How to retain link juice moving to new site, cms and servers?
-
We have been hosting our website with a provider (their design and CMS) and we are now moving to a new design, better content focussing on keywords in a different CMS platform on different servers but want to retain the link juice from the old site.
We have used Open Site Explorer Report to determine all the links to the old site and the pages they link to.
What is the best strategy to keep the link juice flowing to the new site?
Example
This site <http: www.dogslifedownunder.com="" what-is-worse-then-going-to-the-v-e-t="">links to this page <http: 19105="" www.sydneyanimalhospitals.com.au="" ourstaff="" thevets="" tabid="" default.aspx="">on the old site.</http:></http:>
We will have a similar page on the new site with the same staff members called for example:
How do we ensure that the we retain the link juice?
Any thoughts most welcome.
-
Pleasure buddy, hope it helps!
-
Thanks Marcus. Appreciate your input and suggestions. Most helpful.
-
Hey, the basic answer here is with HTTP 301 redirections from the original pages to the new page.
Rather than just knowing the cryptic name it helps to understand what is going on behind the scenes a little and why this works. When a page is requested on your site the web server returns a HTTP status code. For a standard page request this is 200 OK and for missing pages a 400 Page Not Found response is returned. There are many other responses but the one we are interested in is for indicating a permanent redirection from the resource on Site A to a resource on Site B and this is a 301 Permanent Redirection.
This provides a range of benefits for users and the search engines
- a user visiting the old site from a search engine result listing is transported to the new resource
- a search engine visiting the link is informed that this resource has moved to a new location and the new page is given
- the page rank and value from any inbound links is forwarded to the new page (not all but most)
So, in this case the 301 redirect provides a complete solution to your problem. It updates and redirects users without requiring anything from them and it allows the search engine to update their records and start concentrating on your new site.
Note
There are a few things to take into consideration here to make sure this works well
- You need to manually redirect page A to page B so there maybe a fair bit of work involved for a larger site
- The redirections may need to be in place for a good while and if you generate a lot of direct traffic - keep an eye on the indexation and web logs for the old site to decide when you can kill it dead
Ultimately, you want the old site to remain in place, redirecting requests until it no longer receives any traffic (or such a low level that it is practical to remove it). If you do get a lot of direct traffic, be sure to update people so they can update their records.
Approach
Which brings us to the technology and approach required. I see you are using .Net aspx pages which is not really my bag but I can give you an overview of the options. You also seem to have wildly different page rules so a cute solution that just dynamically changes the domain but keeps the page the same is not going to work here (sorry).
- Page Level Redirects: add code to the individual pages to redirect to the new page
- Add redirection rules to the global.asax config file
- Create rewrites in the IIS GUI
Beyond the rewrites
An oft overlooked strategy with 301's is to get them done and then really concentrate on the new site. Start building links, try to repoint some of your high quality older links to the new site and start building and promoting new content to get some really high quality links to the new site. All of these strategies will bolster the new site and help it replace the old site as quickly as possible.
Summary
If you have a big site, manually rewriting all the URL's to the their counterparts on the new site is going to be a bit of a job but one that is worth doing. If you want to prioritise the job look at your most popular pages in your analytics and this gives you a plan of attack. Once you have created specific rules for this you can create a catch all rule to redirect all remaining pages to the sites homepage.
That, pretty much covers it. If we have a windows server / IIS / asp.net guru here who can dive in and fill you in on the specifics of the actual syntax and approach then you should be good to go.
Shout if you have any questions.
Marcus
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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Recovering from spam links on MY site
Hey guys, Having a weird situation and wondering if anybody can help. I run a sizable WordPress site with a number of content writers. One of the writer's accounts was hacked and was used to post several dozens of complete spam posts with spun content and links to all sorts of shady sites. Recently the site has begun losing rankings on all sorts of pages. There's no manual penalty or anything, but I'm concerned that we're being penalized for having had these links on the site. Of course, as soon as we found the content, we immediately removed it, reset passwords, etc. But a decent number of the pages were indexed. Does anybody have any experience with this or ideas of what to do about it? Is there somewhere we can talk to Google about it or some way to show that we are not part of bad neighborhoods? Thanks so much for any thoughts, Yon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yon230 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
What link building techniques would you recommend for a dating site?
I am working on adding more content to the site (content marketing, trying to attract natural links), and this includes a blog. On-site optimization will be done based on good keyword research, and after that I will be working on link building for the site. I will pull backlink data of competing best performing dating websites, google-wise, and try to get some links from there. What other link building strategies / techniques could be good for this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blrs120 -
OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site
I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752 There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary? Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
New Domain name vs Low Ranked Existing Site
I am going to build a new site. I could hang it off an existing site with similar content or buy a new keyword rich domain and start over. The existing site does not have much trust or authority beyond the domain being registered for 5 plus years. I would prefer to start over and build linksfrom scratch but I realize we are starting at the bottom. The keywords we will be competing against are not super competetive so I think we can get ranking within 6 months or so. These post Panda days I am rethinking everything so any input is appreciated. I did a similar niche site a few years ago and found the site ranked well fairly quickly for its little nice. Today though it may be different. I have no experience in buying domains and would have no idea where to start there. New or existing? Thanks for any input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reportcard0 -
Big Site Wide Link
Hi Guys, I've noticed that Google is starting to de-value site-wide links... Our previous SEO agency sourced us a site wide link on a big website and at the moment within Google Webmaster Tools its showing 749,726 links from this 1 source. Do you think this is too many? Could this be being flagged by Google? Here is the site: http://tinyurl.com/7bttw3b Cheers, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Tips for Link Building for Mobile Sites
Hi, I wondered if anyone had any tips and advice for link building for mobile sites. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkChambers0