Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?
-
Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names.
The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to?
It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months
-
I'd go for quality over quantity. Some guest blogs, perhaps, or maybe links from vendor or partner websites. I'd be very careful to use a natural mix of anchor text, too. Don't want to give Google any reason at all to be suspicious.
-
Adam,
I am highly considering 301-ing the homepage to our main source of revenue and because it actually ranks along with our other pages. If we do this i am guessing we'd be taking more of a hit on our other new website, which i am willing to do.
This sounds like the best option to keep revenue a float while we build these brands back up. Assuming I will be launching everything in August, how many links to recommend I build to each domain?
Thanks,
Paul
-
Hi Paul,
I went through a very similar situation at the end of last year with a client of mine. That client's business broke apart into two other companies. It was scary because that old company's website had a lot of authority, ranked for many, many terms (long tail and head terms).
Adam's recommendation of getting links to the new domains is critical. In the case of my client, one of the new websites did have a few links (a dozen or so) while the other website had no links. The website without links did not perform as well. I would recommend you start that process now, even if those links point to a "coming soon" type home page on those new domains.
For the home page, we created a splash page that offered visitors a choice of going to one company or the other. We did put deeper links into both sites on this page, though that was more a usability consideration. I wouldn't redirect the home page to either website, unless there is a clear usability case to be made for doing so. That way the splash page acts a communication to users and Google about the new direction of the website.
Also, so that you know...Google still has that page indexed but after the first 2-3 months, that page started to lose rankings and traffic from search. I'm not sure if it lost rankings because of it being a splash page or because we started changing links (I suspect the links though the change in the content of the home page certainly played a role). Either way, that was the desired intention; you don't want the splash page to rank.
All the other pages on the site were 301 redirected to the appropriate pages of the new websites. We had no troubles redirecting to multiple domains. Adam is right though that this may be seen as spammy so be careful with this. We started out in small batches of pages as a test before going full on into the redirects. If you can, I'd start with that. Measure, test, repeat with another small batch, etc.
Finally, I will tell you that we did see a drop in rankings/traffic to the two new websites (that is, the total Google and Bing activity for the two sites was less than where we had been with the old website). We are now at the seven month mark and starting to regain steam. Not quite where it was this time last year, but I am seeing gains. SO, make sure that you brace for impact and plan for a slowdown when you do this.
I hope I was able to help you out. Thanks,
Matthew -
A few suggestions:
- Anything you can do to get the new domains indexed and a few links built to them well in advance of the redirect might be a good idea. I've never had it happen myself, but I've heard of a few cases of lost rankings when redirecting to a fresh domain.
- Once you do the redirects, try to get your most important links changed to the new domain. (Redirects to lose some link juice and/or decay over time.)
- Make sure you are redirecting each page on the old site to the most relevant page on the new site.
- I've never redirected every single URL on one domain to pages on two other domains. You might want to ask around to see if Google might frown upon that (I can imagine this is a tactic spammers might try to use to pass link juice to a bunch of domains). I'm sure someone else has done this and could advise.
- Any chance of keeping your current domain for one of the two sites?
I can think of a few options for the homepage:
- Don't redirect it. Create a splash page with a "which do you want" option and links to both domains.
- Redirect it to the domain that is most important to you.
- Redirect it to the domain that will be most relevant to the highest number of users.
- Redirect it to the domain that will be most relevant to the keywords the homepage currently ranks for.
Hope this helps!
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
-
The client wants to close the current e-commerce website and open a new one.
The client wants to close the current e-commerce website and open a new one on a completely different engine without losing income. I have no idea how to approach this topic. Old site has over 100 000 pages, and in terms of SEO is quite great - we hit almost every important keyword in our niche but thanks to heavy modifications of source code site become unmaintainable. Content on new shop will be almost 1:1 with old page but: domain will be different (I can't explain to the client that this will damage our core brand). Beacuse of that I'm forcing idea of going with brandname.com/shop domain instead of newshop.com beacuse our main brand is well known to our customers, not as much as old shop but still better than new shop brand. engine and design will be different we will lost almost 30 000 backlinks. budget: only IT. No content and seo tools budget. BONUS: client hired before me some "SEO magician" - now SEO audit score with tools like ahrefs etc. is around 6 - 12% for 100 000 pages on new shop. Great. Does anyone have idea how to approach such task with minimal losses?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | meliegree0 -
301 redirecting to anchor points
A client has just given me a list of redirect URLs as requested of them. However, they're wanting to redirect a bunch of pages to various anchor points within the same page. For example: /pages/about might redirect to: /pages/our-story#our-mission And: /pages/history might redirect to:Â /pages/our-story#history Is there any problem with this? I've never seen or been asked to redirect like this before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
HTTPS 301 Redirect Question
Hi, I've just migrated our previous site (siteA) to our new url (siteB) and I've setup 301 redirects from the old url (siteA) to the new (siteB). However, the old url operated on https and users who try to go to the old url with https (https://siteA.com) receive a message that the server cannot be reached, while the users who go to http://siteA.com are redirected to siteB. Is there a way to 301 redirect https traffic? Also, from an SEO perspective if the site and all the references on Google search are https://siteA.com does a 301 redirect of http pass the domain authority, etc. or is https required? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | opstart0 -
301 Redirection
Hi there guys, I have a question about redirection. My boss has just bought a new domain name and he wants it to redirect to our current site when looking for specific products. www.example.com is our current website www.productname.com is the new domain So the new domain would be redirected to example.com. Would that be considered against Google Policies? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
New Site Structure and 404s. Should I redirect everything?
Hi fellow Mozzers, I've recently re-released a site and also took the opportunity to change/clean up the URL structure. As a result of this Google is starting to report many 404s such as below; blog/tag/get-fit/ blog/tag/top-presents/ Most of these 404 errors are from tag or category pages which simply don't exist any more (because they were unnecessary, crap or irrelevant). Although there's also a few posts I've removed. My question is whether it's worth redirecting all these tags and pages to the root directory of the site's new blog (as there isn't really a new page which is similar or appropriate) or just to leave them as 404 errors. Bearing in mind; They don't really rank for anything There's little if any links pointing to these pages Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Multiple Versions of Pages on One Website
Hi! My name is Sarah and I work for a brand design firm in Los Angeles. Currently we're working on a website redesign for our company. We have three pages of content that we want to add to the site, but are unsure if we will get penalized by Google if we add all of them since they may come off as too similar? The pages are: Branding
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jawa
Personal Branding
Corporate Branding Does anyone know if our SEO will be penalized for having all three of these pages separately, or should we just focus on Branding, and include Personal Branding and Corporate Branding as sub categories on the page? Thanks! Sarah P.S. IÂ Â should also say, we will have more than just the three aforementioned pages. It's going to be a big site with around 200+ pages. (Half of them being services, which is where the Branding, PB and CB pages will be located.)0 -
Regarding 301 Redirect!
Hello, I heard that 301 redirect can be good for newly registered domain names can i buy a old domain name and put 301 redirect on it to my newly registered niche market domain name. Shall i buy only 1 domain name and put 301 redirect to my newly registered domain names or i can do this for more than 1 old domains i purchased?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anand20100