Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is domain authority lost if you create a 301 redirect but mark it as noindex, nofollow?
-
Hi everyone,
Our company sells products in various divisions. While we've been selling Product A and Product B under our original brand, we've recently created a new division with a new domain to focus on a Product B.
The new domain has virtually no domain authority (3) while the original domain has some (37). We want customers to arrive on the new domain when they search for key search terms related to Product B instead of the pages that previously existed on our main website.
If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags?
I read a few blog posts from Moz that said there isn't any domain authority lost with 301 redirects but I'm not sure if that is true if the pages are noindex, nonofollow. Do you follow?
Apologies for the lengthy post. Love this community and the great Moz team.
Thanks,
Joe
-
Thanks Mike. How do we preserve any 'link juice' from the existing page that will have the redirect? Do the noindex and nofollow tags hurt the passing of link equity vs. just having the 301 redirect without those tags?
-
Hi Joe,
If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags?
If you create 301 redirects for pages on the main site, the "noindex,nofollow" tags will have no impact (bc they'll never be visible to Googlebot or other clients). The pages would have to load (200 status code) for Google to discover and make use of the Meta Robots tag or any other directive/content.
So if you're planning to create 301 redirects for these pages, I wouldn't bother with the "noindex,nofollow" tags - once Google encounters the 301 redirect they should index the new pages and remove the old pages.
One caveat: if Google detects a large disparity between the old and new pages (topic/intent is clearly different), the authority might not translate over to the new pages. We usually see this work fine, but it's something to keep in mind.
Best,
Mike
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
-
Redirection of 100 domain to Main domain affects SEO?
Hi guys, An email software vendor managed by a different area of my company redirected 100 domains used for unsolicited email campaigns to my main domain. These domains are very likely to get blacklisted at some point. My SEO tool now is showing me all those domains as "linking" to my main site as do-follow links. The vendor states that this will not affect my main domain/website in any way. I'm highly concerned. I would appreciate your professional opinion about this. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anagentile0 -
301 Redirect - Rank Recovery Examples?
Hi All, I recently did a 301 redirect. Page to Page and the notified google via its console. Its been 6 days since. The home page and one other high traffic page swopped out with the new domain on google search index with 3-4 drops in ranking for each. The rest of the sites pages have been indexed but still reflect the old domain when searched. Recently today my home page dropped even further to the second page of google index for the specific keyword. Can you share similar experiences and how long it took you to recover rank fully? and how long for all pages to swop out on google search's index? Regards Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeBlue10 -
Will 301 Redirects Slow Page Speed?
We have a lot of subdomains that we are switching to subfolders and need to 301 redirect all the pages from those subdomains to the new URL. We have over 1000 that need to be implemented. So, will 301 redirects slow the page speed regardless of which URL the user comes through? Or, as the old urls are dropped from Google's index and bypassed as the new URLs take over in the SERPs, will those redirects then have no effect on page speed? Trying to find a clear answer to this and have yet to find a good answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
301 redirects Ruby on Rails
Can anyone point me to the best way to implement 301 redirects on a Ruby on Rails website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Images Returning 404 Error Codes. 301 Redirects?
We're working with a site that has gone through a lot of changes over the years - ownership, complete site redesigns, different platforms, etc. - and we are finding that there are both a lot of pages and individual images that are returning 404 error codes in the Moz crawls. We're doing 301 redirects for the pages, but what would the best course of action be for the images? The images obviously don't exist on the site anymore and are therefore returning the 404 error codes. Should we do a 301 redirect to another similar image that is on the site now or redirect the images to an actual page? Or is there another solution that I'm not considering (besides doing nothing)? We'll go through the site to make sure that there aren't any pages within the site that are still linking to those images, which is probably where the 404 errors are coming from. Based on feedback below it sounds like once we do that, leaving them alone is a good option.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
Can you redirect specific sub domain URLs?
ello! We host our PDFs, Images, CSS all in a sub domain. For the question, let's call this sub.cyto.com. I've noticed a particular PDF doing really well, infact it has gathered valuable external links from high authoritative sites. To top it off, it gets good visits. I've been going back and forth with our developers to move this PDF to a subfolder structure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs
For example: www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf In my perspective, if I move this and set up a permanent redirect, then all the external links the PDF gathered, link juice and future visits will be attributed to the main website. Since the PDF is existing in the subdomain, I can't even track direct visits nor get the link juice. It appears in top position of Google as well. My developer says it is better to keep images, pdf, css in the subdomain. I see his point and an idea I have is to: convert the pdf to a webpage. Set up a 301 redirect from the existing subdomain to this webpage Upload the pdf with a new name and link to it from the webpage, so users can download if they choose to. This should give me the existing rank juice. However, my question is whether you can set up a 301 redirect for just a single subdomain URL to a folder structure URL? sub.cyto.com/xxx.pdf to www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf?0 -
301 or 302 Redirects to Mobile Site
When it's detected that a mobile device is accessing the site it has the ability to redirect from www.example.com to m.example.com. Does it make more sense to employ a 301 or 302 redirect here? Google says a 301 but does not explain why (although usually I stick to "when in doubt, 301") . It seems like a 302 would prevent passing link juice to the mobile site and having mobile-optimized results also showing up in Google's index. What is the preference here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTGT0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0