Does redirecting from blog from sub domain to root domain hurts SEO of old blogs.
We have done a reverse proxy to forward blog.casefox.com to casefox.com/blog/. As I think it give great help in getting the “link juice” to the root domain. However, I am concerned about any possibility of harm to the existing SEO value of the blog. Is there any way to not loose the traffic of the old blogs and reverse proxy doesn’t hurt website traffic / juice?
Related
I have
'website.com' and 'newwebsite.com', both on LAMP environment.
I need
website.com redirecting to newwebsite.com
AND
old.website.com pointing to root of website.com
I have full control of both hosting and DNS records.
I can't figure out the best solution without creating a loop !
There are two choices here: redirects, or DNS records. If you do it with redirects it means the user will see that they have been forwarded elsewhere. If you use DNS, the user will not be aware of the deprecation of the old websites.
For this reason, I would use HTTP redirects for this task.
If you wanted to go the DNS route then simply have an A record for newwebsite.com and CNAMES for the others that point to it.
I have around 15+ sites, and we want to drop these sites and merge them into only one site (create pages for each one in the new site).
The 15+ site's domains should be redirected to one site as below:
a.com -> z.com/a
b.com -> z.com/b
c.com -> z.com/c
..
Also, we want to redirect (301) page by page from the old domains to the new the new domain to keep the page's ranking:
a.com/about-us -> z.com/a/about-us
b.com/about/abouus -> z.com/b/about-s
c.com/contactus -> z.com/c/contact-us
Each one of the 15+ sites is running on its own server with a different platform while the new server is IIS.
Currently, I'm thinking of two approaches:
Point the old DNS records to the new server of z.com, and handle all the redirects on the server.
Keep the old site running, and configure redirect rules on each server to redirect each page to the matching page on the new site.
Which approach is better, any other approaches? So far I think the first approach is better since we will control all the redirects in one place - but from the performance wise, is it going to add more headache on the server?
The Scenario
You created a new site and you want to redirect all old sites(15+) to new site (page to page).
All old sites are running in it's own server on different platforms whereas the new one is IIS.
Your options
Point the old DNS records to the new server of z.com, and handle all the redirects on the server.
Advantage
Less cost - you can remove all old sites and the server cost can be saved.
Internal redirection. So, time will be less
Disadvantage
Complex to perform
take care of conflict of similar pages(double check the redirection path)
Keep the old site running, and configure redirect rules on each server to redirect each page to the matching page on the new site
If you can afford the cost of running 15 different sites on 15 servers just to redirect, then only go for this method.
It is just a waste of money and the redirection time will be more.
I think eventually you'll have to shutdown all the other sites as in the long term unlikely does it make sense to keep 15 sites running just to do the redirects.
So as I understand the question is rather on how to better organize the migration to the new system in the short term. So here are my thoughts on this:
how huge is your system
what's your QPS?
how many pages do you have across your sites farm?
do you need to remap URLS for a decent amount of pages?
what's the migration procedure? Will you switch your sites one-by-one or it's technically infeasible and they all need to be swtiched over at once?
If we're talking about a system handling 10 QPS and 1K pages or about a system handling
50K QPS and having 1B pages we need to dynamically remap system load may be a concern and p.2 may look better
rollbacks
note that DNS records can be cached by intermediate servers and if you need to quickly rollback to the previous version if something goes wrong it can be an issue
what kind of systems do you have
Is it actually possible to easily extract URLs from 15 diverse systems and put them to a single point without a risk to lose something valuable?
ease of maintenance
At first glance the first approach looks easier from the maintenance perspective, but I don't know what kind of system you use and how complex the redirection rules need to be.
If they are complex dynamic ones like a.com/product.php?id=1 => z.com/a/iPhone6S moving millions of such urls to a single point could be tricky
SEO
I don't follow the industry closely, but a few years ago both would work ok. I think it's worth consulting those keeping up to date with this industry - it changes very rapidly
Your first approach is definitely the best.
It is easy to maintain
You needn't to keep old infrastructure (though in your second case you'll need to keep only redirecting frontend like apache, nginx or lighthttpd)
There are no performance risks as from one visitor request to old location, redirect answer and than request to new location will come in turn and not simultaneously.
DNS records are not capable of HTTP redirection which is crucial for SEO. To make sure your redirect is 301 HTTP redirect you can use sniffer.
The answer is just make sure your redirect is 301 HTTP redirect so you get your SEO right. Other than that it's just a matter of taste / architecture / money rather than standards.
UPDATE
Read more:
wikipedia
Both Bing and Google recommend using a 301 redirect to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results.
ehow.com
A 301 redirect is a search-engine friendly way to move a domain. The 301-redirected domain does not cause duplicate content in the search engines so that you do not harm your search engine rank. Using a new DNS setting is required to have a new domain name, but it does not redirect browsers or search engines. Both of these methods are used to move to a new domain.
webmasters.stackexchange.com
Duplicate content occurs when the same content is available on two different URLs. To prevent duplicate content on www vs no-www, use 301 redirects to redirect one to the other. To implement redirects, it is the webserver that needs to be configured properly. As long as DNS is pointing to the webserver (either CNAME or A record), then the webserver can be configured properly.
I was stuck with this problem some months back. I wanted to redirect a whole site into a new site's structure. The old site was .php which I know nothing about.
I figured I'd point the old website's DNS at my server and write some MVC code to catch every request, and then use a set of rules using the vb.net Like operator to compare the inbound Url with my ruleset.
It worked a treat. I redirect 300+ pages to my new site with about 10 rules. These include changes of folder structure, a forum (which was mainly junk but had a few good questions), and I implement a "catchall" rule which points to the new home page, in case I missed something.
It worked so well I've packaged it up as a commercial product and it publically available. It is free with link from the destination site (in your case just the single destination site).
https://301redirect.website/
There are a couple of demo videos on the homepage which will explain the setup in a few minutes.
Recently while scrolling around the internet I've found a few websites that have w2 at the beginning of the URL instead of www. I'm not really sure of what the purpose of using this form of canonicalization may serve, other than just to be different. But after seeing that the Vatican's website also has it now, I'm starting to think it may actually have a functional purpose.
The Vatican's website has a lot of interesting redirects, but for me at least they all end up going back to w2.vatican.va as the base URL.
www.vatican.va redirects back there, google redirects there although it was indexed with the www.
So what is the purpose of using w2 instead of www?
The w2 is a subdomain, just as www is actually a subdomain. vatican.va is the top-level domain.
There are many uses for subdomains that usually come at the discretion of the developers, engineers, or administrators of a web site.
This is why sometimes you will see websites without the www (e.g. https://example.com). They have chosen to exclude the www subdomain. Most will pick one version to be their canonical and redirect the other to it.
In the example you provided, they chose to make their primary subdomain w2.vatican.va at some point and are redirecting (likely older) links from the www.vatican.va to the new one.
Additionally, the w2 domain may indicate that the web server is using IBM's CICS Transaction Server. The w2 may be it's default listener and the server administrators did not choose to change it.
I have a Concrete5 site which already has a bunch of contents and I want to point the images to my cookieless domain without replacing the urls.
I created an htaccess that will redirect all images from my main site to the cookieless domain
http://www.example.com/images/header.jpg
to
http://static.example.com/images/header.jpg
It's actually working but YSlow doesn't seem to honor this. It's still giving me a low score on that part.
Since you didn't change the image links, browsers will still make a request to the original URL and will send the cookies. That's probably why YSlow is still giving you a poor score for that.
To properly change it you would need to:
Change all links to the new cookie-less domain (static.example.com)
Change cookies to be issued for www.example.com only (per Croises comment above)
Remove the redirects for images
It's a lot of work to achieve, and depending on your site traffic it may not be worth it. Like all YSlow rules (and those from other tools), it's important to understand the recommendations. Not all of them are worth the effort for all websites.
Reference: Cookie-less domains best practices
So i have the following scenario:
I have a domain: mydomain.ro. I am hosting the domain on a host provider in Romania. I will add a Cname record and A record in my DNS settings of my host provider that will point to an azure hosted website. Will this affect my seo? Is it still considered that i have the website hosted in my country so that i don't mess up the seo for google.ro?
Thank you
Interesting question. The trick here is the method of redirection.
Generally speaking, there are 2 main methods of redirection.
a 301 redirect ("permanently moved"), or,
a 302 redirect ("temporarily moved").
You'll want to ensure that you use a 301 redirect ("permanently moved") in order to not anger Bing, Google, etc.
This works differently with various DNS providers, but most provide you with the choice between 301 and 302. If yours doesn't, you'll want to find one that does.
There's some good information here on the whole 301/302/SEO impact thing. http://www.theinternetdigest.net/archive/301-redirects-seo.html
Good luck,
-adam
My Windows Azure Blog - http://www.stratospher.es
My Twitter-er-er: http://twitter.com/stratospher_es