Redirect entire website or not?
-
I have 2 websites:
- a UK health blog covering a wide range of topics (professional medical advice, diets, mental health), core business, strong brand, content ranks well, lots of valuable traffic, only 100 external links but all of good quality. We also sell some of our UK consultancy services on the site.
- small niche blog just covering fitness, every page has robots=noindex, 100x more traffic, 100% of traffic is from 500,000 external links on other websites talking about fitness matters (these range from spam to medium quality) , 95% of traffic is from countries we cannot serve, probably only 1% of the remaining 5% of traffic would be considered our target market, but the main concern is that the content is very out of date and should anyone see, it would be damaging to the UK health blog
My dilemma is what do we do with the fitness website to make most business use, while ensuring little maintenance?
Suggestions have been:
- Keep fitness blog running but make very basic content updates and remove robots=noindex
- Redirect fitness website urls to appropriate pages on UK health website
We are on the verge of choosing option 2 but I have some SEO concerns about the impact of the redirects on the UK health website.
Due to the volume of external links which mostly all reference 'fitness', is there any risk through redirects that Google might start thinking the UK health website is just about fitness? If so, is there any way to prevent this through certain redirects eg 307?
Also with the fitness website having some spam related external links, is there any risk to the UK health website if these aren't disavowed before redirects are setup? If so, on which website should these be done?
Thanks!
-
I would first like to clarify that the redirect of the users from the fitness website to the main health website will not damage the SEO and rankings of the main health website.
However, since you are saying that the traffic is mostly international and only 1-5% of the users would actually be useful for the UK blog, I would rather suggest that you keep both websites, put minimal efforts and content on the fitness website and also indexing it, and you can find other ways to use (monetize) the rest of the traffic. For UK clients, you can put some banners, paid ads or referring articles to bring traffic and add credibility to the main site. you can also set it so that the banners show up only for the UK visitors.
As mentioned, doing a 301 redirect from the fitness website to the main health website won't harm your rankings, and if you aren't willing to give the effort of minimally maintaining the fitness blog you can also have an agency managing it for you and monetizing the foreign traffic.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com
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
-
Correct Hreflang & Canonical Tags for Multi-Regional Website English Language Only having URL Parameters
Dear friends, We have a multi-regional website in English language only having the country selector on the top of each page and it adds countrycode parameters on each url. Website is built in Magento 1.8 and having 1 store with multiple store views. There is no default store set in Magento as I discussed with developer. Content is same for all the countries and only currency is changed. In navigation there are urls without url parameters but when we change store from any page it add parameters in the url for same page hence there are total 7 URLs. 6 URLs for each page (with country parameters) and 1 master url (without parameters) and making content duplicity. We have implemented hreflang tags on each page with url parameters but for canonical we have implemented master page url as per navigation without url parameters Example on this page. I think this is correct for master page but we should use URL parameters in canonical tags for each counry url too and there should be only 1 canonical tag on each country page url. Currently all the country urls are having master page canoncial tag as per the example. Please correct me if I am wrong and **in this case what has to be done for master page? **as google is indexing the pages without parameters too. We are also using GEOIP redirection for each store with country IP detection and for rest of the countries which are not listed on the website we are redirecting to USA store. Earlier it was 301 but we changed it to 302. Hreflang tags are showing errors in SEMRush due to redirection but in GWT it's OK for some pages it's showing no return tags only. Should I use **x-default tags for hreflang and country selector only on home page like this or should I remove the redirection? **However some of the website like this using redirection but header check tool doesn't show the redirection for this and for our website it shows 302 redirection. Sorry for the long post but looking for your support, please.
International SEO | | spjain810 -
Which Google does a .ie website get shown in?
Hi all, I am working on a .ie website and I was under the understanding that if you have a regional domain, like .ie you will limited to being shown in a search engine like google.ie When I go to International Targeting in Google SEarch Console it says the site is associated with: Ireland Am I limiting my ability to rank well in worldwide Google searches with this domain and if so, how can I counter this? Many thanks.
International SEO | | Bee1590 -
Hosting your website where you customers are located ?
Is it possible and recommended to host a website in Switzerland ending in.com to rank in the United States ? Or is it better to host it in the country you are targeting ? I know in WMT you can choose the country you want to target but is it as efficient as hosting it on a server located in the country ? Thanks,
International SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Internationalise all or just part of website?
Hi We are a UK company looking to expand our sales into the US market. We will be setting up a US office. Our (.com) site has a number of main sections relating to different products and services - but only two of these sections will be selling products to the US. /service1 - UK only
International SEO | | AbsolutelyN
/products1 - UK and US - different product names/descriptions for different markets
/service3 - UK and US - not much difference for uk/us pages So the query is do we fully internationalise the site with sub folders /us & /gb and make all content on the site have a different language version. Or do we only give an alternate language version for the two areas that need it? Perhaps /products1/us & /products1/uk We also have top rankings and are concerned about changing the urls. Is one option to keep the existing urls as the 'default' language? The default perhaps being US as it is a .com domain. If not then how do you redirect a url that going forward splits into US or GB sub directories? Another option is to have the current .com become US only and create a .co.uk site. We are in a position to easily do this but research suggests subdirectories is the better way forwards due to aggregated link authority. Many thanks for any thoughts,
Tristan0 -
Setting up a website targeted for the US
Hi, As an English company we have a co.uk domain with .com domain pointing to this. We are now looking to launch a separate (new) website targeting the American market and I have been asked to do the following: If an American or Canadian IP address visits the .com website it automatically goes to our newly created website i.e. website 2. If a non-American or non-Canadian IP address goes to .com it automatically goes to the original website i.e. website 1. If a user is on website 1 and clicks an American flag it takes the website user to website 2. If a user is on website 2 and clicks on the UK flag it takes the website user to website 1. Can anyone advise the best way to go about doing this as I feel that this could effect our search rankings. I am concerned how the search engines will penalize website 2 (original site) which has good rankings. Thanks in advance.
International SEO | | Cybertill0 -
'Mini' versions of our website for overseas markets. Does it matter?
Hi Guys. I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries, we make bespoke diaries and journals. In essence we allow people to design their own diary online, then we make it and send it. We have already sold some products to poeple in many European countries, (Malta, France, Germany) but we want to have a better online presence for those overseas markets. So….. We're want to do an overseas ‘test case’, to see if we can sell more products in Europe. Out thinking is this: We’ll buy a subdomain for a specific country. Then we’ll then build a ‘mini’ version of our site in the appropriate language. This be a country specific landing page with links to our ‘design your own diary’ pages, basket and checkout. All in the language we’re targeting. Question: Will having such a small number of pages in the targeted countries language effect out ability to rank well? It will be maybe 10 – 15 pages in size. Or is it much more to do with on page optimization and quality backlinks? i.e) the site's size has no impact. What other factors should we consider when trying to rank well in other European countries? Many thanks in advance.
International SEO | | isaac6630 -
Website Translation
Hi All, I know its not an SEO question, but....................... Can anyone suggest a few good website translation "widgets" I would like to give those who are not fluent in English and option to choose another language in which to view the page text. Thank You!!!
International SEO | | APICDA0 -
Site structure for multi-lingual hotel website (subfolder names)
Hi there superMozers! I´ve read a quite a few questions about multi-lingual sites but none answered my doubt / idea, so here it is: I´m re-designing an old website for a hotel in 4 different languages which are all** hosted on the same .com domain** as follows: example.com/english/ for english example.com/espanol/ for **spanish ** example.com/francais/ for french example.com/portugues/ for portuguese While doing keyword search, I have noticed that many travel agencies separate geographical areas by folders, therefor an **agency pomoting beach hotels in South America **will have a structure as follows: travelagency.com/argentina-beach-hotels/ travelagency.com/peru-beach-hotels/ and they list hotels in each folder, therefor benefiting from those keywords to rank ahead of many independent hotels sites from those areas. What **I would like to **do -rather than just naming those folders with the traditional /en/ for english or /fr/ for french etc- is take advantage of this extra language subfolder to_´include´_ important keywords in the name of the subfolders in the following way (supposing the we have a beach hotel in Argentina): example.com/argentina-beach-hotel/ for english example.com/hotel-playa-argentina/ for **spanish ** example.com/hotel-plage-argentine/ for french example.com/hotel-praia-argentina/ for portuguese Note that the same keywords are used in the name of the folder, but translated into the language the subfolders are. In order to make things clear for the search engines I would specify the language in the html for each page. My doubt is whether google or other search engines may consider this as ´stuffing´ although most travel agencies do it in their site structure. Any Mozers have experience with this, any idea on how search engines may react, or if they could penalise the site? Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | underground0