Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
-
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes:
-
New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible
-
Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google)
-
Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well
My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant).
So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct?
Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
-
-
That's my thought as well (about link-purchasing/black hat), [insert expletive].
Like I said, horrible situation. I'm waiting on somebody to get me the login details, but even so, I suspect whomever was managing it prior to my team taking over a new site design would have actually deleted any notices to cover their tracks.
Short of a whole new domain, definitely no 301s, correct? It's going to take Herculean convincing to get somebody to approve a different domain, we are supposed to launch in a few days.
-
Well those sites are definitely indicative of link-purchasing and black-hat SEO tactics. Couldn't say for certain but all signs point to yes. Might have a penguin algo penalty going on there.. Depends how many there are/how varied the anchor text is/how unlucky you happen to be.
Can you get to the previous site's Webmaster Tools to check for notices? Honestly if it's a Penguin issue you'd be better off ditching the old domain and starting fresh in this scenario and of course in my opinion.
(I do have some experience dealing with Penguin penalties, for the record..) -
hey no problem and you can always post the domain if you want this awesome community to take a peek and offer their thoughts. might help you discover something you missed.
Could very well be Panda. If it's an algo-panda-penalty that won't carry over once the content is fixed and duplicates gone.
-
Thanks Jesse.
I didn't manage the site (and I'm not actually sure who did manage it, I just know it was managed terribly) but I should be able to get a look at the Webmaster tools. Thanks for the info about the tags, I probably should've realized that.
I just asked around and it sounds like the site was de-indexed just before Christmas 2012. Sounds like Panda (and like I said I suspect a shady link profile, but I'll dig further).
Thanks again.
-
It will only pass the "non-indexed status" if the reason for index removal was due to a penalty. Specifically Penguin. You need to thoroughly go over the backlink profile of the domain and uncover the real reason that the site was not indexed.
Misuse of canonical tags is no reason for Google to de-list a site. They've said themselves that they tend to ignore improperly used canonicals.
Check your backlinks, check Google Webmaster Tools for any messages of unnatural link penalties, look everywhere you can to uncover why this site was de-listed. If those links knocked it out of SERPs then 301'ing them will do that to the next site as well. Bottom line is you need to know what happened before you make that call, but poorly structured site optimization is definitely not the reason.
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
-
Highly ranked pages to new domain?
Hi everyone! We are ranked #1 for about 30 product pages at www.oldsite.com/product1 and we are wanting to move about 30 of those pages to a new site www.newsite.com/product1 (new domain and hosting - which we own). What is the best way to do this? I'm confused if you recreate those pages on the new domain vs. ftp move them, 301 re-directs, etc. Looking for the things we must do and the sequence to do it all, etc. Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamesmcd030 -
Staging/Development Site Indexed?
So, my company's site has been pretty tough to try to get moving in the right direction on Google's SERPs. I had believed that it was mainly due to having a shortage of back links and a horrible home page load time. Everything else seems to be set up pretty well. I was messing around and used the site: Google search operator for our staging site. I found stage.site.com and a lot of our other staging pages in the search results. I have to think that this is the problem and causing a duplicate content penalty of the entire site. I guess I now need to 301 redirect the entire site? Has anyone every had this issue before and have fixed it? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
Redirect wordpress from /%post_id%/%postname%/ to /blog/%postname%/
Hi what is the code to redirect wordpress blog from site.com/%post_id%/%postname%/ to site.com/blog/%postname%/ We are moving the site to a new server and new url structure. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
Revert to old domain w/ better DA/PA or stick with new one?
I switched from one domain to another because I wanted a domain that had our company name so it was more brand-y. However, the old domain had better DA/PA. Originally I set up a global 301 from the old to the new, but now I'm finding that I actually need to set up individual 301's from each URL of the old site, or at least from each page. The new domain is http://www.bohmkalish.com and the old domain was http://www.ssdlawcalifornia.com. However, I am using Wix so it looks like I can't always do URL-URL 301's, although I can redirect any URL to a page on the new website. The problem is that, in some cases, the content on the new site is different (or, for example, I can only link a particular blog post on the old site back to the new site's blog's main page). How closely do URLS/pages need to resemble each other for link juice to be transferred? Also, should I try to set up all these redirects manually or bite the bullet and go back to using the old domain? The problem is that I did a lot of beginner SEO junk for the new domain, like submitting to a few higher-quality directories, and getting our website on various industry resource sites, etc. I'd need to re-do this entirely if I go back to the old page. What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BohmKalish1230 -
Is it safe to 301 redirect old domain to new domain after a manual unnatural links penalty?
I have recently taken on a client that has been manually penalised for spammy link building by two previous SEOs. Having just read this excellent discussion, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience I am weighing up the odds of whether it's better to cut losses and recommend moving domains. I had thought under these circumstances it was important not to 301 the old domain to the new domain but the author (Lewis Sellers) comments on 3/4/13 that he is aware of forwards having been implemented without transferring the penalty to the new domain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience#jtc216689 Is it safe to 301? What's the latest thinking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy0 -
Redirecting a Page from Domain A to Domain B
We have a page on Domain A, an established and well-ranking website, that would be more appropriate on Domain B, a site that we launched about two years ago. This page ranks well, pulls nice search traffic and has traffic from external links. We would like to move the page and its traffic from Domain A to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Have you ever done this or have you heard of how it has worked for someone else? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0