Can I use a 301 redirect to pass 'back link' juice to a different domain?
-
Hi,
I have a backlink from a high DA/PA Government Website pointing to www.domainA.com which I own and can setup 301 redirects on if necessary.
However my www.domainA.com is not used and has no active website (but has hosting available which can 301 redirect). www.domainA.com is also contextually irrelevant to the backlink.
I want the Government Website link to go to www.domainB.com - which is both the relevant site and which also should be benefiting from from the seo juice from the backlink.
So far I have had no luck to get the Government Website's administrators to change the URL on the link to point to www.domainB.com.
Q1: If i use a 301 redirect on www.domainA.com to redirect to www.domainB.com will most of the backlink's SEO juice still be passed on to www.domainB.com?
Q2: If the answer to the above is yes - would there be benefit to taking this a step further and redirect www.domainA.com to a deeper directory on www.domianB.com which is even more relevant?
ie. redirect www.domainA.com to www.domainB.com/categoryB - passing the link juice deeper. -
It definitely passes link juice, one of my extortion activism groups recently was attempting to stop an individual from monetizing a domain that publicly shames people. What the black hat hacker had done was identify dead links on a NY Times article and wanted the DoFollow links from such a authority
The individual purchased the domains and redirected them to his site and luckily we caught it on a backlink check and one of the group members was a journalist that was able to get them to remove the links.
-
Hi DGAU
There is no doubt that cross-domain 301s do pass link juice and depending on who you listen to you may experience a 15% drop in the juice passed.
The problem is that if it is completely different and irrelevant content then you may do more damage than good.
Your second option, linking to a directory with relevant content is a much better idea and may help you get the link back if you can show them that the destination URL has more relevant content. It also means that you may keep it for longer. I should imagine that no Government department would want to link out to an irrelevant URL!
First, though I would enhance the page to make it as relevant as possible - then request the link back. You'll give yourself a much better chance of getting it!
I hope that helps, Regards Nigel
-
Hi DGAU,
it's a difficult question. I have used this technique 2 times (redirect a broken link on a .gov site to my site) and in my experience it did not work very well, didn't see improvements on rankings, but I'm not really sure about if it can work in some situations.
Probably, if the link was broken for a short period and you redirect it soon, it will be much better that if it has been a long time broken. If it's broken and you inmediately redirect it would be the perfect situation, each day from that I think it will give less link juice.
Just my opinion.
In any case, you don't have anything to lose by doing the redirect to your deeper directory, try it.
Greetings
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
-
After you remove a 301 redirect that Google has processed, will the new URL retain any of the link equity from the old URL?
Lets say you 301 redirect URL A to URL B, and URL A has some backlinks from other sites. Say you left the 301 redirect in place for a year, and Google had already replaced the old URL with the new URL in the SERPs, would the new URL (B) retain some of the link equity from URL A after the 301 redirect was removed, or does the redirect have to remain in place forever?
Technical SEO | | johnwalkersmith0 -
Using Sub Domains For Back Linking
Hey Guys! I'm building links for my page and happened upon the "Hoth" link building page. I tried it out and it built some no follow links and some links on several sub domains. I know that, when back linking via guest posting, no follow links do not juice my site. My question is, does building links on a subdomain from another company juice my site? If it's not helpful, could you explain why? Does it juice my site in any way? If you could link sources, I would really appreciate it. Also, do any of you have input on Hoth or platforms like it? Are they worth it? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | rodv0 -
301 redirect syntax for htaccess
I'm working on some htaccess redirects for a few stray pages and have come across a few different varieties of 301s that are confusing me a bit....Most sources suggest: Redirect 301 /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html or using some combination of: RewriteRule + RewriteCond + RegEx I've also found examples of: RedirectPermanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html I'm confused because our current htaccess file has quite a few (working) redirects that look like this: Redirect permanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html This syntax seems to work, but I'm yet to find another Redirect permanent in the wild, only examples of Redirect 301 or RedirectPermanent Is there any difference between these? Would I benefit at all from replacing Redirect permanent with Redirect 301?
Technical SEO | | SamKlep1 -
Best use of an old domain?
I've discovered that my clients website used to have another domain name, which they still own but don't use. It's doing OK considering its not been used for a few years - almost 6,000 backlinks showing on Majestic. So what's the best way of using this for SEO? I'm presuming some kind of redirecting? A simple redirect of everything on the domain to the new domain index page? Or going trough all the old pages and redirecting them one by one?
Technical SEO | | abisti20 -
301 redirect question
Hi Everyone When doing 301 redirects for a large site, if a page has 0 inbound links would you still redirect it or just leave it? Im just curious on the best practice for this Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
Migration to New Domain - 301 Redirect Questions
My client is migrating their site to a new domain. I just did a big redesign, including URL structure change, and 301s from old URLs to new URLs. Now they want a new name, so we're moving forward with a new domain name. However, we're going to keep the site on the current domain while we ease customers into the new name. During that time, I'm going to be building links to the new domain name and 301 Redirecting that new one to the current domain name. Then, once we migrate the site to the new domain name, I'm then going to redirect the current domain name to the new domain name. So, my question(s) is/are: Is the above process the best way to use 301 redirects to to build links to the new domain while we transition everything? Should I (or can I) do 3 redirects from the oldest URLs, to the current URLs then to the new URLs? General question... I can't seem to find this anywhere online, but what is the best practice for what order URLs should be in in the htaccess file? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Kenny-King0 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
301 redirect chains
Hi everyone, I've had my site for a while now and have changed the structure a number of times. I'm confident my 301's work well and am not concerned about dead ends on my site. My question is, is there a way to find 301 redirect chains? i.e. can I export my link data from webmaster tools and run it through some software that tells me how many steps my 301's are taking to get to the final page? I don't know for sure that there are long 301 chains in my link structure, but I have a suspicion and it's very hard to check by going through them manually. Thanks in advance Will
Technical SEO | | madegood0