Redirect questions
-
Hi!
A client of mine have created a new site with a new URL structure which they launched the other day. They have done a 301 redirect on all pages on the old site to the start page on the new site. E.g:
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com
www.olddomain.com/subfolder2/index.html -> www.newdomain.comI'm thinking of fixing this now so the redirect instead looks someting like this:
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com/newsubfolder1/index.html
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com/newsubfolder1/index.htmlTwo questions:
1. Is it worth doing the latter kind of redirect in all cases (after all, it involves quite a lot more work compared to the first solution)? or do you recommend the first solution for all redirect projects?
2. Now that they have already done the first solution, is it at all worth amending this to the latter or is everything spoiled now that they have already gone ahead with the first solution?Many thanks in advance!
-
Thanks guys!
So my interpretation of your feedback and the short answer to my questions are:
1. Yes, it's worth doing.
2. Yes, it's worth doing.Cheers!
-
You should only need one redirect if link stucture is the same,
point both domains at the new site
then create a rule if HTTP_HOST is not newdomain.com then redirect to new domain,
here is the rule for IIS
<rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^thatsit.com.au$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="http://thatsit.com.au/{R:1}"></action></match></rule>http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issues
-
From a visitors perspective, if you've got links to deep pages, then it would be worth creating redirects to the relevant content on the new site.
If someone follows a link from another site with anchor text along the lines of "see this great article about x" and it just goes to the homepage, the visitor is going to find it rather jarring...
-
Agree with Rasmus pm the whole.
I'd still go with the updated subfolder version even if google has crawled the pages...these things take a while to settle down.
If there are lots of pages, check out the tool Russ Jones shared for using Levenshtein distance to automate creating redirects http://www.seomoz.org/blog/set-it-and-forget-it-seo-chasing-the-elusive-passive-seo-dream
There's another great post for larger sites that could help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/scripting-seo-5-pandafighting-tricks-for-large-sites-14455
And here's another version that creates the htaccess redirects for you (though I've not tried it so don't know how well it works) http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2010/10/levinshtein_link_fixer_aka_the.htm
-
in cpanel there is an option to redirect all at once, keeping the structure of site. try cpanel.yourdomain.com
-
I would recommend making the redirects from subfolder to subfolder. If you redirect all pages to the new frontpage Google needs to crawl the new site from scratch in order to index all pages.
If you make the 301 redirect from old pages to corresponding new pages I would say it is worth the effort. Otherwise www.newdomain.com/newsubfolder1/index.html needs to build up its own new page ranking since it is a new URL that Google does not know.
Question is if Google has already crawled a lot of the old URLs, but if it was me I would get on making the correct redirects before Google crawls to many of the old URLs. This will give the new site better ranking from the start I should think AND it will save time for the Google crawlers. One should always anticipate a drop when changing domain, but it is always a good idea to take precautions in order to ensure a quick bounce back.
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
-
Redirecting homepage to subdirectory
Any issues with 301 redirecting a site's homepage to the English version subdirectory? Example: Original homepage: www.mysite.com New homepage: www.mysite.com/en/ The site is very old and very authoritative and trusted with lots of traffic.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Google not using redirect
We have a GEO-IP redirect in place for our domain, so that users are pointed to the subfolder relevant for their region, e.g: Visit example.com from the UK and you will be redirected to example.com/uk This works fine when you manually type the domain into your browser, however if you search for the site and come to example.com, you end up at example.com I didn't think this was too much of an issue but our subfolders /uk and /au are not getting ranked at all in Google, even for branded keywords. I'm wondering if the fact that Google isn't picking up the redirect means that the pages aren't being indexed properly? Conversely our US region (example.com/us) is being ranked well. Has anyone encountered a similar issue?
Technical SEO | | ahyde0 -
What to do with a 302 redirect after a while
Hi guys, A client of ours has a website with a very bad linkprofile. We adressed this issue and we migrated the website to another domain. We redirected the bad website (cornelisbedding.be) to the new domain (cornelisbedding.com) with a 302 redirect. We didn't want to pass the bad link juice. The problem we are having now is that we can't afford to lose the redirect on cornelisbedding.be. We would lose to much traffic because the old domain still has alot of links that generate good quality traffic. I have read that Google will treat 302 redirects as 301's in the long run. We really want to avoid this.
Technical SEO | | Jacobe
We were thinking of using a meta refresh with a delay on, but in Google's eyes that would be considered spammy. Are their any other suggestions on how to handle this? Thanks you!0 -
301 redirects
Hi, I am a working on a new web site, and I want to redirect all the urls of another site (on a different host) to this one. According to both hosts it is "impossible" to do this for all urls. I don't believe that to be the case, but how do I do this? And, should both sites be hosted on the same server first?
Technical SEO | | vibelingo0 -
Htaccess redirect with question mark
Hi I have a problem setting up my htaccess for a specific page that has a question mark in the link, and one that has a space in the link and also a question mark. So I would like 2 redirects in my htaccess like that: www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=pagename1 to www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=page name2 to www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html I have tried with something like this but doesn't work: RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^page.php?page=pagename1 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html" [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^page.php?page=page name2 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html" [R=301,L] Could someone tell me what exactly I have to change? Thanks
Technical SEO | | darkanweb0 -
301 Redirecting weird URLs with % in them
I've been working on redirecting links reported as 404 in Google webmaster tools. I've stumbled upon 41 URLs that Google is reporting as 404 that include a '%' in the URL, but I don't know how to redirect. Here is an example: URL: bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ Attempted redirect: redirect 301 /bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ http://www.mysite.com/ Unfortunately, after implementing the redirect, http://www.mysite.com/bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ still resolves a 404 error. Anyone successfully fix these errors using Apache .htaccess?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
Ask a Question
Using SEOmoz for the first time, the initial crawl said we have 9,00 errors which were basically 4,500 duplicate pages and 4,500 dupllicate page titles. (ie http://domainname/etc .html, and http://www.domainmname/etc .html
Technical SEO | | FFTCOUK
We altered our website accordingly by changing all internal links to http://www.domainmname/etc .html as Google and all other rngines are listing us using the www. prefix. On the next crawl we now have even more of these duplicate errors. How d we go about removing them as we only have one file for each on the server. Google has down graded our website in April by 35% and ass this is a retail site we are losing a lot of business. I would very much appreciate it if anyone has the time to amswer. Howard0 -
301-redirect
Hi My website is fairly new and i wasnt aware of the difference btw 'website.com' and 'www.website.com' when i started up. It doesnt matter which one i use as long as i am consistent right ? Most of my ingoing links are to mainpage on 'website.com'. I have som ingoing links to 'www.website.com' but also some to 'www.website.com/brandname'. is it enough to 301-redir 'www.website.com' to 'website.com' or does it need to be done on several levels ? I need to have someone do the redirect for me - how can i check its working when its done ? Dan Lærum
Technical SEO | | danlae0