301 Redirect from unused domain
-
Hi All
First question here so go easy.. I have a property site which is working well so far considering it;s early days, unfortunately some of my earlier efforts did not go so well and one in particular I pretty much destroyed in my attempts to improve the site SEO. Lucky enough my SEO skills have improved quite a bit lately, largely thanks to the great tools, tutorials and experts here at Moz
My question is whether I can use a 301 redirect to pass the domain authority and any link equity from an unused site to the one that ive done a better job on? it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy...
Thanks everyone and thanks for all the help over the last 6 months or so..
Wes Dunn
-
Wes,
I would be more than happy to give you my feedback that's awesome that you are starting a YouMoz!
Your right Moz this full of very talented SEO's Can't beat it.
I have one more suggestion this is something I really enjoy and it's helped my career immensely.
I would definitely sign up for SearchLove, MozCon, inbound, SMX and other marketing conferences.
I just returned from SearchLove San Diego and inbound 2014 I can tell you firsthand they are worth every penny. Your enthusiasm for this is fantastic and my best recommendation. I would recommend you do VIP you have the opportunity to have dinner with the speakers and get to know them. This led to more clients and more resources for me. Not to mention a whole lot of fun.
I have attached a photograph of the 3rd day for me but is 2nd day of SearchLove.
My interactive schedule this is something you can watch while you watch the speakers and ask questions and do way more it's really cool. The reason I posted this is you might see somebody familiar at the very bottom is a speaker. He was also a speaker at SearchLove of Boston earlier this year. I have the pleasure of seeing him again at inbound 2014 that ended last week.
Of course MozCon awesome conference I recommend you go to As many as possible.
I love the way Moz teaches I think they do a top-notch job however because when SEOmoz became an SAAS company they needed a partner to give their existing clients to they chose Distilled one of my favorite companies. There has been a very good relationship to say the least between Moz & Distilled making their offerings very complementary in my opinion to each other.
Distilled is a marketing agency that offers a tool that was built to teach their own people.
They released it approximately 3 years ago ( could be off by a year) I of course use both Moz and distilled University because they each offers so much when combined together they offer even more. the 2nd photograph attached is a personal Distilled U page showing what you have done and it's a considerable amount of time that will take to finish all the courses. And they're constantly adding new ones. However, this is great when dealing with clients because you can show them what you have done and in my opinion this is very valuable.
Check out distilled.net/u it is really an awesome way to practice what you've learned as well as obviously take in the always evolving new information in the search marketing world.
I hope that all this is helpful and hopefully I will see you at the next MozCon & SearchLove
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hi Thomas
Thanks a lot, I have read this article briefly before but I need to put some proper time aside to really absorb it, I'm always optimistic and have a background in IT Training so it's in my nature to want to help others improve, The SEO world is so vast, it's great to know there are so many talented SEO's here for me to learn from and hopefully pass what I have learnt down to others.
I will definitely do the Youmoz when I have a little free time, I would love to get some feedback from you and others and the community so stay tuned
Thanks again for your support, it means a great deal
Best regards
Wes Dunn
-
Hi Wes,
In my opinion in my opinion Fruition was more accurate beginning now it seems they try to scare people into purchasing their services. Just my $.02
I would not 301 the old site.
I completely agree link earning is really what this is about regardless of what it's called there is a great how to on link building by http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building
I will definitely read the post if you write it I like energy and optimism it will help you immensely throughout career.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hi Thomas
I appreciate you taking the time to reply, as far I know I was never manually penalized, I used a tool called Fruition to identify if my old site had been affected by any google updates, in most cases my site was affected negatively, to be honest I have still not worked out the best way to build links other than to write high quality content that s worthy of "Earning" links. looking around at the competition there is no doubt in my mind that most are buying links from higher authority domains in order to boost their page rank and domain authority etc.
I have decided not to try and push any of the old rank to the new site via a 301, it just seems a shame that all the hard work will go to waste really, but at least I have learned from the experience.:-)
I will take another look at YouMoz, Ive never been afraid of telling people about things I have done particularly badly, Equally Im happy to broadcast something I have done quite well, it makes for better reading when you read about someone misfortunes though so I could probably patent it and turn it into a worldwide smash, "The SEO Woes of Wes" has a nice ring to it..
Thanks and best regards Thomas
Wes Dunn
-
Hi Wes,
"I can use a 301 redirect to pass the domain authority and any link equity from an unused site to the one that ive done a better job on?"
Absolutely technically can however in this case does not seem like it would be a wise decision.
I agree with Matt.
I guess I'm wondering if you were manually penalized?
On the whole it would be unwise to 301 redirect something that you believe to be spammy to something that you've worked hard to correct.
Something to keep in mind & very important. How relevant are the back links to what you're doing? if you have powerful links that are relevant you are welcome to ask the webmaster to point them to your "new site"
My hats off to you for doing the right thing. You might think of writing a
YouMoz on all the things you did that were incorrect and learn from. I believe it would get a high amount of readers.
Moz Rocks agree with you 100% on that.
Everything you do that takes patience and time is worth it at the end.
Check out https://www.distilled.net/u/ it complements Moz.
All best,
Thomas
-
Hi Matt
Thanks alot for the reply, there is nothing really wrong with the domain concerning links etc as far as I know, I just made a bit of a mess of the site by changing, category bases, taxonomy names, posts types etc, you are right about the wonderful world of SEO, It has been a frustrating year or so learning by my mistakes but very rewarding as my knowledge and skills improve, I am very grateful to everyone here for that and the Moz Pro tools has been a massive help also.
My old domain seemed to incur 2 penalties due to penguin updates but I just put that down to the mess I had made really, duplicate content was possibly a reason as I had no incline about cannonicalization and the changes I made duplicated just about everything multiple times, If Google issues penalties for providing a poor user experience then I probably got hit with a few of those also.. I could write several pages about bad mistakes I have made previously but so far Ive never had a Manual Action message or anything from Google to indicate Ive really messed up....
Thanks again for the reply, the new site is in much better shape than the old one ever was so perhaps it's best not to try and cut any corners
regards
Wes Dunn
-
Hi Wes - so I take you are asking if you can 301 redirect your old domain that you had a penalty on from dodgy links? Can you clarify what you did and what you think has hurt your old domain? Sudden ranking/traffic drop? Manual action in Google Webmaster Tools?
At the end of the day if you have had a penalty on your old site i wouldn't recommend using a 301 redirect to try and pass authority of your old penalized domain as it is known that the penalty will flow. However if you have done work to clear up the issue and have removed links and done a disavow if required then you should be fine.
As with anything in the wonderful world of SEO if it sounds to good to be true it usually is and I would go with your gut - "it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy..."
I hope this helps!
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
-
Order and multiple match when 301 redirect ?
Hi, I'm migrating a single domain to a multiple domain for each language, using apache redirections: Redirect 301 /partners http://www.itris-automation.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2MSens
Redirect 301 /partner-si http://www.itris-automation.com/system-integrators-partners
Redirect 301 /partner-institute http://www.itris-automation.com/institutional-partners
Redirect 301 /fr/ http://www.itris-automation.fr/
Redirect 301 /fr/support http://www.itris-automation.fr/support
Redirect 301 /privacy?lang=fr http://www.itris-automation.fr/politique-de-confidentialite Redirect 301 /de/plc-converter http://www.itris-automation.de/plc-converter
Redirect 301 /de/services http://www.itris-automation.de/
Redirect 301 /de/plc-quality http://www.itris-automation.de/sps-qualitat .... However it doesn't work properly: For example automationsquare.com/privacy?lang=fr redirect to http://www.itris-automation.com/privacy instead of http://www.itris-automation.fr/politique-de-confidentialite Does the order of the redirect has an influence? Am I missing something? I've seen that the command [L] can be useful to avoid mismatch? Thanks, Best, Benoit.0 -
301 redirect for page 2, page 3 etc of an article or feed
Hey guys, We're looking to move a blog feed we have to a new static URL page. We are using 301 redirects but I'm unsure of what to regarding page 2, page 3 etc. of the feed. How do I make sure those urls are being redirected as well? For example: Moving FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/ to a new page url FloridaDentist.com/dental-tips. So, we are using a 301 on that old url to the new one. My questions is what to do with the other pages like FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/page/3. How do we make sure that page is also 301'd to the new main url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Danger in using utm_source and utm_medium to track tens of thousands of cross domain redirects
We just merged with another company and are redirecting their domains (competitive/similar content) to our own. We'll have several domains, redirecting (301) several hundred thousand URL's to our domain (not all the same page, very unique mappings). Will adding utm_source, et al parameters to the URL's have a negative impact on how google transfers value to the pages based on the redirect authority passed? Any points of view? We have a self referencing canonical, but given that we have 90 million pages on the current domain (and climbing), seems like cleanest approach would be to not use redirects. Thanks, Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jrjames830 -
What are the effects of having Multiple Redirects for pages under the same domain
Dear Mozers, First of all let me wish you all a Very Happy, Prosperous, Healthy, Joyous & Successful New Year ! I'm trying to analyze one of the website's Web Hosting UK Com Ltd. and during this process I've had this question running through my mind. This project has been live since the year 2003 and since then there have be changes made to the website (obviously). There have also been new pages been added, the same way some new pages have even been over-written with changes in the url structures too. Now, coming back to the question, if I've have a particular url structure in the past when the site was debuted and until date the structure has been changes thrice (for example) with a 301 redirect to every back dated structure, WOULD it impact the sites performance SEOwise ? And let's say that there's hundreds of such redirections under the same domain, don't you think that after a period of time we should remove the past pages/urls from the server ? That'd certainly increase the 404 (page not found) errors, but that can be taken care of. How sensible would it be to keep redirecting the bots from one url to the other when they only visit a site for a short stipulated time? To make it simple let me explain it with a real life scenario. Say if I was staying a place A then switched to a different location in another county say B and then to C and so on, and finally got settled at a place G. When I move from one place to another, I place a note of the next destination I'm moving to so that any courier/mail etc. can be delivered to my current whereabouts. In such a case there's a less chance that the courier would travel all the destinations to deliver the package. Similarly, when a bot visits a domain and it finds multiple redirects, don't you think that it'd loose the efficiency in crawling the site? Ofcourse, imo. the redirects are important, BUT it should be there (in htaccess) for only a period of say 3-6 months. Once the search engine bots know about the latest pages, the past pages/redirects should be removed. What are your opinions about this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eukmark0 -
301 Redirects?
We have an e-commerce website with about 4500 products for sale. About 1200 of these items were not showing up in the Google PLA ads because they were $0 dollar items, so we made those products invisible. Then Set 301 Redirects for each of the 1200 items. My question is this; we want to turn back on the 1200 items, should we delete the 301 redirects that are in place for them.? Will it hurt SEO performance by having them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Goriilla0 -
Do I need to use canonical tags if I'm 301 redirecting pages?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?
I have a well established domain that's been hit with some penalties. It hasn't been nuked off the map, just downgraded, especially on short-tail, one word type queries. I'm planning on redirecting this domain to another well established domain. The domains already have a history of lots of interlinking and are very similar from a subject matter standpoint. I feel that the penalized domain has been hit with an "over-optimization" of link anchor text penalty (I'm hoping it's algorithmic, but it could be manual). My question is if anyone has ever heard of a penalty like this being transferred to another domain through a 301 redirect. My hope is that the penalty just puts a cap on how much juice the redirect can pass, rather than transferring the penalty to the other domain itself. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOMG1 -
How do I go about changing a 302 redirect to a 301.
Hello Friends! Thanks for viewing my question. Ok,My question today is How do I go about redirecting a 302 link to a 301 link. I understand the benefits of doing this as far as link juice and how the Search Engines views the two Re-Directs. I am wanting to know where I would start to do this. Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0