301 redirects for all urls - legal dispute
-
The website in question is a very high traffic website with substantial credibility in it's subject matter (sorry, can't share more details) that delivers an overwhelming majority of traffic from SEO, much of which is new visitors.
A legal dispute has resulted in both parties agreeing to forward a percentage of the total URLs to alternative websites (only 1 website for each party). All URLs for the domain will be forwarded elsewhere.
It does not make sense to me that the "sum of the parts" will be as strong once the redirects are implemented but I am looking for feedback.
It is fair to say that the alternative domains of each party are no where near as strong as the domain being "parted out."
Will the SEO juice be distributed to each domain in full? Will both parties lose out substantially?
Feel free to ask for clarifications and I'll do the best I can given the legal parameters.
Thanks.
-
The legal wrangling aside (as this isn't something to concern ourselves with from a technical standpoint) I'd say this boils down to: If I redirect all of the established equity for one site well-established, authority site between two newly-established domains, will the new sites do as well, pro rata, as the original site?
Short answer, no.
The purpose of a 301 is to tell Search engines that the original content has been moved elsewhere. on a permanent basis. Between 2013 and early 2016, it was the case that approx 15% of PageRank was lost when using a 301. However, that is (thankfully) no longer the case *BUT **just because Google no longer imposes a penalty for 301 redirects, PageRank is only of hundreds of signals that Google uses when ranking web pages.
In a perfect world, if you create a 301 redirect from one page to another where the content remains exactly the same AND only the URL changes, then you should see no fall off in traffic.
See: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
Even if we assume that you have evenly (and successfully) divided 100% of the links between the two sites, with each page redirect passing over 100% of the link equity (and, in this hypothetical world, each page is carrying the same level of authority), you're still dividing the overall domain authority between two sites, so, even if everything goes perfectly when you create all of the redirects, you still end up with two sites which are weaker than the original.
In reality, of course, you are unlikely to manage to pass on every drop of 'link juice' from each of the original pages, and not all pages will carry the same weight as the others (you could compare page authority in Moz and divide by overall "value" rather than number of pages but that's never going to be precise - or easy). And this is before all of the other ranking signals come into play.
I'd suggest the best you can do here is to carefully plan and execute the separation but both parties are going to lose out here - it's now a matter of trying to lose least.
(*I like big buts and I cannot lie.)
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 Redirects a Year Later
I inherited the digital maintenance of a website that was relaunched a year ago. In looking at Google Analytics, organic search a year later is still down 33%. I fear they did not install 301 Redirects but can't really get a specific answer from them. Is it possible to install them a year later to help with Google indexing and get back some of the organic traffic?
Technical SEO | | stansamples0 -
301 Redirect non existant pages
Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Canonical tags pointing at old URLs that have been 301'd
I have a site which has various white label sites with the same content on each. I have canonical tags on the white label sites pointing to the main site. I have changed some URLs on the main site and 301'd the previous URL to the new ones. Is it ok to have the canonicals pointing to the old URLs that now have a 301 redirect on them.
Technical SEO | | BeattieGroup0 -
301 redirect on wordpress.com
Hi, How/where do I input a 301 redirect for my http site within wordpress.com. I am already redirecting my wordpress url to myy new non wordpress domain Thanks Lisa
Technical SEO | | lisamarieCunn0 -
301 redirect Issues
my clients site is www.greenbayharvest.co.uk When you enter that URL it redirects to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop, dont ask why, thats the way they set it up and thats what im stuck with. So, how do i resolve the 301 issue here. we want all things to point to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk, in terms of SEO but does the fact that there is a redirect going to /shop make this an issue? we appear to have: www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop www.greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop all these URL's go to the same same page so what is the best way to correct this? thanks for any help on this Lee
Technical SEO | | IPIM0 -
Does 301 redirecting a site multiple times keep the value of the original site?
Hi, All! If I 301 redirect site www.abc.com to www.def.com, it should pass (almost) all linkjuice, rank, trust, etc. What happens if I then redirect site www.def.com to www.ghi.com? Does the value of the original site pass indefinitely as long as you do the redirects correctly? Or does it start to be devalued at some point? If anyone's had experience redirecting a site more than once and they've seen reportable good/bad/neutral results, that would be very helpful. Thanks in advance! -Aviva B
Technical SEO | | debi_zyx0 -
301 Redirects - SEO Benefit?
Hello, Years ago, our company started out as a Yahoo store. We've since moved onto another website with its own shopping cart but since the Yahoo store is almost 10 years old, there's a lot of history there and it still exists with the occasional order. We currently use it for reputation management purposes with links to our real ecommerce site but we're thinking of just redirecting the Yahoo store to our ecommerce site. Is there any SEO benefit in doing this? We were also kind of penalized by Panda. Would this help us out at all (the descriptions on both sites could be considered duplicate content).
Technical SEO | | airnwater0 -
Wordpress 301 redirects
I use wordpress as CMS on a few sites and I noticed that word press automattically places 301s if I change a url etc. I believe it does it by having the following in the .htaccess file: BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Should I use this? I feel like it limits my control over the 301s.
Technical SEO | | mmaes0