Is it worth keeping a decades-old domain that's merely 301 redirecting to the main domain?
-
Hi fellow Moz SEOs,
We have a bigger client who we just did an SEO Site Audit for, and it was discovered that they have several domain names that are simply 301 redirecting to their main domain name. One of their domains in particular is decades old, and the client is asking if there is any value in keeping it (and the others), or simply leaving them as-is. Considering the domain age, does anyone have any recommendations?
Much appreciated,
Zack Barton
Barton Interactive
(833) 442.6853 // office
(408) 910.7750 // mobile
https://bartoninteractive.com -
Thank you everyone. Taking a look further, I found that:
- Google Analytics shows that this old domain used to get traffic, for years, but back in January of this year, the traffic more or less came to a halt. I suspect this is approximately when a former SEO put in 301 redirects for this domain, and Google recognized it.
- And in a site:{domain.com} search in Google, along the same lines, I found that only one page is currently being crawled -- the homepage.
- BUT in an advanced search in Google, there are 171 mentions of "{domain}.com" in Google still. While many of these are mentions of the owner's email address, this leads to recommending hanging onto the old domain, especially if it is inexpensive.
- AND in Moz Pro, I can see that while there is certainly not much happening with the old domain, it does have some link equity, which is being passed to the main new domain name.
Conclusion
With all this said, I told the client that the bottom line is that I've looked into the potential value of this domain, and do feel it's worth hanging onto -- especially if it is relatively inexpensive.
Thanks again, so much, for chiming in on this one. Should anyone else have any vastly different suggestions, I'm all ears.
Zack Barton
Barton Interactive
(833) 442.6853 // office
(408) 910.7750 // mobile
https://bartoninteractive.com -
Just keep it, the costs (probably a few dollars yearly) should outweigh any potential downsides of giving up the domain and potentially losing the value. If you really are encouraged to get rid of the domains look into how many incoming links those redirecting domains have. If they're all absolutely dead you might as well get rid of them, but in most cases, I would always recommend keeping them until eternity.
-
Keep it.
-
An old domain may have gathered many useful links that can boost your main domain's profile. I vote keep.
-
If the domain is decades old it can have high DA. I guess there are many links to those old domains as well. So, I do recommend keeping them unless you did a study and found that they don't attract any traffic. However, that's very unlikely.
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
-
Redirection of 100 domain to Main domain affects SEO?
Hi guys, An email software vendor managed by a different area of my company redirected 100 domains used for unsolicited email campaigns to my main domain. These domains are very likely to get blacklisted at some point. My SEO tool now is showing me all those domains as "linking" to my main site as do-follow links. The vendor states that this will not affect my main domain/website in any way. I'm highly concerned. I would appreciate your professional opinion about this. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anagentile0 -
Is domain authority lost if you create a 301 redirect but mark it as noindex, nofollow?
Hi everyone, Our company sells products in various divisions. While we've been selling Product A and Product B under our original brand, we've recently created a new division with a new domain to focus on a Product B. The new domain has virtually no domain authority (3) while the original domain has some (37). We want customers to arrive on the new domain when they search for key search terms related to Product B instead of the pages that previously existed on our main website. If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags? I read a few blog posts from Moz that said there isn't any domain authority lost with 301 redirects but I'm not sure if that is true if the pages are noindex, nonofollow. Do you follow? 🙂 Apologies for the lengthy post. Love this community and the great Moz team. Thanks, Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jgoehring-troy0 -
Handling Multiple Domain 301 Redirects on Single htaccess file
Hello, I have a client that currently that has 9 different markets with different sub-domains on one server (aka one htaccess file.). All the sites have very similar Navigation and some of them contain the same products aka same URLs. The site is using Magento CMS and I'm trying to figure out how to redirect some products that have been removed from one of the stores. The problem I'm running into is when I try to redirect one store url, it redirects all the site's URLs. Example http://store.domain1.com/ http://store.domain2.com/ I'd like to redirect http://store.domain1.com/old-url.html to http://store.domain1.com/new-url.html without making http://store.domain2.com/old-url.html redirect. I've literally been pulling out my hair trying to figure this one out but have had no luck. Does anybody have any ideas on how I could do this without having the sites redirect or create any loops? Any wisdom from you apache experts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Erik
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Erik-M0 -
301 process, migration to new domain
Hi all! We have an old site wordpress based, with great ranking and PR 7, called www.europe-internship.com which is going to be migrated into our new Django site www.eurasmus.com (specifically eurasmus.com/en/europe-internships)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eurasmus.com
The new one is a much more advanced version that we will keep developing. We have been migrating the information already but we are planning to apply the 301s in the next weeks to start passing the SEO value to our new site and traffic. We have all the url structures and everything checked and technically we are ready for it.
Therefore, we are almost ready. I have 2 questions: The new site includes more services, like accommodation, information...not only internships. Therefore, should we point the most relevant urls from our previous site to our home to share the value or just to the internships section? I am afraid that if the bounce rate goes higher from the 301 we could loose some value... 2)Should we point all the urls at the same time to the new site? Home, vacancies, blog pages, etc... or start gradually doing it to see how it goes till we make it to all the pages including the home? The old site still makes some money and I am not sure how quick will be to pass the SEO value, so in the way we may loose few thousand euros...We understand that, but we want to check what would be the best in your opinion. Let me know what you think and your opinion! Thank you in advance!0 -
Multiple 301 Redirect Query
Hello all, I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues. I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago. We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's. Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
What's the best way to check Google search results for all pages NOT linking to a domain?
I need to do a bit of link reclamation for some brand terms. From the little bit of searching I've done, there appear to be several thousand pages that meet the criteria, but I can already tell it's going to be impossible or extremely inefficient to save them all manually. Ideally, I need an exported list of all the pages mentioning brand terms not linking to my domain, and then I'll import them into BuzzStream for a link campaign. Anybody have any ideas about how to do that? Thanks! Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonMorrow0 -
301 many smaller domains to a new, large domain
Hi all, I have a question regarding permanently redirecting many small websites into one, large new one. During the past 9 years I have created many small websites, all focusing on hotel reservations in one specific city. This has served me beautifully in the past, but I have come to the conclusion that it is no longer a sustainable model and therefore I am in the process of creating one large, worldwide hotel reservations website. To not loose any benefit of my hard work the past 9 years, I want to permanently redirect the smaller websites to the correct section of my new website. I know that if it is only a few websites, that this strategy is perfectly acceptable, but since I am talking about 50 to 100 websites, I am not so sure and would like to have your input. Here is what I would like to do: (the domain names are not mine, just an example) Old website: londonhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/london/ Old website: berlinhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/berlin/ Old website: amsterdamhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/amsterdam/ Etc., etc. My plan is to do this for 50 to 100 websites and would like to have your thoughts on if this is an acceptable strategy or not. Just to be clear, I am talking about redirecting only my websites that are in good standing, i.e. none of the websites I am thinking about 301'ing have been penalized. Thanks for your thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tfbpa0 -
"Starting Over" With A New Domain & 301 Redirect
Hello, SEO Gurus. A client of mine appears to have been hit on a non-manual/algorithm penalty. The penalty appears to be Penguin-like, and the client never received any message (not that that means it wasn't manual). Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam. She is about to launch a new site, and I am tempted to simply encourage her to buy a new domain and start over. She competes in a niche B2B sector, so it is not terribly competitive, and with solid content and link earning, I think she'd be ok. Here's my question: If we were to 301 the old website to the new one, would the flow of page rank outperform any penalty associated with the site? (The old domain only has a PR of 2). Anyone like my idea of starting over, rather than trying to "recover?" I thank you all in advance for your time and attention. I don't take it for granted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0