Redirecting Pages from site A to site B
-
Hi,
I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B).
To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B.
What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A?
What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.
-
DO NOT interlink your sites with dofollow links, Google hates this kind of activity and can penalize both sites for this.
It is a blatant attempt to self promote your own site and will be seen as a paid link. If you have a good site, I would not mess with it.
I would look at better ways to integrate the eCommerce site into the current existing site, why do you need a new site with a new url?
-
Thanks Chris,
A good Answer.
best,
-
You would have a drop in rankings.
Normally if you 301 a page to a relevant page you shouldn't loose any link juice however if you don't there is a lose.
Matt Cutts does touch on it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw
Site A would vanish and Site B wouldn't rank as well as the established site A it's sort of like chopping it in half you don't have a whole site only two half ranked sites (to a degree)
I wouldn't say Google would see it as cloaking etc. (unless you move the 301 back after a short while) Google should look at the 301 and think "This is now where all the links should go" however if there is no relevance there it might think "well this isn't relevance to this search query" and then give priority to a page that may have more relevance.
Unfortunately its a bit vague sorry but it's always a tad Hard to give certains. If you're going to remove site A all together then 301 its fine but if your doing it as a quick fix it will work in the short term but longer term your going to find it a bit harder.
as I mentioned it may be easier to have links to relevant pages so if your on site A on a product you could have a link to site B with a similar product. you would be sharing the juice to a degree and reinforcing the relevance of both sites.
Feel free to get more advice as more research never hurts and that's just an opinion really but good luck let us know how it all goes.
-
Thanks Chris,
What do you thin the negatives would be? Literally, the client wants to redirect site a's man navigation menus to site B.
Would google then look at site a as some sort of link farm / cloaking site?
-
I would agree that this is indeed a poor idea, a better idea may be to create some links between site A & B to pass link juice that way. You would loose some traffic and rather than have 1 good site and 1 needs some work site you would have two sites that need work.
I would suggest getting a landing page on site B start some basic SEO on that to give it a nudge prior to launch and give it some SEO focus with some links on site A pointing to relevant sections of site B.
Good luck!
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
-
Redirecting Pages During Site Migration
Hi everyone, We are changing a website's domain name. The site architecture will stay the same, but we are renaming some pages. How do we treat redirects? I read this on Search Engine Land: The ideal way to set up your redirects is with a regex expression in the .htaccess file of your old site. The regex expression should simply swap out your domain name, or swap out HTTP for HTTPS if you are doing an SSL migration. For any pages where this isn’t possible, you will need to set up an individual redirect. Make sure this doesn’t create any conflicts with your regex and that it doesn’t produce any redirect chains. Does the above mean we are able to set up a domain redirect on the regex for pages that we are not renaming and then have individual 1:1 redirects for renamed pages in the same .htaccess file? So have both? This will not conflict with the regex rule?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez0 -
How I can improve my website On page and Off page
My Website is guitarcontrol.com, I have very strong competition in market. Please advice me the list of improvements on my websites. In regarding ON page, Linkbuiding and Social media. What I can do to improve my website ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zoe.wilson170 -
Do I eventually 301 a page on our site that "expires," to a page that's related, but never expires, just to utilize the inbound link juice?
Our company gets inbound links from news websites that write stories about upcoming sporting events. The links we get are pointing to our event / ticket inventory pages on our commerce site. Once the event has passed, that event page is basically a dead page that shows no ticket inventory, and has no content. Also, each “event” page on our site has a unique url, since it’s an event that will eventually expire, as the game gets played, or the event has passed. Example of a url that a news site would link to: mysite.com/tickets/soldier-field/t7493325/nfc-divisional-home-game-chicago bears-vs-tbd-tickets.aspx Would there be any negative ramifications if I set up a 301 from the dead event page to another page on our site, one that is still somewhat related to the product in question, a landing page with content related to the team that just played, or venue they play in all season. Example, I would 301 to: mysite.com/venue/soldier-field tickets.aspx (This would be a live page that never expires.) I don’t know if that’s manipulating things a bit too much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ticket_King1 -
What to do about similar product pages on major retail site
Hi all, I have a dilemma and I'm hoping the community can guide me in the right direction. We're working with a major retailer on launching a local deals section of their website (what I'll call the "local site"). The company has 55 million products for one brand, and 37 million for another. The main site (I'll call it the ".com version") is fairly well SEO'd with flat architecture, clean URLs, microdata, canonical tag, good product descriptions, etc. If you were looking for a refrigerator, you would use the faceted navigation and go from department > category > sub-category > product detail page. The local site's purpose is to "localize" all of the store inventory and have weekly offers and pricing specials. We will use a similar architecture as .com, except it will be under a /local/city-state/... sub-folder. Ideally, if you're looking for a refrigerator in San Antonio, Texas, then the local page should prove to be more relevant than the .com generic refrigerator pages. (the local pages have the addresses of all local stores in the footer and use the location microdata as well - the difference will be the prices.) MY QUESTION IS THIS: If we pull the exact same product pages/descriptions from the .com database for use in the local site, are we creating a duplicate content problem that will hurt the rest of the site? I don't think I can canonicalize to the .com generic product page - I actually want those local pages to show up at the top. Obviously, we don't want to copy product descriptions across root domains, but how is it handled across the SAME root domain? Ideally, it would be great if we had a listing from both the .com and the /local pages in the SERPs. What do you all think? Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKelly0 -
How are pages ranked when using Google's "site:" operator?
Hi, If you perform a Google search like site:seomoz.org, how are the pages displayed sorted/ranked? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
Best practice to change the URL of all my site pages
Hi, I need to change all my site pages URL as a result of moving the site into another CMS platform that has its own URL structure: Currently the site is highly ranked for all relevant KWs I am targeting. All pages have backlinks Content and meta data should remain exactly the same. The domain should stay the same The plan is as follow: Set up the new site using a temporary domain name Copy over all content and meta data Set up all redirects (301) Update the domain name and point the live domain to the new one Watch closely for 404 errors and add any missing redirects Questions: Any comments on the plan? Is there a way (the above plan or any other) to make sure ranking will not be hurt What entries should I add to the sitemap.xml: new pages only or new pages and the pages from the old site? Thanks, Guy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jid1 -
Site navigation menu in head of page for SEO
We are considering expanding our site navigation menu (horizontal) at the top of our pages. However, once implemented, this would include around 30-40 links at the top of the page; before the content of the page. How much effect (good/bad) would this have on SEO? Are their any other options? (perhaps rendering the menu after the main content with CSS)? Any thoughts, suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Pages un-indexed in my site
My current website www.energyacuity.com has had most pages indexed for more than a year. However, I tried cache a few of the pages, and it looks the only one that is now indexed by Goggle is the homepage. Any thoughts on why this is happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abernatj0