What passes more value, a contextual link or a 1-to-1 301 redirect?
-
I have a client who is running a website which just lost a significant amount of rankings and by extension organic traffic in a redesign. Call it newsite.com.
The client also has an older site that will no longer be updated, but has good authority that's built up over time. It even out ranks the current site for some queries. This website has no real value to my client.
We want to try to pass the authority from oldsite.com to newsite.com as efficiently as possible. Each site has pages a good amount of matching pages, ie. oldsite.com/subject1 and newsite.com/subject1
My question is, would it provide more value to put a contextual link on the old page or simply redirect the entire page to the new site?
oldsite.com/subject1 contains a link to newsite.com/subject1
oldsite.com/subject1 301 redirects to newsite.com/subject1
My guess is that the 301 would pass more value, but would like a SEOMoz opinion as well!
Thanks!
-
My vote goes for 301. It makes more sense.
-
301 is going to be the way to go here. Not only is it going to pass a little more juice but chances are if you have a new site the likelihood that much of the content is identical... well you get where I'm going with this
-
John, I think you definitely are right. If you 301 all old pages to their new destinations, search engines will count each link from the old page to the new page. This will help your PR/mR much better than a contextual link.You can then get the benefit from 2 or more links per old page rather than just 1 optimized link.
Also, consider the domain registrant of oldsite.com and newsite.com. If they are the same, then those links won't pass as much value if you place a contextual link on the page
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
-
301 redirects and impact on page authority
I need to restructure a section of my website, changing some page titles and moving some pages to other sections. This will then change the URLs but the CMS I use will automatically create 301 redirects so the old URLs still work. The question is, will this have any negative impacts on page authority/page rank? From what I've read, it seems having 301's used to have a negative impact but doesn't anymore?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ciehmoz0 -
Is there any set benefit in using a URL tracking engine on a domain for passing link juice?
Is there any set benefit in using a URL tracking engine on a domain for passing link juice? I.E. xxxx.com?$id=1111 to then redirect to shareasale? The client has an affiliate program and is thinking of running one in-house as well. Is there a benefit to a “redirect engine” that uses the website root domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KellyBrady1 -
Penguin and 301 redirects...
Hi, I have several questions about starting a new domain due to Penguin. The site is: http://bajajlaw.com. Quick backstory: This site was hit every time Penguin rolled out. No clean-up was done until October 2015. At that time, I took over the project. My efforts include: (1) Remove'em, (2) manual removal, (3) and the Disavow Tool. The HP went from being at around #50 for the target KW (San Diego criminal defense attorney) to about #25. Never really moved higher than that. However, I redid the content for the internal pages (DV, Theft Crimes, etc.) and they are all ranking fairly well (first page or top of 2nd). In short, the penalty only seems to affect the HP, not the internal pages. Instead of waiting for Penguin to roll-out, client wants to move forward with new domain. My questions are as follow: 1. Can I use the same content for the internal pages and 301 from the old internal pages to the new? 2. Should I 301 from the old to the new domain for the HP, or not? 3. If I do a 301 from an internal page to a new internal page, does that have the same effect of doing a 301 from the old HP to the new HP? I have read various opinions on this topic. I'd appreciate feedback from anyone who has experience doing this sort of thing. Thanks. P.s. I'm inclined to wait for P4 to rollout, but given that nobody seems to know when that might be, it's hard for me to advise client to keep waiting for it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Organic keywords have dropped significantly in a short time period when relaunching site, but all 301 redirects are working properly.
We redesigned a site and relaunched it on the same domain. All 301 redirects were completed and are working properly. Around the same time, they fired an seo company who was published inbound links to their site on spammy directories (and this was during the same time period that Google's Hummingbird algorithm change took place). After the website relaunch, their keyword rankings fell off dramatically; and in all of our research, we're not seeing what has caused this issue. I'm not seeing any red flags in their moz reports or even in their google analytics traffic; but organic keywords are way down, and now leads from organic traffic are also way down. Help??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Effect of 301 redirect to a relative url to homepage?
One of our new clients recently encountered a site-wide ranking drop for many keywords and I'm pretty confident regarding their link profile as to being 98% legit. Background: 1. Client full site is https, and all http pages are 301 redirected to their https counterpart 2. Client has ~50 links partners (all legitimate sites + schools etc) links to client with urls such as www.example.com/portal/123.aspx that redirects to www.example.com. 3. Client homepage 301 redirects from www.example.com to www.example.com/default.aspx and then 301 redirects to the relative url "/Home.aspx". 4. Client launched some testing with Google website optimizer tool. ~1-2 months ago. Symptoms: 1. Rankings dropped for basically many/all 30-40+ keywords by ~15 positions 2. Seomoz reports close to a double of existing pages + (600+) duplicate content in the same date range. Webmasters only report 80 duplicate titles though. 3. Domain authority by seomoz reduced a bit + backlinks recorded by seomoz to the website nearly halved in the past 2 months. I'm not sure if I narrowed this towards the right direction, and it isn't clear when the relative url 301 redirect was implemented: 1. The 301 redirect to the relative page (www.example.com/default.aspx to "/home.aspx") is accounting for the loss of links recorded by seomoz. 2. The ~50 links the client currently use (www.example.com/portal.123.aspx 301 redirecting to www.example.com, also relative) as a tracking tool is being considered 301 redirect abuse. 3. Maybe something went wrong with the usage of google optimizer tool for SEO purposes? Visitor traffic to each of the tested pages looked fine. I would greatly appreciate any advice/insights on what I might be missing in terms of direction / factors. Thanks! Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sixspokemedia0 -
301'ing over 700 internal links to the main page
I just got a contract for a site. After I analyzed their website, I noticed that they have over 700 pages indexed. However, their internal linking structure sucks. It's basically all 700 pages in one directory. What do you recommend? I redirect all the internal structures to their new locations, or would it be better to redirect all those internal pages to their main domain name, and build a completely new seo-friendly structure? Redirecting their current pages to each individual page is gonna take a lotta time, and I don't think they're gonna pay for it. :l
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | skgppa0