Will a timed 301 redirect work for Googlebot?
-
Our client is changing brand names and domain names. We know we need to 301 redirect the old domain, but for marketing reasons we want people to see a short message saying that the brand has changed and that they will be redirected.
Example:
| |
Our concern is how, or if, Googlebot will intepret the redirect. Will this accomplish our SEO objective of moving the value of the page to the new domain, or do we need to do just a plain old fashioned 301 redirect and not even let the page load?
Thanks for your help.
-
Thank you Kane.
I know the message isn't going to be permanent, but I imagine that the client would want it on there for perhaps several weeks.
-
Option 1:
One option would be to set up a normal 301 redirect and have a pop-up message on the new site that explains the branding change to all new visitors.
Option 2:
Another solution would be to set up all 301 redirects to forward to the new URL + a tracking parameter, such as http://www.newdomain.com?redirected=true.
You could then instruct Google to ignore the tracking tag by (A) not displaying the parameter in the canonical tag, and (B) telling Google to ignore the parameter via Google Webmaster Tools.
You should be able to display a message when that parameter is present, and when they click through to another page on the new site, it can go away.
A variation on this would be to do the same thing and use normal Google Analytics UTM tracking parameters. Google will definitely know to ignore those and you should be able to display a popup based upon those as well
Theoretically option 2 shouldn't cause any problems. In an ideal world, you would test this first.
--
There are probably other options that would work - but those two come to mind first.
Does this message need to be permanent or is the client ok with leaving it up temporarily?
--
In case you haven't already, take a look over the rest of Google's suggestions on migrating the domain: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
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
-
Website url structure after redesign and 301 redirect chains - Looking for advice
OK, been trying to piece together what is best practice for someone I'm working with, so here goes; Website was redesigned, changed urls from url a to url b. 301's put in place. However, the new url structure is not optimal. It's an e-commerce store, and all products are put in the root folder now: www.website.com/product-name A better, more organized url structure would be: www.website.com/category/product-name I think we can all agree on that. However, I'm torn on whether it's worth changing everything again, and how to handle things in terms of redirects. The way I see things, it would result in a redirect chain, which is not great and would reduce link equity. Keeping the products in the root moving forward with a poor structure doesn't feel great either. What to do? Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Tomasvdw0 -
Pages with 301 redirects showing as 200 when crawled using RogerBot
Hi guys, I recently did an audit for a client and ran a crawl on the site using RogerBot. We quickly noticed that all but one page was showing as status code 200, but we knew that there were a lot of 301 redirects in place. When our developers checked it, they saw the pages as 301s, as did the Moz toolbar. If page A redirected to page B, our developers and the Moz toolbar saw page A as 301 and page B as 200. However the crawl showed both page A and page B as 200. Does anyone have any idea why the crawl may have been showing the status codes as 200? We've checked and the redirect is definitely in place for the user, but our worry is that there could be an issue with duplicate content if a crawler isn't picking up on the 301 redirect. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Welford-Media0 -
301 redirects- how long to keep and how many are too many?
Hi, I was told we have way too many 301 redirects on our site. We have some that have been there for 3 years. Our site is datacard.com . Question- how long should you keep a redirect out there when building a new page and expiring an old page? Is it 6 months, is it a certain time frame? wondering what the best practices are? Thanks! Laura
Technical SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
301 redirect question
Hi Everyone When doing 301 redirects for a large site, if a page has 0 inbound links would you still redirect it or just leave it? Im just curious on the best practice for this Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
How to know what pages are 301 redirecting to me?
Hi! It is easy to know if somebody is spam linking your website, looking i.e., looking at open site explorer to analyse the links profile. But, is it possible to know if a competitor of mine is redirecting a bad domain to main with a 301 redirect, thus transfering any bad SEO reputation to me? Best Regards, Daniel
Technical SEO | | te_c0 -
How to safely reduce the number of 301 redirects / should we be adding so many?
Hi All, We lost a lot of good rankings over the weekend with no obvious cause. Our top keyword went from p3 to p12, for example. Site speed is pretty bad (slower than 92% of sites!) but it has always been pretty bad. I'm on to the dev team to try and crunch this (beyond image optimisation) but I know that something I can effect is the number of 301 redirects we have in place. We have hundreds of 301s because we've been, perhaps incorrectly, adding one every time we find a new crawl error in GWT and it isn't because of a broken link on our site or on an external site where we can't track down the webmaster to fix the link. Is this bad practice, and should we just ignore 404s caused by external broken URLs? If we wanted to reduce these numbers, should we think about removing ones that are only in place due to external broken URLs? Any other tips for safely reducing the number of 301s? Thanks, all! Chris
Technical SEO | | BaseKit0 -
Double 301 redirect
Hi together, due to some technical reasons I have redirect (301) an existing link two times. Example: www.mydomain.com/root/site.html > 301 > www.mydomain.com/site.html > 301 www.mydomain.com/site_new.html Is there anybody how has got some experience like doing a double redirect? What about link juice? Best regards Steffen
Technical SEO | | steffen_0 -
Trailing slash 301 redirect code
Hi, I have code for redirecting trailing slash to non-trailing slash, which works fine: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.yourdomain.co.uk$ [NC]RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] (got code from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html) But I cant find a code for redirecting to the trailing slash version anywhere, and I cant modify the above code myself. Can someone help resolve this issue please, or point me to a resource. Thanks very much James
Technical SEO | | jamesjackson0