301 redirect blog network to main site, good or bad?
-
Hi,
Here is a newbie question. When we launched our web shop 18 months ago I started eight blogs on a different host with keyword rich domain names to get some links to the shop.
Today I don't update them, but they have a lot of links to our shop and the blogs have something like DA 20 and PA 30-40. There are lots of links between the blogs as well.
Can I do 301 redirects of the blogs/posts to the web shop to rank higher in the SERP for the keywords? If I do, what happens to the links from the blogs to the shop? Will the shop loose a lot of links, but gain in PA, DA, mR etc?
Overall, would the shop/main site benefit from this?
Or should I just leave the blogs and not mess with them? They don't have much traffic.
I appreciate any input, thanks!
-
Thank you for your input Geoff!
-
Hi Todd,
If the blog contained valuable content but was instructed to 301 redirect to a new location, then you are correct, the crawl would not go as far as crawling the content and subsequently indexing/caching or analysing value therefore any weight the actual content possesses will not transfer via the redirect however domain/page/URL authority / link juice / PageRank and other link metrics will, not 100% of this, but most of it.
301 redirecting is not designed to directly improve rank although other benefits of 301 redirecting can lead to this. Such as usability, traffic, relevancy.
-
@Geoff , so if the blog has content in it would the301 stop the crawl and redirect it? If this is true then the content would not be crawled? I have a friend with a similar issue. He is trying to improve ranking by redirecting his old site (which has content) to his new on.
-
The scenario you describe...
"I started eight blogs on a different host with keyword rich domain names to get some links to the shop. Today I don't update them, but they have a lot of links to our shop and the blogs have something like DA 20 and PA 30-40. There are lots of links between the blogs as well."
...is likely to match much of the criteria Google are using to hit sites with Panda / Penguin updates, to be honest, unless the blog content is of high unique content and not 'over optimised', I would not make any efforts to associate yourself with the network of blogs as it will likely do more harm than good over the forthcoming 12 months.
Really, you need to be assessing the overall value of each blog and whether similar content on your current webshop is a good match for the content on each of the blogs. If you're just contemplating 301 redirecting to improve ranking of keywords, then it's unlikely that this will be the result.
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
-
Guest blogging: is there a safe way to do it?
Following Google's nuking of My Blog Guest, is there any way of doing (high-quality, small-scale) guest posting safely? Specifically, do the tips from Neil Patel here (written Jan 22) still stand up? Only post on relevant blogs – ideally these blogs should also be larger than your website. In other words, do it because it will help with branding, traffic, and sales. Posting on bigger blogs that are also relevant will provide you with more good exposure than posting on small, unknown blogs. Avoid using rich anchor text – rich anchor text will become a huge red flag and will probably cause your site to get penalized eventually, especially if you are building these links through guest posts. Share the love – you won’t be able to link out to your site only. From Wikipedia to your competitors, you’ll have to link out to whichever site benefits the reader the most. Build up your author rank – with Google Plus becoming more popular, it will be easier for Google to determine how good of a writer you are. So, you’ll have to focus on publishing only valuable content as you won’t want crap tied to your author account. Co-citations are valuable – even if you don’t get a link from a guest post, just having your site mentioned in the article can help with rankings. I think Google will place more emphasis on co-citations in 2014.
Link Building | | Jeepster0 -
Links between own sites cause bad pagerank?
Many people say PR does not matter, but for me its an indicator that links from a domain with higher PR may rank better. My client has a about 4 different travel-sites of very different kinds of travelling. His sites are not ranking bad but all sites have just a PR 0-2 although the content is unique. I made the experience that even sites with few content will have at least a PR of 3 after some years with no SEO effort. One reason is may some part of duplicate content (4 Tours begin in Manaus, so the description for Manaus is on all the 4 Tour pages the same) but another is that the pages have few external links but many of other sites he is owning... like: also check out this -> link to another own site. Question: If I take all these links away (they even don't cause many referrals at all) - will this have a positive effect on rankings? Means trying to have always more external links from not self owned sites is a good start? Thanks for sharing your experiences Holger
Link Building | | inlinear0 -
Best way to set up a support site - sub domain, separate site or com/support?
My company is setting up our support site. It has been suggested that we set it up as a separate domain - www.company-support.com, rather than setting it up as a sub-domain (www.support.company.com) or the usual www.company.com/support. The person who proposed this believes it wlll create link juice, but i wonder if splitting the traffic will create more harm than good? Opinions please!
Link Building | | googilvie0 -
Blog comments question
Hi, I don't tend to blog comment that much unless it's actually a genuine comment as in, my first thought wasn't gaining a link back. What is the best practise for this type of link building? This is how I do it (When I am looking to gain a link back) title - brand name website - root domain comment - I try and go above and beyond with this, take it out of the spam arena by reading the article and then replying with at least 100 words referencing to part of the article. Would you classify the above as the wrong way about it? I know some say no-follow links (most blog comments out there) don't count but when I see the external link pop up in WMT it does make me think no-follow links count for something. Cheers
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
Linking strategy between my own sites
Hi, I have one main site, let's call it food.com I also have 10 smaller sites, let's call them mexicanfood.com, indianfood.com, italianfood.com etc food.com is on its own separate dedicated server the 10 smaller sites are all on a shared IP in hostgator I don't want Google to think that I have created the 10 sites for only purpose of creating links to each other. So, would you recommend that all those 10 sites link to each other? or should there be no interlinking within those 10 same IP domains? What about linking from those 10 sites to my main site? How should I structure my own backlinks not to get penalized by Google ?
Link Building | | limens0 -
Inbound links from porn sites into a professional business services site - remove help?
The website in question was hacked four years ago and there was porn on the servers. It was used as a peer to peer torrent streamer. The images were deleted. We have just found inappropriate inward bound links (with great link juice!!) - how can we remove these links - or should we? any advice would be appreciated thanks
Link Building | | GardenBeet0 -
Site content creation
I have a new customer that wants to build a comprehensive website to provide dental health information. However, he's a busy dentist and can't develop all the content himself. He particularly likes what mercola.com (http://articles.mercola.com/sites/current.aspx or http://blogs.mercola.com/sites/vitalvotes/default.aspx) is doing to provide content from other sources. At first I thought this could be a good thing and that we could setup some Google Alerts that would alert us to new content related to specific topic areas and then post excerpts and links to the original source of the content. But now I'm concerned that we'll get penalized for this. Can you give me some advice on how to go about getting new/fresh content on a new website that doesn't require someone to write it all themselves? Thank you!
Link Building | | ChristiMcGinley0 -
Good badges?
Hi mozzers, As dissussed last friday at the London Linkbuilding seminar, badges are still working like a charm. I am having some of my designers work on some now (have been in the pipeline for months, but conferences are so good at shifting priorities) and are looking for some examples on good badges. The badges will be an award for other websites. Thanks, Thomas
Link Building | | ThomasHgenhaven0