Deleting Website Section, Preserve Links with 301?
-
HI Mozers!
I have a client who is deleting their community section of their website because they have little activity. I know there are some inbound links going the the community section.
If I 301 redirect those links to the homepage instead, will that still preserve the SEO credit of the link -OR-is Google smart enough to know it's redirecting the the homepage and kill the link love?
My initial thoughts are that Google will see that it's being redirected to the homepage and not count the link anymore, but I'm just guessing. Any ideas? Anyone have any experience in something like this?
-
Hi,
Usually when you redirect to the homepage, Google will still allow it and you get the link juice. By as a best practice, that is kind of a waste because that is not where the visitors want to visit. If the visitor wants to visit website A's topic A page, the best practice is to redirect the visitor to website B's topic A page so the visitor is still viewing what they wanted in the first place.
To answer your question, you still still get the link juice redirecting to homepage but your bounce rate might increase because that is not the page where visitors were expecting to visit.
However, I have a question, if you are closing down the community section then how are you redirecting? I am a bit confused/lost on this part.
-
Bulk redirects to the homepage are usually not the best thing (especially if there is relevant content elsewhere on your site). Its very possible they eventually won't pass the same level of link equity as before. Have you tried instead driving more traffic to your community page in an attempt to grow the community? Perhaps via social media or blogging?
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
-
Weird Site is linking to our site and links appears to be broken
I have got a lot of weird links indexed from this page: http://kzs.uere.info/files/images/dining-table-and-2-upholstered-chairs.html When clicking the link it shows 404. Also, the spam score is huge. What do you guys suggest to do with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Miniorek
Could it be done by somebody to get our rankings down or domain penalized? Best Regards
Mike & Alex0 -
Link Types For Link Building
Hi i have a SEO agency we work with who are building quality guest post links for us, however they are also building forum, profile, blog comments
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts14
and directory based links. 60% of their links they are building are high quality, relevant guest posts while the other 40% are the other link types. The 40% seem to be relevant directories, forums, blog comments, etc. They said they build other link types because it diversifies the link building and profile rather then just building high quality guest posts. As just building one link type can leave a footprint. What are your thoughts on this? Cheers.0 -
How do I redirect my old PHP website to my new Java website?
Please could you help? My old website is written in php. I've created a new design of the website in Java. I'll be using the same domain name though. example.com and I'd like to pass my link juice to my new redesigned website. When I turn the domain name to point to my new website how do I make sure pages that are ranked in google that don't exist on my new website transfer 301 from my old website to a similar page on my new website. Old Website Example example.com/bootcampuk.php New Website Example example.com/bootcamps.jsp Many Thanks, Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | puamethod0 -
Technical 301 question
Howdy all, this has been bugging me for a while and I wanted to know the communities ideas on this. We have a .com website which has a little domain authority and is growing steadily. We are a UK business (but have a US office which we will be adapting too soon) We are ranking better within google.com than we do on google.co.uk probably down to our TLD. Is it a wise idea to 301 our .com to .co.uk for en-gb enquiries only? Is there any evidence that this will help improve our position? will all the link juice passed from 301s go to our .co.uk only if we are still applying the use of .com in the US? Many thanks and hope this isn't too complicated! Best wishes,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TVFurniture
Chris0 -
University website outbound links issue
Hi - I'm working on a university website and have found a load of (1) outbound links to companies that have commercial tie ups to the university and, beyond that, loads of (2) outbound links to companies set up by alumni and (3) outbound links to commercial clients of the university. Your opinions on whether I should nofollow these, or not, would be welcome. At the moment I'm tempted to nofollow (1) yet leave (2) and (3) - quite simply because the (1) backlinks may have been negotiated as part of a package (nobody can actually remember at the university!), yet (2) and (3) were freely given by the university. Your thoughts would be welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Do image "lightbox" photo gallery links on a page count as links and dilute PageRank?
Hi everyone, On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it. In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages. I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue. Is it worth the bother? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Does link equity to a page that is 301'd to a new domain pass juice on?
If we build some quality inbound links to certain pages, that are a later date 301'd to another domain, does any equity or juice get transferred across? Or is the inbound link's value wasted? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Links from tumblr
I have two links from hosted tumblr blogs which are not on tumblr.com. So, website1 has a tumblr blog: tumblr.website1.com And another site website2.com also uses the a record/custom domains option from tumblr but not on a subdomain, which is decribed below: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains Does this mean that all links from such sites count as coming from the same IP in google's eyes? Or is there value in getting links from multiple sites because the a-record doesn't affect SEO in a negative way? Many thanks, Mike.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team740