Maintaining link value during site downtime
-
We are nearly finished rebuilding a client website, but they want to have a "dark launch" period for 4 days prior to the public site launch. During that 4-day period, we will be converting their server, so they want to take down the old site and instead send users a "coming soon" message. Although we have the old site pages set up to 301 for the public launch, I'm concerned that this dark period is going to hurt the link value on the old site pages. During this 4-day period, should we be setting a 503 status code on the old site that automatically serves the "coming soon" message? Or, should all old site pages be temporarily redirected to the "coming soon" landing page? Any other recommendations are appreciated as well.
-
Your last idea about temporarily redirecting them would be the best way to handle this situation. 302 redirects will send the right signals to search engines, and they'll know to come back later and check on them again.
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
-
Why is Google not indexing my site?
I'm a bit confused as to why my site just isn't indexing on Google. Even if I type in my brand name, my social channels rank and there's no evidence of my website. I've followed all of the advice I've read and gone into webmaster tools and got the Wordpress yoast plug-in but nothing seems to be making a difference!One thing I've noticed, in Google Webmaster Tools it says "Couldn’t communicate with the DNS server." in site errors. I've called GoDaddy and they said that everything is fine. A bit frustrating. Trying to work out what my next steps should be but feeling a bit lost to be honest! Any help GREATLY appreciated!
Technical SEO | | j1066s0 -
Will sitemap generated in Yoast for a combined wordpress/magento site map entire site ?
Hi For an ecommerce site thats been developed via a combination of wordpress and magento and has yoast installed, will the sitemap (& other yoast features) map (& apply to) the entire site or just wordpress aspects ? In other words does one need to do anything else to have a full sitemap for a combined magento/wordpress site or will Yoast cover it all ? This link seems to suggest should be fine but seeing if anyone else encountered this and had problems or if straightforward ? http://fishpig.co.uk/wordpress-integration/docs/plugins.html cheers dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Site Blacklisted
Good morning. Just done my WMT ritual morning check and one of my sites has been blacklisted for malware. It's a wordpress site - I've run various scans, e.g. http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and also installed wordfence and scanned with that and wordfence produced some offending files which I have now deleted. I've also installed website defender in the hope that it wont happen again. I'm pretty good with staying on top of updates and rarely let a few days pass without upgrading new version of wordpress or plugins etc. I've also checked my users to make sure no new admins or anything and also changes passwords. I've asked for a review from Google and just wondered how long these reviews take? Also, has anybody got any advice, is there anything else I should be doing? Thanks
Technical SEO | | littlesthobo0 -
Cross links between sites
hi, We have several ecommerce sites and we cross linked 3 of them by mistake. We realize that the sites were linked through WMT, We have shut down 2 of the sites about 2 months ago, but WMT still shows the links coming from those 2 sites. how do we make sure that google will see the sites are shut down. Is there a better of way resolving this issue. We are no longer using those sites, so do not need them to be active. whats the best solution to show google that the links are no longer there. Crawler shows that it was able to crawl the site 45 days after it is shut down. thanks nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
No inbound links. Should I link-build or create new content?
I have a PR4 site with good traffic but the blog is not very popular--the posts do not generate any backlinks and hardly get any traffic. Yet, I continue to kick out a new post every week. Site: http://www.stadriemblems.com/
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
Blog: http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog/ I keep posting content so that Google keeps crawling the site and viewing it as fresh (and yes, I'm posting for my human visitors' benefit too!), but I'm wondering if eventually this will hurt more than help if Google detects all these new pages are not being linked to, and therefore starts viewing the site as low quality and devalues it. So should I: Keep posting Stop posting and build links to the posts Try to promote my blog to get more traffic and hope people link to it Something else or some combination of the above0 -
Is there SEO value in having images referenced on other sites?
We use Amazon to host our assets (images, videos, PDFs, etc). These assets can be used across multiple sites we own and we reference them appropriately via our CMS. example asset URL: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lawgical/assets/data/539/original.png We have an infographic we recently distributed that is hosted on Amazon. Obviously we want any link value to go back to our primary URL where we laid out the infographic, however some of the infographic sites are just referencing the above source image URL. Are we losing SEO / link value by not have the infographic hosted on our domain? Do search engines count these image references as a "link"? For your reference... Infographic post: http://www.serve-now.com/articles/841/process-server-vs-sheriff-infographic Example infographic site usage: http://www.infographicsposters.com/law-infographics/which-is-better-process-server-or-sheriff
Technical SEO | | trentc0 -
Are lots of links from an external site to non-existant pages on my site harmful?
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a heck of a lot of 404s which are due to an external site linking incorrectly to my site. The site itself has scraped content from elsewhere and has created 100's of malformed URLs. Since it unlikely I will have any joy having these linked removed by the creator of the site, I'd like to know how much damage this could be doing, and if so, is there is anything I can do to minimise the impact? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
Value of Twitter Links
Let's ignore the "social metric" value of Twitter links and mentions and look at it from the pure link juice point of view. Twitter accounts such as http://twitter.com/randfish used to have their own PageRank and were treated as separate URLs. Twitter changed that to http://twitter.com/#!/randfish consolidating all their content to a single URL. When I search for "randfish" in Google, however, the result is the first URL version. Some clarification on this matter would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Dan-Petrovic0