This is somewhat of a subjective question. But would like the communities take on this. My client is doing a site split. www.domain1.com will turn in to -- www.domain1.com + www.domain2.com. I know this isn't typically advisable from an SEO perspective, but they are doing it for legal reasons.
Our plan is to only rip out the product pages on www.domain1.com and add those on www.domain2.com everything else on domain1 will stay and everything else on domain2 will be original content. So here's the question, still a good idea to do single page 301 redirects for the pages that are transferred?
www.domain1.com/apples > www.domain2.com/apples
I know that's a bit open-ended, without a ton of detail, but if you have specific examples of where you've done something similar, I'd be curious to know what worked/didn't.
Yes, with a clarification: http 301 is the best for your purpose, because it means permanent redirect (good for SEO, you pass the page and domain authority, link juice...); instead a 302-redirect (http 302) means a temporary redirect, you have no time limits but all the SEO value won't pass! For your purpose, you don't want that.
In general, all pages should be redirected with http 301. Aniyway, with data analysis you can make a decision: if you have a page unuseful, with no traffic, it doesn't need to be redirected, you can use http 404 or http 410 (you can build also a custom 404 page!).
The last thing, must avoid multiple redirects, for example: instead of site1-->site2-->site3 you just need to do: site1-->site3. The reason is each redirect hurts loading speed (also the most common and useful redirect, from http to thhps!!). You just need to avoid multiple ones.
Related
I've got a tricky situation where four different websites are now merging into a single site. I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle 301 redirects for old URLs from these sites.
Here's an example for illustration. Say I have these four sites:
https://red.com
https://blue.com
https://green.com
https://magenta.com
And they're all now going to be living just at https://red.com.
Each of these sites had a "Team" page...
https://red.com/team/
https://blue.com/team/
etc.
Once I've pointed all the URLs to the same place, I'd like to see if someone tried to enter one of the previous URLs, and direct them to a specific new place on the site, e.g.:
URL Entered: https://blue.com/team/
301 Redirect: https://red.com/blue/team/
URL Entered: https://green.com/team/
301 Redirect: https://red.com/green/team/
etc.
Since folks may be coming from multiple different domains, I can't use standard relative 301 redirects in .htaccess for this. I'd like to just be able to point the DNS for these other domains to go straight to red.com, and then handle the 301 redirect logic there.
Any ideas on how to handle this?
You can simply use 302 temporary redirect rather than using 301 which is permanent.
** Also don't forget to clear previous 301 redirection caches on your web browser; if used.
I have a question about redirection 301 or 302.
For ex. i have domain www.example.com.
It's a good site with a good domain history. Some 'BAD' webmasters make sometimes a redirect from bad-histories domain with search bans to redirect it to good domains to downgrade good sites in search system query as Google.
So question is: is it possible to know, have someone made this bad-redirect?
As i understand in each html response html headers are transmitted. May by there is a way to catch this responses to detect such redirects?
Is it well-known practice?
Or it is impossible and it's like paranoia?
I think is paranoia, but major browsers still keep the referrer in the redirection and can be read at destination. In php is:
$referral = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
you can trap all referrer urls in a log file and I have no idea how to filter out good sites. this way you will discover only redirects only from websites heaving some traffic;
I have a site with thousands of pages that need to be redirected. I was thinking of using a 301 redirect in my .htaccess, but I'm just afraid that this will be very inefficient.
Would having a .htaccess with thousands of lines (there is no way to have a re-write rule, they have to be mapped one by one), mean that every time someone accesses one of our pages, they have to read the entire .htaccess? Is that a bad thing? This sit is in a shared host.
I saw a previous answer here about using RewriteMap. How is that different than having the 301 redirects?
Thanks
For simple page redirects 301 is the best and it's very fast. RewriteMap is for more complex rewrite functions or doing very specific rewrite tasks.
Before black listing your pages server side, I would try remapping with your application first.
If you set up the redirect with .htaccess those pages will be dead to Google which of course may or may not be a bad thing. Basically once Google indexes those redirects there really is no going back (SEO).
In short redirect wisely.
I apologize if in the wrong place. I have someone that has done 301 redirects where dynamic pages are being redirected to show .html. (www.printe-z.com/computer-checks to www.printe-z.com/computer-checks.html) They feels they should now use a custom 404 page for the original page(s); www.printe-z.com/computer-checks. What do you think? Leave it the way it is?
301 is better for this scenario, specially for search engines: they will associate your old urls with the new ones so you'll keep your pages rank.
People accessing your old links will be benefited too since they will be automatically redirected to new urls.
If the page has moved use 301. If it is removed all together, 404.
301 tells crawlers such as googlebot that the original page is moved permanently to the target page. So keep it as it is.
For your information, most URL rewritings are done using 301 Permanent Redirects. Also sending domain.com visitors to www.domain.com is an example where 301 redirection is used.
People might have bookmarked the old urls, or there may be a link on a website to the old url. Unless you are sure this is no longer the case, which you never can, you can remove the 301. But this is in a perfect world.
If the 301's are a maintenance burden, or have some other negative side-effect and the 301 have been there for some time ( >1 year), you could just remove them. But if not just leave them be.
Background: I've got a web app on sub.domain.com. My primary website is on domain.com. My sub.domain.com pages are stuffed with keywords that I would like to use to get upped in pagerank on domain.com. however, the whole app has been written on sub.domain.com, and it'll be some effort to host it at domain.com/subdirectory, due to how URLs are written, etc.
First question: would you expect that migration (from sub.domain.com to domain.com/subdirectory) to substantially improve the pagerank of domain.com over how it is now? I've done a lot of research, and opinions are split on if google with link the subdomain with the main domain.
Next question: if I do want to do the migration, it'll be difficult to do in the actual codebase (more tedious than difficult). Does anybody have some advice for how I could do this with mod_rewrite? I know there has to be a clever way to do it, but I can't even start to sketch out a solution. Maybe this means it's not a good thing to do, but I was hoping for kind of a quick hack, rather than rewriting all my URLs. Plus, I would like it to be pretty easily reversible, which wouldn't be the case if I change my URLs (dev is ongoing, so it's not as simple as just rolling out a previous version).
Pagerank isn't a property of domains, it's a property of individual documents. So it'd be more accurate to say that migration from sub.domain.com to domain.com/subdirectory will improve the pagerank of domain.com/subdirectory. If you're concerned solely about the ranking of the domain.com home page, the impact on that will mostly depend on your internal linking. For example, if all pages on sub.domain.com currently have a "home" navigation link that leads to the home page of sub.domain.com, and when you do your move they'll now lead to the home page of domain.com, then this will contribute to the domain.com home page's ranking. If this "home" navigation link went to domain.com/subdirectory, on the other hand, then that's what they'll be contributing pagerank to.
mod_rewrite doesn't change the outbound links in your HTML, it changes how inbound links are interpreted. So it would let you put this in the virtual host file or .htaccess for sub.domain.com:
RewriteEngine on
RedirectRule (.*) http://domain.com/subdirectory/$1 [R=301]
to mass redirect any requests coming in on sub.domain.com where they need to go. It won't help you produce correct new-form URLs in your codebase. (You could, in theory, leave all your links how they are and rely on the 301 redirect to keep you from having to change them, but this is really sloppy and wasteful, generating two HTTP requests instead of one for no good reason).