What will happen after I 301 this domain?
-
A while back I created a new website. Somehow my "scratch" copies of the site got indexed even though I didn't have links built to them. (In the future I will use noindex tags when I am playing around with designing).
Now, I have three versions of the site online...let's call them TheRealSite.com and Practice1.com and Practice2.com. Practice1.com and Practice2.com now rank #1 for their main keyword. (It's a relatively uncompetitive niche). TheRealSite.com is somewhere lower than page 20 despite having an exact keyword match domain name. I'm assuming that Google considered it duplicate content as it is the exact same thing as Practice1 and 2.
I had considered simply removing Practice1 and 2 from the server, but I was worried that if I did that, I would lose my #1 rankings if TheRealSite didn't recover.
So, what I've done is 301 redirect Practice1 and Practice2 to TheRealSite. I'm guessing that over time TheRealSite will come back to #1 and then I can just remove the files from Practice1 and Practice2.
Is this the best way to handle this situation?
-
[EDIT] Previous answer deleted because I had a brain fart and thought you were answering a different question I asked this morning! LOL!
Yes, this WBF was very timely! It sounds like this is exactly what I need to do!
-
Today's Whiteboard Friday post addresses this situation: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday
Since you have identical content on each page and it's basically the same site you could rel=canonical the secondary sites to the original and you should see your original site gain the rankings, while keeping the old sites online for the time being.
Like the others said, just a small amount of link building should let the original site outrank the others.
Cheers,
Vinnie
-
Excellent thank you.
-
Ah, tricky situation. Well, if no links have been built to any of the domains and one is ranking at no.1 for this particular keyword, then it would lead me to assume that it would be very easy to get to no.1 for it with the other domain once you have a few incoming links for it.
Therefore, it would seem most logical to build some links for the domain you want to use, and do like you said with the 301 until the proper site domain hits no.1
-
The problem is that the domain name is not great. It's a complicated situation because this is a site that I built for a friend/client and it was a really difficult relationship. He's now very happy that his business is #1, but it comes up as "ABCWebdesign.com/businessname" as the URL.
His business is seasonal and right now is the busy season. So, right now my thought was to 301 redirect the ABCWebdesign.com/businessname site to the BusinessName.com site and then if the SERPS have not reversed in a few months I'll just remove the content from ABCWebdesign in the off season.
-
Okay yeah, if the domain name is okay for the one that's ranking you could just replace the existing site with the one you want then. I know there is still an exact match bonus for keyworded domains but it's far from the be-all and end-all if everything else is right. And there's plenty of talk of it being worth a lot less now.
Mind you, I've seen some contradicting stuff. On the one hand there's the fact it can improve CTR as people see the keywords they've searched in the domain, but on the other hand it can be seen by some as a bit spammy... although I have no idea what the ratio of the advantage vs disadvantage there would be.
There is a hell of a lot of abuse of exact match domains though so it wouldn't surprise me (and this is only my own humble opinion) if the value of them went down considerably sooner or later.
-
Thanks Steve. There are no links to either site right now.
-
Have you been link building to the practise sites? If not, don't bother with the 301's at all, just put the real site on to the practice domain that is ranking well (if you're okay with the domain name). Exact match domain isn't everything, and in some instances it can be seen as spammy. Exact match bonus is a lot less now than it was anyway.
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
-
Domain authority a better metric then referring domain count?
Hi Guys, When reviewing competitors what would be a better metric - Referring domain count OR domain authority. From my understanding DA is a indication of the quality of the link profile. So if a site has a high DA this is a better metric for comparison then referring domain count. What are your thoughts on this? Cheers/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
Tricky 301 question
A friend has relaunched a website but his web guys (he didn't consult me!) didn't do any 301s and now traffic unsurprisingly has tanked. The old site and database no longer exists and there are now 2000+ 404's. Any ideas how to do the 301s from old urls to new product urls WITHOUT it being a massive manual job?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
Content From One Domain Mysteriously Indexing Under a Different Domain's URL
I've pulled out all the stops and so far this seems like a very technical issue with either Googlebot or our servers. I highly encourage and appreciate responses from those with knowledge of technical SEO/website problems. First some background info: Three websites, http://www.americanmuscle.com, m.americanmuscle.com and http://www.extremeterrain.com as well as all of their sub-domains could potentially be involved. AmericanMuscle sells Mustang parts, Extremeterrain is Jeep-only. Sometime recently, Google has been crawling our americanmuscle.com pages and serving them in the SERPs under an extremeterrain sub-domain, services.extremeterrain.com. You can see for yourself below. Total # of services.extremeterrain.com pages in Google's index: http://screencast.com/t/Dvqhk1TqBtoK When you click the cached version of there supposed pages, you see an americanmuscle page (some desktop, some mobile, none of which exist on extremeterrain.com😞 http://screencast.com/t/FkUgz8NGfFe All of these links give you a 404 when clicked... Many of these pages I've checked have cached multiple times while still being a 404 link--googlebot apparently has re-crawled many times so this is not a one-time fluke. The services. sub-domain serves both AM and XT and lives on the same server as our m.americanmuscle website, but answer to different ports. services.extremeterrain is never used to feed AM data, so why Google is associating the two is a mystery to me. the mobile americanmuscle website is set to only respond on a different port than services. and only responds to AM mobile sub-domains, not googlebot or any other user-agent. Any ideas? As one could imagine this is not an ideal scenario for either website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
Sub Domain
Hi everybody, My competition has started to use the sub-domains vastly. He has created one sub domain for every single city and keyword. Is it something that I should be worried of? Is it a good idea I start doing the same thing? Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Armin6660 -
Does using a sub-domain lessen the effectiveness of your main domain?
For example a website without a blog and is a simple html site with no blogging capabilities. We go out to Blogger or Wordpress and set up the blog portion of the website using something like blog.yourdomain.com. Does this make a difference SEO wise? Is is more effective to be sure that you are using the main domain and not a sub-domain? I have heard both sides before but can't seem to find the concrete answer. Thanks for any advise out there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | d25kart0 -
How do I 301 Redirect a complete folder?
Hi, I am want to delete a folder and all the contents. I then need to redirect anyone that is trying to reach a file in that folder to another page on my site. example: www.mydomain.com/folder/ (contains 50 pages) I want to delete the folder and all 50 pages. So if someone tries to reach www.mydomain.com/folder/page1.php the redirect would take them to a specific page on my site. Doing this to clean up old content. How would I do this on the .htaccess? I have redirected a page but not a folder. Thanks in advance! Force7
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Force70 -
301 Not Allowed...Other Solutions?
A client's site where both the www. and non-www. versions are both being indexed. The non-www. version have has roughly 1000 or so links where the www. version has over twice as much pointing back to the site. In addition, the www. version has higher domain authority. Their programmer has suggested that they can't implement 301's permanent redirects across their site for a few reasons. My question is, what would be the best alternative to block/redirect the non-www. version from being indexed yet still pass link-juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VidenMarketing0 -
Exact domain or subfolder?
If I am targeting a specific keyword, from an SEO perspective is it better to create a subfolder on a url that has some authority or is it better use the exact domain with no authority? For example, if I want to target the word 'widgets' which is the better choice and why? **Choice 1: ** www.domainwithauthority.com/widgets Note: this domain has 1000 links to it **Choice 2: ** www.widgets.com Note: this is a brand new domain with 0 links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mnipko0