301 Redirect Domain or 301 Redirect Domain + Interior Pages
-
Hello - My company acquired another company in our industry and our IT team immediately set up the acquired companies domain name as a an alias to our site.
This created a duplicate version of our website under another domain name and Google started ranking interior pages from the aliased acquired site for several top keywords that were previously held by our real site.
Should we 301 redirect just the top level domain name of the acquired site to the real site or 301 redirect the top level domain name and the interior pages on the acquired site to help ensure that our real domain will take back the rankings it once had?
Thanks!
-
Totally - thanks!
-
Yeah so if you want pages on the acquired site to go to corresponding pages on the primary site like you mention above
www.aquired.com/interior-page-1 >> redirects >> www.primary.com/interior-page-1
then you can create 301 redirect with a regular expression pattern with wild card to capture the URL and reuse them in the target URL.
If you have lots URLs then this will be quickest way rather creating an entry for every possible URL.
Hope this helps
-
Thanks for the response. Can you expand on the "wildcard redirect". Our it team set up a 301 redirect so that any URL on the acquired site redirects to the home page of the primary site. So for example:
www.aquired.com/interior-page-1 redirects to www.primary.com
instead of
www.primary.com/interior-page-1
Any thoughts on this set-up.
-
Thanks for the insight Nakul.
-
Ultimately you'll probably want your primary (real site domain) ranking for the keywords so you'll want to 301 redirect the acquired site to the primary domain.
As the site content is essentially one and the same you'll be able to set-up a wildcard 301 redirect, at the server level (Apache/IIS) which will take care of the interior pages
-
Yes, I would recommend you remove the alias.
Next, I would suggest you redirect the specific pages from the old domain/site of the company you acquired to the pages that make most sense for the user on your site. Like if you took over certain products from that company and merged them into your products (or services), a 301 from the products page to your products page would make sense and so on.
This will pass on the SEO value to the respective pages much better rather then a complete redirect from the entire site to just your homepage.
I suggested this based on the fact that you wrote, the acquired company's domain is ranking better, which demonstrates the presence of some sort of authority in terms of backlinks and trust and aging factor in the SERPS.
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
-
Redirects, 301's & 404's
I have tons of links that I have had added a redirect to after creating my companies new website. Is it bad to have all these 301s? How do I permanently redirect those links? Also, on Google Search Console it's telling me I have 1,000+ excluded links. Is this bad? Will it negatively affect me? Is this something to do with my sitemap? Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | sammecooper0 -
Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | TaraLP1 -
301 Redirect for multiple links
I just relaunched my website and changed a permalink structure for several pages where only a subdirectory name changed. What 301 Redirect code do I use to redirect the following? I have dozens of these where I need to change just the directory name from "urban-living" to "urban", and want it to catch the following all in one redirect command. Here is an example of the structure that needs to change. Old
Technical SEO | | shawnbeaird
domain.com/urban-living (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe/the-vale (single page w/ content) New
domain.com/urban
domain.com/urban/tempe
domain.com/urban/tempe/the-vale0 -
Page disappeared from Google index. Google cache shows page is being redirected.
My URL is: http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/converse Hi. The week before last, my top Converse page went missing from the Google index. When I "fetch as Googlebot" I am able to get the page and "submit" it to the index. I have done this several times and still cannot get the page to show up. When I look at the Google cache of the page, it comes up with a different page. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/converse shows: http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/pop-in-olivia-kim Back story: As far as I know we have never redirected the Converse page to the Pop-In page. However the reverse may be true. We ran a Converse based Pop-In campaign but that used the Converse page and not the regular Pop-In page. Though the page comes back with a 200 status, it looks like Google thinks the page is being redirected. We were ranking #4 for "converse" - monthly searches = 550,000. My SEO traffic for the page has tanked since it has gone missing. Any help would be much appreciated. Stephan
Technical SEO | | shop.nordstrom0 -
301 Redirect
The SEOmoz crawl campaign found some 404 errors in my Joomla site poker-brands.ca. So, I figured I would set up 301 redirects in my hosting account to make sure bots don't read that there is a page missing. For example: This link gave a 404 error in the crawl: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager I redirected it to: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pt3-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager-hem-hm2 However, when I visit the first link it doesn't send me to the second link. Am I supposed to get forwarded to the second link now?
Technical SEO | | Uramark0 -
My home page 301 redirects - is this an SEO problem
When ever a browser calls my site canineconcepts.co.uk, it is automatically 301 redirected to canineconcepts.co.uk/en I am not sure if I should be concerned about this from an SEO perspective or not. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | CanineConcepts0 -
301 Redirection of entire section to the homepage
Hi Guys, So here's the deal. Let's say I have a site at mysite.com/ which talks about tomatoes, and I also have a subsection that talks about potatoes at mysite.com/potatoes I want to stop providing information about potatoes altogether so i'm thinking about doing a 301 redirection from all of the pages at mysite.com/potatoes(.*) to the home page. The thing is, mysite.com/potatoes actually has a great page authority (3475 links from 145 domains) so I really don't wan to lose all that juice... Here are my questions: Will the links be added to the ones i have for the homepage already? Since my home page and my /potatoes section ranked for 2 different subjects, how is this transfer going to affect my rankings for the homepage? will it now also rank for both tomatoes AND potatoes? How much time does it usually take for google to recognize the 301 and pass the link juice? Any other tips on optimizing this process? Thank you for your time! -francois
Technical SEO | | nyakim0 -
When should you turn off redirects to your new domain?
Our website moved to a new domain a year ago, and we have our original domain to redirect to our new domain. We're working on contacting people who still link to our old domain to ask them to update, but 7% of our traffic is still coming as a redirect from our old domain. My question is, when should we just shut the old domain down entirely and stop redirecting people to our new domain? Or should we just keep it up indefinitely? What would be the positive or negative impact on our new domain's SEO if we shut the old domain down? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | UWPCE0