301 Redirecting an Entire Site
-
I have a question which has had me thinking for hours.....
If SITE A is ranking well on a number of search phrases and you 301 that site to another (SITE B). The site will change on the Google SERPs to the site which you've re-directed to... In this case SITE B.
But how do you maintain the rankings of SITE A?. Do you keep the rankings of SITE A forever? Or will your rankings of SITE A (now SITE B) gradually slip as other sites rank higher?
As you can no longer edit SITE A does Google take into consideration the content on SITE B and no longer take anything that SITE A had to offer into consideration? SITE B has simply replaced it in the SERPs??......
Please can anybody help?
Thanks,
-
Actually in this case the domain ranks highly but doesn't have many (if any) quality links. So is it likely that we will loose the rankings if we place a 301 redirect on the site?
-
Also don't forget you need to setup a change of address in google webmaster tools
-
If by "How do you maintain the rankings of site A" you mean "what value am I passing over to site B once site A is gone", remember that Site A probably got its ranking through its link portfolio and that isn't going to go away immediately. The purpose of the 301 is to direct crawlers and humans to the content that has superseded the content that was originally linked to.
-
Think of a 301 as a funeral service. Bob Sr is dead and now Bob Jr will carry on the family business. But Bob Jr is not Bob Sr. He needs to be treated as such.
The main problem with a 301 is that the changeover takes time. Your old page may lose its rankings to the new page before the new page inherits the popularity of the old. Eventually A is gone from the index and only B remains. But it's a different site and Google will still treat it as such. B will have to get its own popularity.
Incidentally, moving the entire site can be helped along by using WMT.
-
You won't automatically get the rankings from site A but I have done this in practice 3 times in the past year with whole site redirects and each time we have seen a significant boost in domain authority for the site we redirected to. This boosted our rankings and traffic.
If you do this just make sure you redirect at the page level tans also do outreach to see if you can get your best external followed links changed to your new url.
-
If you are redirecting all of the pages from Site A to Site B, Site A really no longer exists from a content point of view. You are simply passing on some of the authority from Site A to Site B, which will increase the authority of Site B.
You are not keeping Site A's rankings. You are telling Google, "I don't use Site A anymore, but the content on Site B is the equivalent... you should use that instead." If you were ranking #5 for a keyword using Site A, you will not automatically rank #5 for Site B when you have the redirect in place.
If you were to completely remove the content from Site A, Google would not care, because you have redirects that immediately redirect users and spiders from Site A to the Site B equivalent.
Does that answer your question?
Mike
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
-
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
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 -
Removing Blogs and 301 redirect to blog home page?
Hi, I was at the MozCon conference in Seattle this Summer and heard great concepts about deleting a lot of pages on your site that are deemed excess. It got me thinking to remove all of our old blogs that were: Sales(ee) less than 400 words Flat out bad blogs When i begin removing these links, i know i will get a lot of 404 errors because of previous social links. So in your opinion, what would you do? Do i just 301 those blogs to my main /blog page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
After 301 redirects average rankings went down a little. Any idea?
We have changed the design of a website, from an oscommerce site to a new responsive website with customized programming. After the 301 redirects we have lost 1 to 2 positions in Google Rankings of the most visited categories. This are real data <colgroup><col span="5" width="80"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
| page | brand | page | CTR | average position |
| old | fagor | http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda/fagor-m-41.html | 15% | 6,6 |
| new | fagor | http://www.electrorecambio.es/fagor | 13% | 7,2 |
| old | teka | http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda/teka-m-39.html | 12% | 7,2 |
| new | teka | http://www.electrorecambio.es/teka | 9% | 8,8 |
| old | balay | http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda/balay-m-81.html | 12% | 7,4 |
| new | balay | http://www.electrorecambio.es/balay | 11% | 8,6 |
| old | bosch | http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda/bosch-m-44.html | 10% | 7,4 |
| new | bosch | http://www.electrorecambio.es/bosch | 8% | 11 | Edited: As this table is not shown properly I have added an image For you to check the old page you can see the old urls in the folder tienda2. For example http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda/bosch-m-44.html can be checked in http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda2/bosch-m-44.html I would like to know if you see any important information that could justify this drop down in rankings Thanks!!! data-webmaster-tools.jpg1 -
.htaccess 301 Redirect Help! Specific Redirects and Blanket Rule
Hi there, I have the following domains: OLD DOMAIN: domain1.co.uk NEW DOMAIN: domain2.co.uk I need to create a .htaccess file that 301 redirects specific, individual pages on domain1.co.uk to domain2.co.uk I've searched for hours to try and find a solution, but I can't find anything that will do what I need. The pages on domain1.co.uk are all kinds of filenames and extensions, but they will be redirected to a Wordpress website that has a clean folder structure. Some example URL's to be redirected from the old website: http://www.domain1.co.uk/charitypage.php?charity=357 http://www.domain1.co.uk/adopt.php http://www.domain1.co.uk/register/?type=2 These will need to be redirected to the following URL types on the new domain: http://www.domain2.co.uk/charities/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/adopt/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/register/ I would also like a blanket/catch-all redirect from anything else on www.domain1.co.uk to the homepage of www.domain2.co.uk if there isn't a specific individual redirect in place. I'm literally tearing my hair out with this, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
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 | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
301 Redirects After Company Acquisition
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt1