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  4. Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?

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Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?

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  • SEOMG
    SEOMG last edited by Feb 21, 2012, 5:32 PM

    I have a well established domain that's been hit with some penalties. It hasn't been nuked off the map, just downgraded, especially on short-tail, one word type queries. I'm planning on redirecting this domain to another well established domain. The domains already have a history of lots of interlinking and are very similar from a subject matter standpoint.

    I feel that the penalized domain has been hit with an "over-optimization" of link anchor text penalty (I'm hoping it's algorithmic, but it could be manual). My question is if anyone has ever heard of a penalty like this being transferred to another domain through a 301 redirect. My hope is that the penalty just puts a cap on how much juice the redirect can pass, rather than transferring the penalty to the other domain itself.

    Any thoughts on this?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
    • paulanth
      paulanth @Wagada last edited by Mar 25, 2014, 8:10 AM Mar 25, 2014, 8:10 AM

      I had a site from years ago (2006) that I think was under some penalty as it was once ranking quite well but then I made a national site which took over. Eventually black hat tricks from my national site after working until 2013 fell too.

      After re-building the national site and starting to see positive results, I ordered my web firm to re-direct my original site to the new one. Back then I know nothing about back links and link juice but I was monitoring a bunch of words with positionally which suddenly dropped on the same day.

      Bad results continued for at least a month until I submitted a disavow for both my original and national sites. Since then they have improved but still not as good as they were before the redirect. I also think that the disavow may be very slow to take affect as movement is gradual.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • topic:timeago_earlier,8 months
      • Silkstream
        Silkstream @OrionGroup last edited by Jul 23, 2013, 6:45 AM Jul 23, 2013, 6:45 AM

        Hi Scott,

        My intial thoughts were over-optimisation penalty, its just on the second level pages, which are main category pages. The category+Town pages are ranking just fine. We removed two sets of footer links and made the navigation more user friendly with tabbed navigation instead. We fixed the breadcrumb as it wasnt clickable, so the second level pages had barely any internal links. We rewrote content for all pages applying semantics liberally. We added other content to the pages and improved the social signals overall to the domain. We finally did a 301 redirect on the second level pages to new URL's hoping to lose any penalty....but still nothing. Not even ranking in the top 500 for core keyword yet add a stemmed keyword as a prefix and BAM there we are at position 5. Im running out of ideas.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Wagada
          Wagada last edited by Jul 23, 2013, 6:29 AM Jul 23, 2013, 6:29 AM

          Thanks for sharing everyone, this is really interesting stuff. Has anyone tried the 301 redirect from a site which has been penalised to a new domain but with masking enabled so that the user can't tell the redirect has taken place? Will the penalty travel?

          Thanks

          paulanth 1 Reply Last reply Mar 25, 2014, 8:10 AM Reply Quote 0
          • topic:timeago_earlier,about a month
          • OrionGroup
            OrionGroup @Silkstream last edited by Jun 13, 2013, 11:46 AM Jun 13, 2013, 11:46 AM

            Silkstream,

            Are you sure that those pages actually have real penalties or is it algo changes?

            Also, when you search your keyword phrases... what sorts of results show up in the SERPs? Does the local 7-pack show up?  If so, then your Google+ Local listing would most likely be what would get you to rank for those 'local' terms.

            Do you have physical offices in each of the towns represented by the 'category+town' pages ... along with corresponding G+ Local pages for each?  If not, you may have difficulty ranking for many towns not close to the epicenter of your actual business address.

            Silkstream 1 Reply Last reply Jul 23, 2013, 6:45 AM Reply Quote 0
            • Silkstream
              Silkstream last edited by Jun 13, 2013, 9:36 AM Jun 13, 2013, 9:36 AM

              I'd also be interested to hear peoples thoughts on 301 redirects internally.

              My website is structured like this:

              Home > Categories > Categories+Town

              The homepage and the Categories+Town page all rank for intended keywords, yet the "over-optimised" category pages do not rank at all, they are still indexed, just not ranking for the core keywords.

              Will creating new URL's and 301 redirecting the old pages internally pass on any penalty that may be in place, algorithmic or otherwise?

              OrionGroup 1 Reply Last reply Jun 13, 2013, 11:46 AM Reply Quote 0
              • topic:timeago_earlier,3 months
              • OrionGroup
                OrionGroup last edited by Mar 23, 2013, 7:36 PM Mar 23, 2013, 7:36 PM

                Any update on this?

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • topic:timeago_earlier,8 months
                • invision
                  invision @KeriMorgret last edited by Jul 31, 2012, 7:05 PM Jul 31, 2012, 7:05 PM

                  I can see why a penalty would transfer a penalty to a new domain, if in fact it's a new domain. It's a fresh domain with 0 history and 0 backlinks.

                  But, if the penalized domain was 301'd to an existing, already established website, that's the kind of situation where I don't see why it would make sense to transfer the penalty. That's where you can hurt competitors.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • topic:timeago_earlier,9 days
                  • KeriMorgret
                    KeriMorgret @KeriMorgret last edited by Jul 22, 2012, 1:43 PM Jul 22, 2012, 1:43 PM

                    Thanks for clarifying! It is always helpful to know whether a statement is based on personal experience/experience of others, or based off of something that Google has said in their official communications.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • kellymandingo
                      kellymandingo @KeriMorgret last edited by Jul 22, 2012, 6:34 AM Jul 22, 2012, 6:34 AM

                      I have worked with many people who have 301 a site for whatever reason and although i would not call myself an expert i am quite familiar with what i do.

                      In the UK there was a big SEO company that got the unnatural links message and then they had a drop of around -50 to -150 places created a new URL and recovered their rankings.

                      This same company who had many many clients also used this practice on their customers (the one's that stuck with them that is) and at the beginning  all were successful because the time spent correcting any issues was taken and links replaced

                      After a while they got complacent and would just 301 sites that they had spammed which took a drop in rankings and at first all seemed good, then after a few weeks they would drop, these were the sites that were caught in penguin or panda and did not resolve the out lying issue's be it over optimisation, thin content or just the fact that the links pointing to the site were devalued resulting in a loss of ranking juice.  once they addressed these issues (not removing links) the sites returned to a decent level higher than the original site after the penalty.

                      As i mentioned in the earlier post if a penalty could be passed through a 301 it would be easy to point at a competitor,

                      I do suppose its going to be one of those questions that in near on impossible to prove 100% and no real credible source is going to exist they are just going to be examples like mine, but i have seen it with my own eyes,

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • KeriMorgret
                        KeriMorgret @kellymandingo last edited by Jul 22, 2012, 2:04 AM Jul 22, 2012, 2:04 AM

                        Hi Kelly,

                        Thanks for your response on this older thread! I'm interested in knowing more about your sources for this 100% claim. Could you share with us some more background about your answer?

                        kellymandingo KeriMorgret invision 3 Replies Last reply Jul 31, 2012, 7:05 PM Reply Quote 0
                        • kellymandingo
                          kellymandingo last edited by Jul 20, 2012, 8:52 PM Jul 20, 2012, 8:52 PM

                          The penalty wont pass through a 301 and that's 100% , however if you have Panda or Penguin issues that are not cleared before you 301 the site then the algorithmic penalty will picked up.

                          If a site had a penalty and was passed, then all i would do is 301 my penalised site to my competitor , As Mark Higgins who responded in this thread has done a 301 and all initially ok but i bet there are issues and would like to see the timeline of of drop after the initial 301

                          KeriMorgret 1 Reply Last reply Jul 22, 2012, 2:04 AM Reply Quote -1
                          • topic:timeago_earlier,about a month
                          • GuillermoOrtiz
                            GuillermoOrtiz Subscriber last edited by Jun 18, 2012, 3:51 PM Jun 18, 2012, 3:51 PM

                            I would have to agree with Rand about the negation of value of the links vs the penalty. I just had a client we picked up who had a very polluted backlink profile and dropped off the face of the earth after Penguin. When we launched his newly designed site, we gave it a fresh domain name that retained his branding and 301'd his old site. So far it has worked beautifully and given us a fresh start.

                            I'm also in agreement that penalties passing through 301's is a can of worms for Google.....

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • topic:timeago_earlier,14 days
                            • MarkHIggins
                              MarkHIggins @randfish last edited by Jun 5, 2012, 12:25 AM Jun 5, 2012, 12:25 AM

                              That's what I was thinking. A great one page wordpress site with some great content about wedding photography in New England.

                              Work on the linking issues and when I recover do the 301 to the new domain

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • randfish
                                randfish @MarkHIggins last edited by Jun 4, 2012, 11:20 PM Jun 4, 2012, 11:20 PM

                                Wow - amazing. That's a rarity indeed. I've seen only one other case (post-Penguin) where a 301 caused a penalty.

                                I think your inelegant solution is likely the right one, but definitely sucks.

                                MarkHIggins 1 Reply Last reply Jun 5, 2012, 12:25 AM Reply Quote 0
                                • MarkHIggins
                                  MarkHIggins last edited by Jun 4, 2012, 10:31 PM Jun 4, 2012, 10:31 PM

                                  3 weeks later and blamo! Dropped off the face of the earth. I think there is some negative penalty being passed from my old site to my new one.

                                  I've been cleaning up the link profile of the old site, but many webmasters won't respond.

                                  I'm at the point where I'm going to remove the 301 and set up a one page wordpress website on the old domain directing existing and past customer to the new site. Inelegant solution, but I can't think of anything else to do. Suggestion?

                                  randfish 1 Reply Last reply Jun 4, 2012, 11:20 PM Reply Quote 1
                                  • MarkHIggins
                                    MarkHIggins @randfish last edited by Jun 4, 2012, 10:30 PM Jun 4, 2012, 10:30 PM

                                    3 weeks later and blamo! Dropped off the face of the earth. I think there is some negative penalty being passed from my old site to my new one.

                                    I've been cleaning up the link profile of the old site, but many webmasters won't respond.

                                    I'm at the point where I'm going to remove the 301 and set up a one page wordpress website on the old domain directing existing and past customer to the new site. Inelegant solution, but I can't think of anything else to do. Suggestion?

                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                    • topic:timeago_earlier,20 days
                                    • MarkHIggins
                                      MarkHIggins @randfish last edited by May 15, 2012, 1:05 PM May 15, 2012, 1:05 PM

                                      It's working so far, but we'll see if the results hold true. I've been using the Copyblogger Scribe SEO wordpress plugin to make sure that my writing of posts and pages is natural and that keywords I'm trying to rank for are not over optimized.

                                      | Keyword |   | Current Rank |   | Change |
                                      | newport wedding photographer | 3 | up     > 47 |   |
                                      | boston wedding photography | 4 | up     > 46 |   |
                                      | newport wedding photographers | 4 | up     > 46 |   |
                                      | boston wedding photographers | 5 | up     > 45 |   |
                                      | boston wedding photographer | 5 | up     > 45 |   |

                                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                                      • randfish
                                        randfish @MarkHIggins last edited by May 9, 2012, 4:21 PM May 9, 2012, 4:21 PM

                                        Thanks so much for sharing Mark! Examples like these are a gold mine for the rest of us (and good luck on moving from gray hat to white hat) 🙂

                                        MarkHIggins 2 Replies Last reply Jun 4, 2012, 10:30 PM Reply Quote 1
                                        • MarkHIggins
                                          MarkHIggins last edited by May 9, 2012, 3:54 PM May 9, 2012, 2:26 PM

                                          I just went this route on Monday so I guess you can call me the lab rat.

                                          I had a site ranking very well, and in the last 60 days with the latest panda and the penguin update it fell from page 1 with top 3 results for close to 50 money keywords to basically page 5 or below.

                                          I am a photographer and was an engineer before so I love things that are technical like SEO. Before joining SEOMoz I did quite a few gray hat things that I learned from forums such as a ton of exact match anchor text on tons of irrelevant blogs, Senuke, forum profiles. Basically a ton of crap, but low and behold it worked and I ranked well until now. The problem was that I created such a huge mess with inbound links that it's impossible to clean it up. I have thousands of crummy irrelevant links (Rand would need to take me out behind the woodshed)

                                          So what does all this have to do with a 301 redirect?

                                          My old website was at the domain markandrewphotographer that I used the past three years (2008 to now). The good news is that when I started in photography full time in 2006 I used a domain markandrewphotography.com and in 2008 a branding consultant had me switch to the markandrewphotographer domain because it was more about me than the photography in attracting clients. (That was a big trend in out industry for a couple of years) I kept the old markandrewphotography domain as it had a page rank of 2 and did a site wide 301 to the markandrewphotographer domain.

                                          This Monday I moved my site to the markandrewphotography domain and then decided to 301 the photographer.com domain that is penalized and we'll see what happens. The worst thing is I get the penalty passed and I can then just remove the 301 and slow work on changing the links cape of the site and then try again in a few months.

                                          The markandrewphotography domain is a clean domain. It's almost 6 years old and has seven links. I will link using only white hat methods with this site within my niche. I started changing some of the inbound links yesterday on industry websites that I am listed such as weddingwire, marthastewart and that are considered authority sites. I plan on doing a few links a day and making sure that I use partial match anchor text and that my brand name keywords out number other keywords but a good margin, maybe 70% branded to 30% partial match.

                                          I also wonder if I was outed by a competitor. The person ranking #1 for search terms like "boston wedding photographers" is a one man photography studio, but in opensiteexplorer her has 440,000 links?

                                          randfish 1 Reply Last reply May 9, 2012, 4:21 PM Reply Quote 7
                                          • topic:timeago_earlier,3 months
                                          • Syed1
                                            Syed1 @TecmarkUK last edited by Feb 22, 2012, 6:22 PM Feb 22, 2012, 6:22 PM

                                            Taking into account what your're saying here, one would then assume that inbound backlinks could never cause a penalty too - since competitors could do that intentionally as well? If Matt Cutts was reading this, he'd probably be all over you...

                                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                            • SEOMG
                                              SEOMG last edited by Feb 22, 2012, 6:04 PM Feb 22, 2012, 6:04 PM

                                              Thanks for the input everyone. I probably will end up implementing the redirect, but not for a few more months, as it's going to take some serious preparation.

                                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                              • Syed1
                                                Syed1 last edited by Feb 22, 2012, 2:29 PM Feb 22, 2012, 2:29 PM

                                                Since there are mixed opinions here, probably my short 'yes' didn't help, so here is my opinion, in little more details.

                                                If 301s could ONLY pass juice but not penalty, wouldn't everyone try to get as many 301s as possible - ie. acquire dozens of sites, pay other webmasters to do 301s, etc? Think about it. In effect, the 301 would act as a 'paid' backlink except only more powerful and it would be much easier for everyone (with $) to game rankings.

                                                If you still don't believe 301s can potentially pass a penalty, you can refer to this thread:
                                                http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4323639.htm

                                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                                • TecmarkUK
                                                  TecmarkUK Subscriber last edited by Feb 22, 2012, 10:41 AM Feb 22, 2012, 10:41 AM

                                                  In my experience, penalties are not passed through a 301 redirect.

                                                  Think about how open this would be to abuse?? You get a domain blacklisted then just 301 redirect it to a competitor? It would be too easy for people to completely abuse that so I can't see, just on that practical level, how passing a penalty through a 301 redirect would ever be a consideration.

                                                  Where I have dealt with websites that have been penalised and have subsequently set up new domains and 301 redirected the old ones, I've never seen a penalty passed through that redirect.

                                                  Syed1 1 Reply Last reply Feb 22, 2012, 6:22 PM Reply Quote 2
                                                  • randfish
                                                    randfish last edited by Feb 22, 2012, 4:34 AM Feb 22, 2012, 4:34 AM

                                                    I've seen a bunch of these and weirdly, the 301s do seem to (often) remove the penalty in cases where it's a true penalty. However, what you're describing sounds like it could just be a negation of the value of many external links (which is much more common than the actual "penalty" that downgrades you).

                                                    If that's the case, 301'ing likely won't do much positive or negative - it will pass on the "juice" that Google's still counting and thinks is legit, but probably not the devalued juice (though, to be honest, I've seen a few times when it has and black hats sometimes do use this strategy - constantly re-pointing stuff as it gets hit). This certainly isn't recommended, as eventually, you will have that "burnt-to-the-ground" effect. If you're looking to go clean and white hat on a different domain, and want to take some of the content and link efforts you have in the penalized site, that's certainly a way to go.

                                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 6
                                                    • myloseo
                                                      myloseo last edited by Feb 22, 2012, 1:18 AM Feb 22, 2012, 1:18 AM

                                                      im shocked by the people who think a penalty can be passed, definately do the redirect. You won't be passing the penalty. No point losing you're link juice. If your not going to redirect it at your site, PM me, i'l take the juice haha

                                                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
                                                      • Syed1
                                                        Syed1 last edited by Feb 21, 2012, 8:33 PM Feb 21, 2012, 8:33 PM

                                                        In short - Yes it can

                                                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                                        • ResslerMotors
                                                          ResslerMotors @SEOMG last edited by Feb 21, 2012, 7:21 PM Feb 21, 2012, 7:21 PM

                                                          I've talked to a couple people that have said that 301's will pass on the penalty.  A better alternative would be to try move the links over to your new website in waves.  If you experience a drop, then you know the link exists in that group.  Just do some quick checks on their domain, and see what you find.

                                                          Of course, if you are working with 10,000+ links, your batches are going to have to be pretty large.

                                                          Then again, if you don't have more than a couple hundred, go through the various domains, and try to identify problematic links.

                                                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                                                          • JGar-28032
                                                            JGar-28032 @SEOMG last edited by Feb 21, 2012, 6:39 PM Feb 21, 2012, 6:39 PM

                                                            Man, please don't sue me if this doesn't work, but I say go for it.

                                                            Think about it like this. What's to stop a competitor from getting a bunch of those links, wait til a site is penalized and then redirecting it to you? Nothing. It's unlikely I think, and quite the investment but it could happen, right?

                                                            Plus, if you're getting hit because your links look shotty to Google, then wouldn't a redirect to a well-established site help to curb that perception.

                                                            I vote do it. But seriously, let me know how it goes.

                                                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
                                                            • SEOMG
                                                              SEOMG @JGar-28032 last edited by Feb 21, 2012, 6:32 PM Feb 21, 2012, 6:32 PM

                                                              Hi Josh,

                                                              To answer you questions,

                                                              I have some direct feedback from Google that I have links that look like they are designed to manipulate pagerank. And some of the pages that were hit particularly hard with targeted anchor text were ones that fell a greater amount than the rest of them.

                                                              To complicate the matter, the site was hit by the first iteration of Panda on 2/24 last year. It was not torched like some sites were, but fell a fair amount. It has recovered quite a bit on a lot of keywords...except for the short-tail vanity keywords that are doing worse.

                                                              So, I think the site is still a little pandalized, though it is hard to say, since this link penalty is likely having an impact...and I believe Google's increased emphasis on brand signals is part of the reason for decreased short tail rankings as well.

                                                              I'm making the changes to clean things up but this is a huge site with a lot of history and lots of links and it's not that easy to do quickly.

                                                              Also, part of the reason for the redirect is that Google is loving the domain that I'm redirecting to - it has higher rankings than ever across the board. I've always had the domains separate for technical reasons, but that situation is changing so now I have the option to combine them for the first time. So it's not "just" for SEO - it makes some sense for them to be together.

                                                              JGar-28032 ResslerMotors 2 Replies Last reply Feb 21, 2012, 7:21 PM Reply Quote 0
                                                              • JGar-28032
                                                                JGar-28032 last edited by Feb 21, 2012, 6:10 PM Feb 21, 2012, 6:10 PM

                                                                It's always so hard to get a straight answer on this. There isn't much in the way of an official one from Google (of course), and I've experienced what I think to be both results (penalty passed, and penalty not passed).

                                                                Personally, I think it has a lot to do with the penalty, etc.

                                                                More importantly though, why do you think it has been penalized. You mention that it hasn't completely lost visibility, but you've lost rankings. There are many things that can cause that.

                                                                First, I would check this vid to get a grasp on your situation:

                                                                http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-oh-i-got-a-penalty

                                                                If you still think you have a penalty it can be a bit tricky. Like I said, I constantly hear debates on this, and have anecdotedly seen both results. It's tough to test really.

                                                                I would take a step back and put the SEO goggles down. Ask yourself "How do I genuinely fix this situation?" Not the penalty itself, but the cause of the penalty. If you think a 301 is your best hope, then go for it.

                                                                As for actually redirecting the penalty, I don't think that's going to happen...unless you did something really naughty. Rather I think people 301 without fixing the underlying issues, and when they get penalized they assume that it was transferred via the redirect.

                                                                I'm pretty interested though. Let us know what happens/what you decide to do.

                                                                SEOMG 1 Reply Last reply Feb 21, 2012, 6:32 PM Reply Quote 1
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                                                                • Andrew_In_Search_of_Answers

                                                                  302 > 302 > 301 Redirect Chain Issue & Advice

                                                                  Hi everyone, I recently relaunched our website and everything went well. However, while checking site health, I found a new redirect chain issue (302 > 302 > 301 > 200) when the user requests the HTTP and non-www version of our URL. Here's what's happening: • 302 #1 -- http://domain.com/example/ 302 redirects to http://domain.com/PnVKV/example/ (the 5 characters in the appended "subfolder" are dynamic and change each time)
                                                                  • 302 #2 -- http://domain.com/PnVKV/example/ 302 redirects BACK to http://domain.com/example/
                                                                  • 301 #1 -- http://domain.com/example/ 301 redirects to https://www.domain.com/example/ (as it should have done originally)
                                                                  • 200 -- https://www.domain.com/example/ resolves properly We're hosted on AWS, and one of my cloud architects investigated and reported GoDaddy was causing the two 302s. That's backed up online by posts like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46307518/random-5-alpha-character-path-appended-to-requests and https://www.godaddy.com/community/Managing-Domains/My-domain-name-not-resolving-correctly-6-random-characters-are/td-p/60782. I reached out to GoDaddy today, expecting them to say it wasn't a problem on their end, but they actually confirmed this was a known bug (as of September 2017) but there is no timeline for a fix. I asked the first rep I spoke with on the phone to send a summary, and here's what he provided in his own words: From the information gathered on my end and I was able to get from our advanced tech support team, the redirect issue is in a bug report and many examples have been logged with the help of customers, but no log will be made in this case due to the destination URL being met. Most issues being logged are site not resolving properly or resolving errors. I realize the redirect can cause SEO issues with the additional redirects occurring. Also no ETA has been logged for the issue being reported. I do feel for you since I now understand more the SEO issues it can cause. I myself will keep an eye out for the bug report and see if any progress is being made any info outside of this I will email you directly. Thanks. Issue being Experienced: Domains that are set to Go Daddy forwarding IPs may sometimes resolve to a url that has extra characters appended to the end of them. Example: domain1.com forwards to http://www.domain2.com/TLYEZ. However it should just forward to http://www.domain2.com. I think this answers what some Moz users may have been experiencing sporadically, especially this previous thread: https://moz.com/community/q/forwarded-vanity-domains-suddenly-resolving-to-404-with-appended-url-s-ending-in-random-5-characters. My question: Given everything stated above and what we know about the impact of redirect chains on SEO, how severe should I rate this? I told my Director that I would recommend we move away from GoDaddy (something I don't want to do, but feel we _**have **_to do), but she viewed it as just another technical SEO issue and one that didn't necessarily need to be prioritized over others related to the relaunch. How would you respond in my shoes? On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the biggest), how big of a technical SEO is this? Would you make it a priority? At the very least, I thought the Moz community would benefit from the GoDaddy confirmation of this issue and knowing about the lack of an ETA on a fix. Thanks!

                                                                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 10, 2018, 4:35 PM | Andrew_In_Search_of_Answers
                                                                  0
                                                                • VeteransFirstMarketing

                                                                  SEO impact of 301 redirects based on IP addresses from a specific state

                                                                  Hello Moz Community! We are facing an issue that may or may not be unique, but need some advice and/or clarification on the best way to address the issue. We recently rebranded and launched a new site under a new domain and things have been progressing well.  However, despite all the up front legwork on trademarks and licensing, we have recently encountered a hiccup that forces us to revert to the old URL/branding for one specific state.  This may be a temporary issue that lasts a couple of months or it could potentially be in the court system for a couple of years. One potential solution we have discussed is to redirect the new site to the old site based on IP addresses for the state in question.  Looking for any guidance on what type of impact this may have on SEO.  Also open to any other suggestions or guidance on dealing with this situation. Thanks

                                                                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 29, 2016, 2:23 PM | VeteransFirstMarketing
                                                                  0
                                                                • jasonwdexter

                                                                  Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice

                                                                  A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!

                                                                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 8, 2013, 12:27 PM | jasonwdexter
                                                                  0
                                                                • BeytzNet

                                                                  How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?

                                                                  Hi All, In order to avoid duplication errors we've decided to redirect old categories (merge some categories).
                                                                  In the past we have been very generous with the number of categories we assigned each post. One category needs to be redirected back to blog home (removed completely) while a couple others should be merged. Afterwords we will re-categorize some of the old posts. What is the proper way to do so?
                                                                  We are not technical, Is there a plugin that can assist? Thanks

                                                                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 10, 2013, 9:45 AM | BeytzNet
                                                                  0
                                                                • COEDMediaGroup

                                                                  301 redirect with /? in URL

                                                                  For a Wordpress site that has the ending / in the URL with a ? after it... how can you do a 301 redirect to strip off anything after the / For example how to take this URL domain.com/article-name/?utm_source=feedburner and 301 to this URL domain.com/article-name/ Thank you for the help

                                                                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 24, 2013, 6:25 AM | COEDMediaGroup
                                                                  0
                                                                • BrianAlpert78

                                                                  Can I make 301 redirects on a Windows server (without access to IIS)?

                                                                  Hey everyone, I've been trying to figure out a way to set up some 301 redirects to handle the broken links left behind after a site restructuring, but I can only ever find information on 2 methods that I can't use (as far as I can tell). The first method is to do some stuff with an htaccess file, but that looks like it only works on Linux-based servers. The method described for Windows servers is generally to install this IIS rewrite/redirect module and run that, but I don't think our web hosting company allows users to log directly into the server, so I wouldn't be able to use the IIS thing. Is there any other way to get a 301 redirect set up? And is this uncommon for a web hosting company to do, or do you all just run your sites on Linux-based servers or your own Windows machines? Thanks!

                                                                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 4, 2013, 8:53 PM | BrianAlpert78
                                                                  0
                                                                • brianmcc

                                                                  Reverse Proxy better than 301 redirect?

                                                                  Are reverse proxies that much better than 301 redirects? Should I invest the time in doing this? I found out about reverse proxies here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo

                                                                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 6, 2011, 7:14 PM | brianmcc
                                                                  0

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