Multiple domain level redirects to unique sub-folder on one domain...
-
Hi, I have a restaurant menu directory listing website (for example www.menus.com).
Restaurant can have there menu listed on this site along with other details such as opening hours, photos ect. An example of a restaurant url might be www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza.
A feature i would like to offer is the ability for Bob's pizza to use the menus.com website listing as his own website (let assume he has no website currently). I would like to purchase www.bobspizza.com and 301 redirect to www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza
Why?
So bob can then list bobspizza.com on his advertising material (business cards etc, rather than www.menus.com/london/bobs-pizza).I was considering using a 301 redirect for this though have been told that too many domain level redirects to one single domain can be flagged as spam by Google.
Is there any other way to achieve this outcome without being penalised? Rel canonical url, url masking?
Other things to note:
- It is fine if www.bobspizza.com is NOT listed in search results.
- I would ideally like any link juice pointing to www.bobspizza.com to pass onto www.menus.com though this is a nice to have. If it comes at the cost of being penalised i can live without the link juice from this.
Thanks
-
That's a good point you make Cyrus in regards to linking to a site that has competitors on it also. I have considered this and my idea was to pass in a url param that would not show anything else only the restaurants own menu. For example, menus.com/bobs-pizza?ads=0 would not show a search bar or any other links (simply just their own menu). This page would have rel-canonical link to menus.com/bobs-pizza so as to maintain link juice...
Other option i was thinking was to include an iframe on the restaurants page that would source data from menus.com. I guess i could have a link pointing back to menus.com at the bottom of the menu in the iframe.
I think the link idea makes sense rather the redirect for the reasons you mentioned. Maybe i could have a popup on mobile devices that contains a link to the menu's site (again this would be in javascript - not sure if this is a good idea though).
Any other ideas on how i may be able to show a link (only on mobile devices) that could point to menus.com (in a SEO friendly way)?
-
Without getting into the technical details, I have to address the bigger question of why a business owner would want to redirect their site to yours? In all honesty, I have to question the soundness of that business plan. If I'm printing www.bobs-pizza on my business cards, I want my visitors to go to www.bobs-pizza.com, and not redirect to some other site where they can view all my competitors as well.
Regardless, I would think it would be much easier to get a link from these sites than a redirect, and this would mitigate the potential problems of mass 301 redirects.
Another thing to consider, what if the site has been penalized due to poor link building practices? Once you 301 redirect to your site, those bad links become yours, and this could effect your entire site.
Regarding the issue of redirecting mobile users, yes, it's possible using browser detection agents, but redirecting to another site runs huge risks of penalties to the point that I wouldn't advise it.
Instead, I think this is a great idea, but I would opt for links instead of redirects. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
+1 URL Shortener
Also, custom URLs for each business might work, i.e. menu.com/bobs-pizza.
-
Thanks for your response Moosa. I like the idea of shorter urls.
On a similar yet slightly different note.
Some restaurants already have an existing and well established websites (eg www.tomspasta.com). For these websites i would like to redirect to www.menus.com/tomspasta (which is mobile optimised), only if the user is viewing the site (www.tomspasta.com) from a mobile device (ie user agent detection would be used in JavaScript to do the redirect).Would this kind of redirect have any impact on SEO (positively/negatively)? Would any link juice be passed? Would i need to notify Google that the content is different for mobile devices?
-
Thanks for your response Moosa. I like the idea of shorter urls.
On a similar yet slightly different note.
Some restaurants already have an existing and well established websites (eg www.tomspasta.com). For these websites i would like to redirect to www.menus.com/tomspasta (which is mobile optimised), only if the user is viewing the site (www.tomspasta.com) from a mobile device (ie user agent detection would be used in JavaScript to do the redirect).Would this kind of redirect have any impact on SEO (positively/negatively)? Would any link juice be passed? Would i need to notify Google that the content is different for mobile devices?
-
Hi Adam,
It is true that too many 301 redirects could look a bit fishy.
If what you want is for people that see bobspizza.com on advertising material and type the url on their browser to be redirected to your site (and have no possible issues with Google), I'd would use a 302 redirect.
The only problem with 302 redirects is that the link juice pointing to bobspizza.com won't pass onto menu.com .
There are many hosting providers that will allow you to park and 301/302 an unlimited number of domains.
Cheers
-
Adam I think a lot about this even before you actually come up with this question and I thought best URL structure you can follow in this case is of about.me
- You cannot park many domains (ideally one domain for each business page)
- Too many domain level redirects might kill your site and at the same time 301 redirect from domain to a specific page will not let main domain stay in SERPs.
- Canonical can work but again you cannot eat the search engine love.
But there is one thing that you cannot do!
How about shortening the URL?
For instance you have a BOB pizza in Ohio so instead of having a URL http://www.menue.com/pizza/OH/bob-pizza/ why not go for a smile and short URL that looks great with branding http://menu.com/bobpizza/
The URL is short so you can easily use in branding plus search engine will not exclude this in Google... when people will share this short version of URL the domain authority of the overall domain will automatically improved.
Hope this idea might work for you...
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
-
Sub Domain Usage
I see that the gap uses gap.com, oldnavy.gap.com and bananarepublic.gap.com. Wouldn't a better approach for SEO to have oldnavy.com, bananarepublic.com and gap.com all separate? Is there any benefit to using the approach of store1.parentcompany.com, store2.parentcompany.com etc? What are the pros and cons to each?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kcb81780 -
How to handle multiple domains?
Hello, We are working on migrating a website to a new web server. In addition to the primary website domain, there are several other variations that are owned. Is okay if we point all of our domains to the same IP address as our primary domain, and then setup 301 redirects to the primary domain? Are there any risks in doing this? There may be about 100 domains. Many of them are different country TLD for same primary .com domain, others including misspellings of primary .com, and some that are not so related to primary domain. Thank you in advance for your response!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | srbello1 -
Redirecting main www. subdomain to new domain. Can you then create a new subdomain on the old domain?
Hi there, The scenario is this: We have been working on a rebrand and have changed the company name So, we want to redirect www.old-name.com to www.new-name.com However, the parent company is retaining the old brand name for corporate purposes So, in an ideal world, we'd be able to keep www.old-name.com active - but clearly that would sacrifice all of the authority built up over the years, so we do have to redirect the main www. subdomain in it's entirity. However - one suggested solution is to redirect www.old-domain.com to www.new-domain.com... but then create a new corporate subdomain: for example, business.old-domain.com business.old-domain.com will not be competing with the new site on any service/product related terms; it will only need to appear in SERPs for the company name I'd appreciate some thoughts on this, as I've not done this before or found any examples of anyone that has. Is that a massive risk in terms of sending a confusing message to Google? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
Which one is better, a brand new subdomain or a second-level directory with PR 4
Hey, all SEOers! May I ask you a question about subdomain and second-level directory? Our website is about software, so we write many posts about how to use this software solve problems, and then use these posts to get ranks (we don't use the page of software to get ranks). And all the posts we wrote are listed under the second-lever directory, just like: www.xxx.com/support/ . But at this moment our boss want to list all the posts to the subdomain like support.xxx.com. By the way, the second-level directory is a page with PR 4, and the subdomain is brand new, even it doesn't exist now. So here is my question: should we list all the posts to support.xxx.com? If we choose to do like this, this will effect the speed of Google index, and we will take more time to build links for XXX.com and support.XXX.com? Any answer will be appreciated and thank you advance! to get rank instead of ranking the page of product,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vicky28850 -
SEO connectivity between domains and sub-domains
Hi, My web site georgerossphotography.com and my ecommerce site store.georgerossphotography.com each reside on different servers. georgerossphotography.com has a domain authority of 30 store.georgerossphotography.com has a domain authority of 30 Clearly, they are considered two individual sites but is there any way that I can boost the performance of the primary domain by passing along some for that good SEO juice from the sub-domain? Any input would be gratefully received. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sirgeorge0 -
Should I disallow via robots.txt for my sub folder country TLD's?
Hello, My website is in default English and Spanish as a sub folder TLD. Because of my Joomla platform, Google is listing hundreds of soft 404 links of French, Chinese, German etc. sub TLD's. Again, i never created these country sub folder url's, but Google is crawling them. Is it best to just "Disallow" these sub folder TLD's like the example below, then "mark as fixed" in my crawl errors section in Google Webmaster tools?: User-agent: * Disallow: /de/ Disallow: /fr/ Disallow: /cn/ Thank you, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page
Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!0 -
Which domain should I use?
I own a couple domains that are specific to a product and would like to know which one folks on here recommend. Primary Google Search Term Example: "Tax Bond" Example Domain 1: www.taxbonds.net Example Domain 2: www.tax-bond.net I've done research on here before and have come to the conclusion that hyphenated domains aren't bad (no more than 2 hyphens though). So, do I go for the EXACT search term with the hyphen or do I go for the pluralized search term without the hyphen, even though most people will not add the "s" in the Google search? Thanks, Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0