301 Re-direct Implementation & Its Possible Aftermaths
-
Hi all,
I'm currently working on a domain that seems to be 'unofficially' blacklisted by Google. The reason behind my belief are,
-
Ranking process of KW became stagnant.
-
Current crawling and indexing rate has been decreased.
-
Site performance deteriorate after every Search engine update or major data refreshes.
-
And few major indications pointing out that search engines might started doubting its authority.
The site is live n running for about 10+ yr and consists of 6000+ pages out of which 5000+ pages are indexed.
The site also have some serious issues like,
-
The site has been 2 times penalized by Google.
-
The link ratio & inbound link quality of the site is quite unnatural (mostly directory links, links form spammy sites, bad-neighborhood links etc. )
-
The site is in flat file and not CMS, thus making it extremely difficult to maintain and update it.
Due to the above reasons I was thinking of implementing 301 re-direction. I would like to redirect this poor performing existing domain to a new fresh one keeping the URL structure and files same and maintaining 1:1 redirection rules.
I've read an awesome article by Danny Dover on 301 Re direction of a site here in SEOMOZ. It seems that if any one follow the steps mentioned there can actually get benefited by the overall re direction process. Now I'd like know your suggestion about following points:
1. Considering the factors that I've stated, do you think that it would be good to go with this re direction idea?
2. If 301 is implemented then what can be its immediate effects on current rankings and site performance?
3. Assuming that the ranks drowned or gets completely vanished from SERP, after what approx time period can be regain back?
4. Any other suggestion that might help me out to better understand the situation.
-
-
Thanks Mark,
We have actually decided to get rid of the old domain and move forward with the new one. Your suggestions are really useful and it helps a lot during this transition.
-
One thing to bear in mind is that you are never going to retain all of the link juice that you've got with the old site when redirecting to the new site.
If I were you, I would really try to clean up the backlink profile of the site as much as possible before doing any sort of redirection. I would argue that you might even be able to salvage the existing site's rankings by doing some rescue work in terms of your link profile.
One very important consideration is that your domain is 10+ years old already, which is in itself a pretty good authority indicator.
My suggestions to you:
-
Clean up really spammy links by using a tool such as Open Site Explorer to find and weed out the bad links. Follow whatever process is required to remove some of these links. (Contact the administrator of the site, remove your URL from the directory etc.)
-
Help dilute the effect of the spammy links by building new, higher quality backlinks to your site. Diversification is very important. If you have 100 spammy links, but 200 really good links, I don't feel like the Big G will worry too much.
-
Check your on-page factors. What sort of content do you have on your site? Are you stuffing keywords everywhere? Are you using unique content, or spun nonsense? Do you have title tags and headings that are both relevant and unique? Are you duplicating any content throughout your site?
The problem, however, with salvaging the site is that, like you say, you're running on a static platform.
If your rankings are really that bad now, perhaps it would be a good idea to start fresh. Just bear in mind that this won't be a quick fix, particularly if you're using a new domain.
If you insist on creating a new site (CMS based) and using the same content, then you'll have to do the redirect to avoid duplicate content issues. I would just take a long, hard look at your content to ensure that it's really worth copying across rather than starting fresh.
Put it this way, I would use the 301 redirect to inform the search engines that the site has been transferred and is under a new domain now. I wouldn't use the 301 redirect to try and salvage much link juice.
-
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
-
Selectively 301 redirects
Hi there: We are developing a pretty typical 301 redirection strategy. We basically are moving blog posts from a former sub-domain to the top level of our new designed site. We've pulled a site crawl of the old sub-domain and want to make sure we redirect any posts with a significant backlink profile to their current counterparts. Most other posts are just going to be redirected to the main 'front door' of our new blog. Is there a way to selectively redirect a certain number of posts and then 'globally' redirect everything else to a single URL? I would assume this would be a pretty common task, but can't find an easy way to do what we want to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
How to create AMP Pages for product website?
How to create AMP Pages for product website? I mean we can create it easily when we have wordpress through plugin, what about when we have millions of pages, It would be too tedious to create amp version of every page. So, is there any alternative way to create amp version?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sachin.kaushik0 -
How to get rid of two 301 redirects?
I have two 301s from http://www. to https://non-www version of my site. I wonder how can get rid of one so it will look like this: 301-200 instead of 301-301-200 All other combinations work fine and give me 301-200 status codes. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lovemozforever0 -
Re-using content
Hi, I've just sold the domain for a website, so I'm free to re-purpose the content over to another website I own. How can I make sure that Gg doesn't deem it as duplicate? Do I need to let Gg naturally realise that the 'original' website no longer has the content on it? Do I need to hold-off putting the content live again? Should I notify Gg by-way of a de-index request, etc (assuming the domain won't incur any difficulty if I do this)? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newstd1000 -
Woocommerce SEO & Duplicate content?
Hi Moz fellows, I'm new to Woocommerce and couldn't find help on Google about certain SEO-related things. All my past projects were simple 5 pages websites + a blog, so I would just no-index categories, tags and archives to eliminate duplicate content errors. But with Woocommerce Product categories and tags, I've noticed that many e-Commerce websites with a high domain authority actually rank for certain keywords just by having their category/tags indexed. For example keyword 'hippie clothes' = etsy.com/category/hippie-clothes (fictional example) The problem is that if I have 100 products and 10 categories & tags on my site it creates THOUSANDS of duplicate content errors, but If I 'non index' categories and tags they will never rank well once my domain authority rises... Anyone has experience/comments about this? I use SEO by Yoast plugin. Your help is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance. -Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcandre1 -
Massive URL Migration with thousands of 301
Hey Everyone! I'm currently working on a project that we have A Lot of product pages and we have thousands of URL's that need to be 301'd over. I know this can be a major issue and could lead to tons of errors. What is everyone's thought of doing such a huge Migration, Should I do it all in phases? or should I do them all at once so they can all be indexed together? What would you suggest to be the best way to go about doing such a massive migration?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
Google Not Seeing My 301's
Good Morning! So I have recently been putting in a LOT of 301's into the .htaccess, no 301 plugins here, and GWMT is still seeing a lot of the pages as soft 404's. I mark them as fixed, but they come back. I will also note, the previous webmaster has ample code in our htaccess which is rewriting our URL structure. I don't know if that is actually having any effect on the issue but I thought I would add that. All fo the 301's are working, Google isn't seeing them. Thanks Guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Organic Rankings for the US & Australia
I have a site that is ranking well for competitive keywords in the US, but would like to have it rank in Australia as well. Although there's no direct correlation, I'm running large Adwords campaigns in both countries. I've read to write localized content for each region, but not sure if this is effective as it used to be. I've also read to use location markup and microformats. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NickMacario0