Link Reclimation & Redirects
-
Hello,
I'm in the middle of a link reclamation project wherein we're identifying broken links, links pointing to dupe content etc.
I found a forgotten co-brand which is effectively dupe content across 8 sub-domains, some of which have a significant number of links (200+ linking domains | 2k+ in-bound links).
Question for the group is what's the optimal redirect option?
Option 1: set 301 and maintain 1:1 URL mapping
- will pass all equity to applicable PLPs and theoretically improve rank for related keyword(s).
- requires a bit more configuration time and will likely have small effect on rank given links are widely distributed across URLs.
Option 2: set 301 to redirect all requests to the associated sub-domain e.g. foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page1.html and foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page2 both redirect to foo.mybrand.com/
- will accumulate all equity at the sub-domain level which theoretically will be roughly distributed throughout underlying pages and will limit risk of penalty to that sub-domain.
Option 3: set 301 to redirect all requests to our homepage.
- easiest to configure & maintain, will accumulate the maximum equity on a priority page which should positively affect domain authority.
- run risk of being penalized for accumulating links en mass, risk penalty for spammy links on our primary sub-domain www, won't pass keyword specific equity to applicable pages.
To be clear, I've done an initial scrub of anchor text and there were no signs of spam.
I'm leaning towards #3, but interested in others perspectives.
Cheers,
Stefan -
The optimal redirect for both visitors and search engines is to keep the structure as it was, meaning #1.
The optimal solution also follows your options numbering, meaning that for both search engine and visitors the last options is the least desirable.
The optimal solution workload wise, is the exact opposite, as it often is.
Depending on how well related the content is, it might be possible to opt for #2 but it is very rare that option #3 would work well as the content of the entire website, including all its subdomains, has to be extremely well related and basically only cover one single topic.
A few simple questions might help:
-
Are all the topics of every single page of the forgotten co-brands present on the homepage? If not, then #3 is not a very good option.
-
Are all the topics of every single page of the forgotten co-brands present on the associated subdomain? If not, then #2 is not a very good option.
Another thing to consider is the amount of pages that will be re-directed. I actually have a problem with that at the moment, as I am really not sure how well that will be treated by the search engines.
IMHO you should look at how the redirects are for people first, bots second and equity/domain authority/etc. last. Not to mention that I think that no matter which group you put first, the optimal solution out of the 3 options stays the same as your numbering anyway.
-
-
+1 to option 1 and Takeshi's response.
You should consider user experience as a huge decision-making factor in this. Landing on a page the user is looking for will ultimately provide a better user experience and therefore you should go with that option. That said, it's also slightly better for SEO purposes imo.
I have 2 sites I monitor. One I was allowed to redesign and the other is a disaster. Of the two sites, they both get similar keyword ranking and similar traffic. But about 65% more leads are generated through the purdier site.
TL;DR - make it purdy, make me happy = win.
-
I would personally go with Option 1. The purpose of 301 redirects is to say that a piece of content has permanently moved from one location to another. Therefore the content on the old location should point to the content on the new location, not the homepage.
Google will often not pass link equity if the new page is completely different from the original, which is why redirecting a bunch of domains to a new site isn't going to pass all their link equity to the new site. Like you pointed out, you will also dilute the value of the keyword relevancy.
It's also bad from a user perspective-- if you have a lot of links going to your co-brand, and people are clicking on those links, having them taken to your homepage is a poor user experience, and can result in increased bounce rate. If those visitors are getting to your co-brand through search, it could even be a negative signal for the search engines.
301s should be directed at content that's as similar as possible to the original content, that's the general rule.
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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
Does 302 redirects pass link juice ? - I've read conflicting reports
Hi Mozzers Ive noticed that I have some 302 redirects on my website which have been there for some time . They should really 301's but I am wondering if 302s pass link juice or not as from what I've read they don't so I just wanted to check if anyone knew for sure, thanks pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Redirects in .htaccess file
I am using yoast seo plugin for wordpress. I have done several link changes and placed approximately 80-100 301 redirect into .htaccsses file. Is this good practice? Do they have to be there forever? Is it not slowing down site? Or should this be done in different way? Thank you very much Iris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca10 -
Google WMT Turning 1 Link into 4,000+ Links
We operate 2 ecommerce sites. The About Us page of our main site links to the homepage of our second site. It's been this way since the second site launched about 5 years ago. The sites sell completely different products and aren't related besides both being owned by us. In Webmaster Tools for site 2, it's picking up ~4,100 links coming to the home page from site 1. But we only link to the home page 1 time in the entire site and that's from the About Us page. I've used Screaming Frog, IT has looked at source, JavaScript, etc., and we're stumped. It doesn't look like WMT has a function to show you on what pages of a domain it finds the links and we're not seeing anything by checking the site itself. Does anyone have experience with a situation like this? Anyone know an easy way to find exactly where Google sees these links coming from?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Link Building
We have just recently launched a new website in Australia and as l am new to the SEO community, l was looking for a little advice on link building. Where is best to start? There are not many authorative websites for our industry. Are there specific websites that are good to link to? Are there any good tools to assist with this? Any help would be great. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
Should We Link To Our News?
We just started an "In the News" section on our webpage. We are not sure what would be the best for SEO purposes. Should we link to the news websites that have the stories about our company, even if they have no link bank? Or should we just take screenshots of the news article and only link to articles that link back to us (this is what we a currently doing)? Here is our news page, http://www.buyautoparts.com/News/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joebuilder0 -
Redirect 301
Hi, I `m redirecting some pages in htaccess The first 15 pages that i redirected it worked. But the last 3 dont work, and i cant figure it out why it is not working. Redirect 301 /analyseverktoy/ /webanalyse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SGacic
Redirect 301 /index.php/ledige-stillinger/ /
Redirect 301 /?page_id=352/ / Anu suggestions?0 -
Global Redirection Rules
SEO Moz Community: After twice changing directory software, I have a ton of 404 errors in Webmaster Tools (over 3,000). I've decided to do 301 redirects but can't manually enter in each 404 URL. How can you redirect pages from the same folder on a mass scale? For example, mysite.com/autos has hundreds of pages associated with it (/autos/ford, toyota etc.) How can you do a 301 that redirects all those pages without manually entering in each URL? Site is built on Wordpress
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0