Emergency duplicate of website due to DNS failure - how to minimise loss of search engine traffic?
-
Hi,
Our client has had a disaster with their domain name registrar, where the DNS settings have been reset and it looks like the registrar won't be able to re-instate the DNS settings for four days time. This is a nightmare for lost business whilst the site and emails are offline. As a fallback, we've setup a copy of the client's website at an alternative domain name so that people can be directed there in the meantime via Facebook posts, etc.
Is there anything you would recommend we do in the meantime to minimise the loss of traffic from search engines, and loss of reputation with Google? eg. using Google webmasters to tell Google about the change of address?
Thank you.
-
Sorry to hear it. Been there, and had to deal with it also! Read this over to help you understand the best practice. It's a great learning piece that will help going forward SEO Redirection practices and the SEO guide to HTTP status Codes by Dr. Pete. Another great piece and article.
It sounds like the a 302 temporary redirect is the best practice if you are only redirecting the site for 4-5 days. Then you can remove the redirect after the site is back up after the DNS failure taking place.
Cheers!
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
-
Website Snippet Update in Search Console?
I have a company that I started working with that has an outdated and inaccurate snippet coming up. See the link below. They changed their name from DK on Pittsburgh Sports to just DK Pittsburgh Sports several years ago, but the snippet is still putting the old info, including outdated and incorrect description. I'm not seeing that title or description anywhere on the site or a schema plugin. How can we get it updated? I have updated titles, etc. for the home page, and done a Fetch to get re-indexed. Does Snippet have a different type of refresh that I can submit or edit? Thanks in advance https://g.co/kgs/qZAnAC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Restructuring Areas of a Website
Hi We are changing the structure of 2 areas of our site but the URL's won't be changing. We're effectively removing the first category level as it doesn't make much sense: Current structure Cat 1 - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/cupboards-lockers Cat 2s - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers & http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/cupboards Cat 3s... New structure will look like Cat 1's http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers & http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/cupboards Cat 2's.... etc The top category 1 doesn't rank for much & the level 2's perform better anyway. Will moving the structure change rankings even though the URLs don't change - just what is assigned to them in the back changes I know if the on-page content changes, things may be affected, but we're minimising this as much as possible. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
If my website do not have a robot.txt file, does it hurt my website ranking?
After a site audit, I find out that my website don't have a robot.txt. Does it hurt my website rankings? One more thing, when I type mywebsite.com/robot.txt, it automatically redirect to the homepage. Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
Duplicate content due to parked domains
I have a main ecommerce website with unique content and decent back links. I had few domains parked on the main website as well specific product pages. These domains had some type in traffic. Some where exact product names. So main main website www.maindomain.com had domain1.com , domain2.com parked on it. Also had domian3.com parked on www.maindomain.com/product1. This caused lot of duplicate content issues. 12 months back, all the parked domains were changed to 301 redirects. I also added all the domains to google webmaster tools. Then removed main directory from google index. Now realize few of the additional domains are indexed and causing duplicate content. My question is what other steps can I take to avoid the duplicate content for my my website 1. Provide change of address in Google search console. Is there any downside in providing change of address pointing to a website? Also domains pointing to a specific url , cannot provide change of address 2. Provide a remove page from google index request in Google search console. It is temporary and last 6 months. Even if the pages are removed from Google index, would google still see them duplicates? 3. Ask google to fetch each url under other domains and submit to google index. This would hopefully remove the urls under domain1.com and doamin2.com eventually due to 301 redirects. 4. Add canonical urls for all pages in the main site. so google will eventually remove content from doman1 and domain2.com due to canonical links. This wil take time for google to update their index 5. Point these domains elsewhere to remove duplicate contents eventually. But it will take time for google to update their index with new non duplicate content. Which of these options are best best to my issue and which ones are potentially dangerous? I would rather not to point these domains elsewhere. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
Google Search Results...
I'm trying to download every google search results for my company site:company.com. The limit I can get is 100. I tried using seoquake but I can only get to 100. The reason for this? I would like to see what are the pages indexed. www pages, and subdomain pages should only make up 7,000 but search results are 23,000. I would like to see what the others are in the 23,000. Any advice how to go about this? I can individually check subdomains site:www.company.com and site:static.company.com, but I don't know all the subdomains. Anyone cracked this? I tried using a scrapper tool but it was only able to retrieve 200.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Training Website Improvements...
Hi Folks, I'm in the process of going over our corporate website with a view to improving on-page optimisation, layout, design and user experience and I would like your feedback on what you think I should improve or change with respect to SEO. Some of my ideas include: Restructure Home Page to Better Show Our Services Possibly Add a Slider to the Home Page (I know engagement rates with these are generally low) Restructure the Course Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation) Restructure the Events Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation) Improve & Streamline the Booking Process AJAXIFY the Booking Process Improve Responsive Elements I'm also interested in conducting user testing before I go ahead and make any changes. What are your thoughts? What would you change? Thanks. Gaz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Website.com/blog/post vs website.com/post
I have clients with Wordpress sites and clients with just a Wordpress blog on the back of website. The clients with entire Wordpress sites seem to be ranking better. Do you think the URL structure could have anything to do with it? Does having that extra /blog folder decrease any SEO effectiveness? Setting up a few new blogs now...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PortlandGuy0 -
BEING PROACTIVE ABOUT CONTENT DUPLICATION...
So we all know that duplicate content is bad for SEO. I was just thinking... Whenever I post new content to a blog, website page etc...there should be something I should be able to do to tell Google (in fact all search engines) that I just created and posted this content to the web... that I am the original source .... so if anyone else copies it they get penalised and not me... Would appreciate your answers... 🙂 regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TopGearMedia0