To Redirect or Not
-
I have a strange situation and looking for advice on how well a permanent redirect of url will work.
I have an eCommerce site called twpstain.com. This site sells TWP Deck stain and the URL/Content is fully owned by me. We do not however own the TWP brand and have always operated with permission from the manufacturer as an Authorized dealer. Circumstance have come up where they now want to be in control of all URLS that have the name "TWP" in them. Not sure if they legally can do this but they can cut me off with product if I do not comply. My options are:
1. A permanent redirect of entire site to new URL that does not have the word "TWP" in the url.
2. Give them the URL but they are willing to have me use the URL as I have in the past. A contract for this would be drawn up to cover me for years to come and possibly offer compensation if they decide not to renew.
My concerns are numerous but the question for the Moz community is to how well the 301 redirect will work and will I lose my rankings? I currently dominate the rankings for my site and I very concerned that there will be major loss of sales and traffic.
Any help or opinions on this would be much appreciated.
-
That would be my concern, if they control the DNS, that would scare me as well.
I still think your best bet would be playing by their rules while spending your time building up a new website.
I would also recommend getting legal advice. I remember long ago I came across Nissan's website which now is functional, but for a while it was just a landing page that stated neither Nissan Computers nor Nissan Motors was allowed to use the website.
If you did a 301 redirect, and this company went hard enough and ended up demanding you to pull the domain, I would hate to see you loose all the 301 potential anyway, simply because they pulled the rug out from under you.
Good luck!!! If I were them I would try and just buy you out!
-
Several years ago when I first started in SEO, I bought domains that were relatively close to my competition's domains, it was a competitive tactic that is quite out dated. However, I never suffered any legal ramifications. My sites were not always live, they were just bought to prevent my competition from buying them.
That being said, I do not believe that they are trying to take the domain away from you for any other reason than it is their brand name and they want control of it, or they want it to disappear. You do not have to give them control of the site, I wouldn't personally. I would hate to have someone running my site, no thank you.
Having a brand is becoming extremely important for SEO. You are probably ranking so well because your domain includes an established brand. I would buy a domain that reflects the name of your business, your brand, and redirect the twpstains.com to that domain. You will see the most benefit from this approach. You will be able to maintain most of your SEO juice and be able to recover faster than if they take control of the domain and decide to do something else with it, like redirect it to their site, or redirect their site to twpstains.com. It wouldn't be in their best interest to have both sites running at the same time.
-
1. Redirect and content would be the exact same as I own the content and data.2. They want the URL but they want to make a contract with me and have the DNS point back to my site. Issue is they can play hardball and switch the DNS if they want or void the contract on conclusion.
Thanks for help!
-
I already do but this one ranks the best. Thanks for the help.
-
Thanks. They do not sell direct.
-
Wow,
Now this is quite a quagmire. TWP owns TWP-Stain.com and obviously is upset that you rank higher than they do for their own product, even though you sell their product. I probably would have thought you were the company if I didn't snoop around and hadn't met you on Moz.
Unfortunately because your domain name does include their brand, and is an identifying factor of the company to the public I believe they could technically take legal action. If the domain was "woodstains.com" it would be different because that's a generic term. (I AM NOT A LAWYER I JUST HAVE GONE THROUGH SOMETHING SIMILAR).
Regardless, in my opinion you are in a situation where they could potentially take over if they wanted to regardless of your wants and needs.
My Thoughts:
- 301 redirects do work, they will cause a drop in ranking, the more similar the content the better, but they will hurt.
- Another option would be to start a new website selling your goods and just negotiate a price to let them use that domain? That's what I do currently. I was in a situation where I ended up stepping out of a company, but I owned the domain. I still own it, but the DNS records point to their server, that way they are still in control of everything.
- Create another website, give them control of them domain, play by their rules, and link this current website to your new website. Take the stipend from them, let them worry about this website and profit. (Ryan typed it faster than me)
Hope this helps a little!
-
The contractual option sounds like it would be the best in this situation, especially since the site is solely dedicated to one brand.
Even with the contract in place you could still develop a separate site that carries multiple brands and begins to rank in other areas. That way you'd have some insurance if the contractual route eventually ends and not have to redirect form scratch.
-
If you have to change your domain name then you will most likely suffer rankings loss. You will redirect the old domain to the new domain, which will temporarily help, but you will basically have to work on the new URLs to get them to rank.
What they are asking for seems strange. Do they sell direct as well?
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
-
URL change - Sitemap update / redirect
Hi everyone Recently we performed a massive, hybrid site migration (CMS, URL, site structure change) without losing any traffic (yay!). Today I am finding out that our developers+copy writers decided to change Some URLs (pages are the same) without notifying anyone (I'm not going into details why). Anyhow, some URLs in site map changed, so old URLs don't exist anymore. Here is the example: OLD (in sitemap, indexed): https://www.domain.com/destinations/massachusetts/dennis-port NEW: https://www.domain.com/destinations/massachusetts/cape-cod Also, you should know that there is a number of redirects that happened in the past (whole site) Example : Last couple years redirections: HTTP to HTTPS non-www to www trailing slash to no trailing slash Most recent (a month ago ) Site Migration Redirects (URLs / site structure change) So I could add new URLs to the sitemap and resubmit in GSC. My dilemma is what to do with old URL? So we already have a ton of redirects and adding another one is not something I'm in favor of because of redirect loops and issues that can affect our SEO efforts. I would suggest to change the original, most recent 301 redirects and point to the new URL ( pre-migration 301 redirect to newly created URL). The goal is not to send mixed signals to SEs and not to lose visibility. Any advice? Please let me know if you need more clarification. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin0 -
Going from 302 redirect to 301 redirect weeks after changing URL structure
I made a small change on an ecommerce site that had big impacts I didn't consider... About six weeks ago in an effort to clean up one of many SEO-related problems on an ecommerce site, I had a developer rewrite the URLs to replace underscores with hyphens and redirect all pages throughout the site to that page with the new URL structure. We didn't immediately update our sitemap to reflect the changes (bad!) and I just discovered all the redirects are 302s... Since these changes, most of the pages have a page authority of 1 and we have dropped several spots in organic search. If we were to setup 301 redirects for the pages that we changed the URL structure would there be any changes in organic search placement and page authority or is it too late?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116990439410 -
Moving to https: Double Redirects
We're migrating our site to https and I have the following question: We have some old url's that we are 301ing to new ones. If we switch over to https then we will be forced to do a double-redirect for these url's. Will this have a negative SEO impact? If so, is there anything that we can do about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
303 redirect
Hi, 303 redirect is a good thing or not ? I have a homepage in 2 languages FR and EN > mywebsite.com/fr/ and mywebsite.com/en/. A 303 redirect is on mywebsite.com to mywebsite.com/fr/. Thanks D.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon0 -
Do my redirects on my homepage need to be 301?
Our domain name is something like www.I-am-cool.com but most people just type in iamcool.com After doing some research I found that those are 302 redirects and I think they should be 301. If I am correct do I need to redirect www.iamcool.com and iamcool.com or just one or the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
301 redirect from one domain to other domain, How To?
Hi, I need to redirect 150 products pages from http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ to http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/ How can I do this? Is there a tool or anything I can do to do 301 from one domain to another one? Can I use Google Webmaster Tool? Thank you, BigBlaze
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Multi domain redirect to single domain
Hello, all SEOers. Today, I would like to get some ideas about handling multiple domains. I have a client who bought numerous domains under purpose of prevent abuse of their brand name and at the same time for future uses. This client bought more than 100 domains. Some domains are paused, parked, lived and redirected to other site. I don't worry too much of parked domains and paused domains. However, what I am worrying is that there are about 40 different domains are now redirected to single domain and meta refresh was used for redirections. As far as I know, this can raise red flag for Google. I asked clients to clean up unnecessary domains, yet they want to keep them all. So now I have to figure out how to handle all domains which are redirect to single domain. So far, I came up with following ideas. 1. Build gateway page which shows lists of my client sites and redirect all domains to gateway page. 2. Implement robots.txt file to all different domains 3. Delete the redirects and leave it as parked domains. Could anyone can share other ideas in order to handling current status? Please people, share your ideas for me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Artience0 -
Htaccess Redirect with %C2%A0 in URL
Below is my setup for redirects in .htaccess file in my root word press installation. The www to non-www works well, so no problems there Other page redirects work well, too (example: redirect 301 /some-page/ http://mysite.com/another-page/ (I didn't post those because I have a few too many : ) So here it goes... RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pepsimoz
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L] BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress redirect 301 /archives/10-college- majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%20majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ I'm having a problem with the last 301 redirect: redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ not working... As you can see I've tried using other varations of the "space" but no go. I also used a redirect in cPanel's Redirect screen; testing all the possible options + wildcard I've also tried this: http://serverfault.com/questions/201829/using-special-characters-in-apache-mod-rewrite-rule (perhaps unsuccessfully, because it caused a 500 server error and it's a different situation in my case) I also saw something here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3908682.htm but I don't know if it works and how I would implement that + do so without compromising ALL other redirects. Note: the URL displays with a space in the address bar of all major web browsers: http://mysite.com/10-college- majors/ and goes to a 404 page I have a goregous page / PR6 / high authority site linking to the URL on my site, but they copied the URL with a space somehow. I contacted the person responsible for the website and he claims it works fine (aka he didn't check it). Is there a clean way to redirect ONLY this problematic URL without compromising other redirects, etc? Any ideas would be great. I'll respond with progress. Thanks in advance. UPDATE the redirect works, and it did work. Even so, when looking at source of page linking to mine, the URL looks like this: ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college- majors/ Clicking the URL in Source View in FireFox takes me to ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ none of my 301 redirects should direct there. I don't have any redirect plugins either.0