What are the SEO ramifications to forwarding your website to Facebook?
-
I have a client who wants to forward their website traffic to a campaign on Facebook for two week. I think it's a horrible idea on so many levels, but need a solid reason why. My gut says that their Google rankings will suffer, but I can't find any research/articles that state such. Help?
-
Sorry - no specific article comes to mind. but you could pint out our answers!
-
These are all helpful answers. Does anyone have links I can use to show the client this shouldn't be done?
-
Completely agree with everything mentioned, what would be interesting to hear though - and possibly amusing - would be why your client thinks this might be a good idea?
-
This would be a clear violation of Google's terms and, when caught, the site would be removed from Google's index.
The role of a search engine is to help user's find the information they seek. Over time, Google extends a level of trust to your site by indexing your pages and directing users to your content. By redirecting users in this manner, your site is betraying that trust.
The reasons for your site's actions are irrelevant. You can re-direct everyone to a page on Japan disaster relief because you believe strongly in the cause. The action is still not in alignment with Google's interests, nor those of your site's visitors.
-
Take any site out of the search engines and see what happens. Whether it's a 301 or a 302 redirect will determine the long term impact. 302s tell the search engines "this page has temporarily moved". Which is all good and fine for a matter of hours, maybe even a couple days. After that, all bets are off.
Users will be disoriented. Expecting to come to an actual site, and being sent to a Facebook page will be disorienting and alienating. It will be annoying and off-putting to users. Many users may very well never come back to the main site afterward.
Intentionally redirecting users who expect to come to a company site is deceptive. And extremely unprofessional. It breaks an expected user experience trust.
Doing it with an entire site could cause all sorts of red flags from a search engine perspective. Because of those very user deception and alienation issues.
Redirecting an entire site to Facebook is very unwise from an SEO perspective, from a user experience perspective, from a brand cohesiveness perspective. Bad. bad. Bad.
-
They have a large website, I don't know the number of pages. Yes, they do wish to re-direct the entire site to their facebook page.
-
I apologize. I should have been clearer.
Do they have a 100 page website and they wish to re-direct the entire site to a single page on facebook? Or do they wish to forward the traffic from a single page on their site to the facebook page?
-
They want to do a 302 redirect. I'll read the link you provided, thanks!
-
Can you clarify what you mean by "forward their website traffic"?
The idea behind a 301 or 302 forward is to send visitors to the same content in a different location. If the content is altered, then you run afoul of Google rules. This could be seen as cloaking or doorway pages.
Further details can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355
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
-
Most important things for seo a travel website
Hello everyone a website working on travel field with this address : https://goo.gl/4gaoAn Let me know what do you think about it and please give me some advises about it get improve on google rankings. If you be able to take time and give me some advises based on what you see on the website, would be great for me. Also what would work best for me to have a great link building strategy after penguin 4.0 update? and what does my site lack right now? Thanks and waiting to hear from you asap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BahadorGh0 -
SEO Strategy help
Hi, I run a B2B 3rd party retail ecommerce site and I am kind of stuck on how to implement my SEO strategy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steve45058
So I learned from AdWords data that the best converting words to my site is the (Brand name, Model Number). Many of my B2B customers already know what they want/are looking for. Now this is all fine and dandy for adwords, but I don't really know how to implement this strategy on the SEO side. I do rank decent for some of these product keywords, but 99% of them I do not (which confuses me because some of the brands I rank high for are the more popular brands eg. more competition.) When I do keyword research on SEMRush or another site, it tells me that the competition for this type of keyword strategy is extremely high. Any Help, Advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!1 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Adding videos to a website
Hello! We are producing multiple videos (each about 1-minute long) for a company website. We have decided to use Wistia to host them, in order get the full SEO benefits of links to the videos. I have two questions: 1. Would it definitely be better for SEO to divide up the videos and place them on the various existing pages of the site that are related to the video content, rather than putting all the videos together on a separate video page? 2. If we do put different videos on different pages, would it be a bad idea also to have a video page with all the videos together? Would this be considered duplicate content? Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
Website not being indexed after relocation
I have a scenario where a 'draft' website was built using Google Sites, and published using a Google Sites sub domain. Consequently, the 'same' website was rebuilt and published on its own domain. So effectively there were two sites, both more or less identical, with identical content. The first website was thoroughly indexed by Google. The second website has not been indexed at all - I am assuming for the obvious reasons ie. that Google is viewing it as an obvious rip-off of the first site / duplicate content etc. I was reluctant to take down the first website until I had found an effective way to resolve this issue long-term => ensuring that in future Google would index the second 'proper' site. A permanent 301 redirect was put forward as a solution - however, believe it or not, the Google Sites platform has no facility for implementing this. For lack of an alternative solution I have gone ahead and taken down the first site. I understand that this may take some time to drop out of Google's index, however, and I am merely hoping that eventually the second site will be picked up in the index. I would sincerely appreciate an advice or recommendations on the best course of action - if any! - I can take from here. Many thanks! Matt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | collectedrunning0 -
Convertinh Website for Mobile ?
Dear All, My website (a rental website where you can hire anything online) currently has approx 1/3 of it's traffic from mobile devices , ipads, iphones, blackberry , HTC etc etc. The bounce rate is slightly higher for these at 47% but we have not optimised our site to be mobile friendly as yet. This is something I want to do. Do we just make it fit well into a 320 pixel screen or should we do new wire frames etc and essentially make a cut down website just for mobile. One of the things I know we will do is to make it pick up someones location and retrieve results nearest to them but is there any other do's and don'ts when going down the mobile route ?. I seem to find conflicting infomation when researching this , one example is about using a different url for mobile , one site says it gets you more traffic whilst another says don't use a different url. Also does anyone know of any good tips or sites where I can get some useful info about making the site Mobile Friendly >? thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Joomla Plugins for SEO
Any input on which Joomla plugins could help us to facilitate the SEO on a client's site? Wordpress has some simple all-in-ones but we're not as familiar with Joomla and it doesn't look like that's the case. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MackenzieFogelson0 -
SEO - What Should We Do...
Hi Guys, Hope your all OK. Were having major problems with our homepage ranking for our main keyword - we were originally 4 but over the Christmas period our SEO company reported a fault with one of there servers that they were using for links, because of this fault these links were de-indexed from the search engine and in turn we have plummeted to 10th... At the time we had a landing page with an exact match keyword in it, e.g: www.ourdomainname.co.uk/key-word/ we were told to 301 this to our main page in Google but when we have looked today its now showing this page instead of our homepage. We also have another domain that we are using for a forum at the moment, now this domain name is an exact match doming e.g www.keyword.co.uk. The question is do we gamble and 301 our whole site to www.keyword.co.uk and see if we can get this ranking better? Thanks, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxter0