know the website is stable it uses Magento 1.9 and is a fixed category page. The page URL is relatively new as we migrated from an old site with a different URL structure I added 301s at server level from the old page URL to the new one. There is only two things I can think that can be the problem -
Technical SEO | | seoman10
1. Lack of links directly to the page (there is literally only one or two)
2. Loading speed problem But I don't see any of these would cause a 5 position fluctuation regularly every day. But do you have any thoughts? Thanks in advance.0 -
Will Google still ignore the second instance of anchor text on a page if it has an H2 tag on it?
We have a page set up that has anchor text with header tags. There is an instance where the same anchor text is on the page twice linking to the same page, and I know that Google will ignore the second instance. But in the second instance it also had an H2 tag (which I removed and put it on the first instance of anchor text even though it's smaller). Is this good practice?
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
Is there a way to get Google to index more of your pages for SEO ranking?
We have a 100 page website, but Google is only indexing a handful of pages for organic rankings. Is there a way to submit to have more pages considered? I have optimized meta data and get good Moz "on-page graders" or the pages & terms that I am trying to connect....but Google doesn't seem to pick them up for ranking. Any insight would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | JulieALS0 -
Will links be counted?
We are considering a redesign of our website and one of the options we are considering is to come up with something along the lines of http://www.tesco.com/, with rotating top offers. The question I am wondering is whether or not the links (ie. the blue links on the left side of the main graphic) will be visible to the spiders, and if not, whether there is a way to code it so they are?
Technical SEO | | simonukss0 -
Rank a site that was 301'd
We had a customer that had 2 sites. They left us, and 301'd site A to site B. Things didn't go well. Now, a year later they want to use us again. Ideally, I would undo the 301. Has anyone done this? Would I be better off starting with a new domain? If you've done it, how long before it started to rank like you expected/hoped?
Technical SEO | | TimColeman0 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10 -
Google , 301 redirects, and multiple domains pointing to the same content.
Google, 301 redirects, and multiple domains pointing to the same content. This is my first post here. I would like to begin by thanking anyone in advance for their help. It is much appreciated. Secondly, I'm posting in the wrong place or something please forgive me simply point me in the right direction I'm a quick learner. I think I'm battling a redirect problem but I want to be sure before I make changes. In order to accurately assess the situation a little background is necessary. I have had a site called tx-laws.com for about 15 years. It was a site that was used primarily by private resource and as such was never SEO'd. The site itself was in fact quite Seo unfriendly. despite a complete lack of marketing or SEO efforts, over time, SEO aside, this domain eventually made it to page one of Google Yahoo and Bing under the keywords Texas laws. About six months ago I decided to revamp the site and create a new resource aimed at a public market. A good deal of effort was made to re-work the SEO. The new site was developed at a different domain name: easylawlook up.com. Within a few months this domain name surpassed tx-laws in Google and was holding its place in position number eight out of 190 million results. Note that at this point no marketing has been done, that is to say there has been no social networking, no e-mail campaigns, no blogs, -- nothing but content. All was well until a few weeks ago I decided to upgrade our network and our servers. During this period there was some downtime unfortunately. When the upgrade was complete everything seemed fine until a week or so later when our primary domain easy law look up vanished off Google. At first I thought it was downtime but now I'm not so sure. The current configuration reroutes traffic from tx-laws to easylawlookup in IIS by pointing both domains to the same root directory. Everything else was handled through scripting. As far as I know this is how it was always set up. At present there is no 301 Redirect in place for tx-laws (as I'm sure there probably should be). Interestingly enough the back links to easylaw also went away. Even more telling however is that now when I visit link: easylawlookup.com there is only one link, and that link is to a domain which references tx-laws not easy law. So it would appear that I have confused Google with regards to my actual intentions. My question is this. Right now my rankings for tx-laws remain unchanged. The last thing I want to have happen is to see those disappear as well. If easy law has somehow been penalized and I redirect tx-laws to easy through a 301 will I screw up my rankings for this domain as well? Any comments or input on the situation are welcome. I just want to think it through before I start making more changes which might make things worse instead of better. Ultimately though, there is no reason that the old domain can't be redirected to the new domain at this point unless it would mean that I run the risk of losing my listings for tx-laws, ending up with nothing instead of transferring any link juice and traffic to easy law. With regards to the down time, it was substantial over a couple of weeks with many hours off-line. However this downtime would have affected both domains the only difference being that the one domain had been in existence for 15 years as opposed to six months for the other. So is my problem downtime, lack of proper 301 redirect, or something else? and if I implement a 301 at this point do I risk damaging the remaining domain which is operational? Thanks again for any help.
Technical SEO | | Steviebone0 -
How long will Google take to stop crawling an old URL once it has been 301 redirected
I need to do a clean-up old urls that have been redirected in sitemap and was wondering about this.
Technical SEO | | Ant-8080