Should I Re-direct Domains to Internal Pages on Money Site
-
I have an ecommerce site that is fully built out with thousands of products.
I own many industry related domains for the products that i sell. Many of these domains are sitting unused.
I started to think that it would beneficial if i 301 redirect (at the registrar level) these domains to their SPECIFIC subcategories on my main money site.
For example, i sell sporting goods and my main website is buysportinggoods.com
I also own the following domains: basketballoutlet.com & baseballequipmentstore.com & footballpads.com
Would it be wise or foolish (and potentially cause a Google penalty) if i did the following:
- Point basketballoutlet.com to buysportinggoods.com/basketballs
- Point baseballequipmentstore.com to buysportinggoods.com/baseball
- Point footballpads.com to buysportinggoods.com/football
Please let me know your thoughts or experiences with similar situations.
Thanks!
-
Well, those domains are not gonna be even on 9th page, more like on 159th.
-
Hey Everyone,
Thanks for the replies.
My goal is not to increase rankings at all. My goal is to simply point people who may have found these domains somehow while doing their searches to the most relevant page on my main site that has everything they were looking for when doing their search.
So using the same example, if someone is looking for the place to buy the best shoulder pads for their kids football league, and they are all the way back on page 9 of google and stumbled on footballpads.com my thought would be that when they click that, it takes them to the specific page on my main site (buysportinggoods.com/footballpads)
Make sense? Still advise against it?
-
From my understanding if you are using domains just for the sake of redirecting them they don't help much and can even hurt your rankings. This used to work years ago but in this day and age if the domain has had no content or gained any real value in the eyes of the search engines why would you redirect it.
-
Hi there.
It will not make any beneficial difference whatsoever. The reason is that if domain is redirected on a dns level, that domain will not be ranked at all. So, unless you have an actual domain with content, it will be useless for you.
P.S. What you might consider doing is creating some type of splash pages for those domains with some unique information and then have a link to main website related section. However, again, since there is not gonna be really any content, those domains won't rank, even if they are full match domain.
Cheers!
-
When you say "many" domains, I'm not sure how many you're talking about. Generally speaking, if it's over about 50 domains then you may run into issues with Google, as I've seen penalties for redirecting too many domains.
Also, keep in mind that redirecting a domain won't magically make that page rank any better or help it at all. If the keyword domain has previous history and links, then it could potentially help--but otherwise it won't. When it comes to domains, you're going to be better off actually setting up a site on that domain than just redirecting it to an internal page. There may still be some type-in traffic, but most likely not with the examples you've given.
The best thing to do is, in fact, to redirect it to the most appropriate page on your site--but don't expect it to help any when it comes to rankings. And, if you redirect too many, it may actually hurt your site.
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
-
Site moved. Unable to index page : Noindex detected in robots meta tag?!
Hope someone can shed some light on this: We moved our smaller site (into the main site ( different domains) . The smaller site that was moved ( https://www.bluegreenrentals.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
Directory where the site was moved (https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals) Each page from the old site was 301 redirected to the appropriate page under .com/rentals. But we are seeing a significant drop in rankings and traffic., as I am unable to request a change of address in Google search console (a separate issue that I can elaborate on). Lots of (301 redirect) new destination pages are not indexed. When Inspected, I got a message : Indexing allowed? No: 'index' detected in 'robots' meta tagAll pages are set as Index/follow and there are no restrictions in robots.txtHere is an example URL :https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals/resorts/colorado/innsbruck-aspen/Can someone take a look and share an opinion on this issue?Thank you!0 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
Backlinks to internal pages
Hi, Our website of 3K+ pages currently has more links coming to internal pages (2nd & 3rd Level), compared to links to homepage. Just wanted to know if this is bad for rankings ? Please share your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Umesh-Chandra0 -
How to get a page re-crawed quickly
Does anyone know a way to get Google to re-crawl a webpage that does not belong to me. There are a bunch of pages that I have had links removed on and I want Google to re-crawl those pages to see the links have been removed. (current wait time is way way too long) Can anyone suggest some ways to get the page re-crawled. (I am unable to get the website owners to use WMT to do anything). Suggestions like good ping services and various other techniques would be very much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Will Google bots crawl tablet optimized pages of our site?
We are in the process of creating a tablet experience for a portion of our site. We haven’t yet decided if we will use a one URL structure for pages that will have a tablet experience or if we will create separate URLs that can only be access by tablet users. Either way, will the tablet versions of these pages/URLs be crawled by Google bots?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbbseo0 -
Bought a site with an old domain where to start?
Hi, I recently purchased the site www.forexnews.com. The domain is more than 10 years old and used to have a ton of content and traffic. A couple of years ago it was purchased by another firm who took down all the old content and made it into a news aggregation site. I am going to try and build the traffic back up by adding back original content and leveraging the domain authority that the site has retained. Besides doing some keyword research, building links, and writing original content is there any advice out there that the community can give me on what else to start with? Any resources that you can point me to which talk about this type of thing would also be appreciated. Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fxtrader19790 -
Re-platform effects on Page Rank
We are performing a major replatform for an ecommerce client who has many top listings on page 1 in Google SERPs for very competitive terms. We are implementing a 301 redirect for all existing URLs that they have now to the appropriate new URLs, but the client is concerned with how deploying a new site with 100% new URLs and site structure will impact their Page Rank. From our experience, the 301 redirects should cover it but wanted to see if there is a way to predictively forecast page rank effects as a result of re-platforming.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bucktown0 -
Does Google crawl the pages which are generated via the site's search box queries?
For example, if I search for an 'x' item in a site's search box and if the site displays a list of results based on the query, would that page be crawled? I am asking this question because this would be a URL that is non existent on the site and hence am confused as to whether Google bots would be able to find it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0