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.
Too many 301 redirects?
-
Hey,
My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website. These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic.
I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website? If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content?
For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site:
-
Michael I don't think you will get anymore benefit from a 301 than you're getting from the cross-domain rel canonical tags that are already in place.
However, I think the fact that you already have these cross-domain rel canonical tags i place, and that the content is identical, will make it much less likely that 301 redirecting those domains would be seen as any type of spam.
If it were me, just so all of my users were on the same domain - and to keep the problem from getting worse over time - I would go ahead and 301 redirect the other domains, but on a page-to-page basis. In other words, each page would link directly to the page it is currently referencing as the rel canonical. This would be much better than redirecting them all to a single landing page, and would send signal that is consistent with the current one you are sending via the cross domain rel canonical.
You might try this one domain at a time. Let the dust settle on that domain and, if all goes well, move on to the next. It may take a year to complete the project, but it might be the safest way to go.
Alternatively, you could just continue to leave the other sites up with the cross domain rel canonical tag - but the problem is likely to just worsen over time as more people link to the other domains, and they develop their own sources of traffic via direct links, social, bookmarks, etc... outside of the SERPs.
-
PS you have a decent thing going with your links already and you are not in a bad spot for page rank.
| Page Authority (PA) | 53 | Domain Authority (DA) | -- | 46 |
| MozRank (mR) | 5.94 | Domain MozRank (DmR) | 4.81 | 4.72 |
| MozTrust (mT) | 5.83 | Domain MozTrust (DmT) | 4.51 | 4.30 |
| Total Links | 1,635 | Total Links | 15,333 | 52,916 |
| External Followed Links | 1,589 | External Followed Links | 10,939 | 12,132 |
| Internal Followed Links | 39 | Linking Root Domains | 566 | 701 |
| Linking Root Domains | 399|
I would not jeopardize you have that's my $.02.
-
301 redirecting is not bad at all in itself.
It is simply a method of redirecting links. However because of the quantity of exact match sites I believe you can only put yourself in danger Google is getting and more aggressive every day I would rather sleep soundly if I were you or myself obviously. And not redirect possibly spamish websites to my main site where I do business.
If this was not regarding 500 duplicate sites I would say go for it
unfortunately I believe that you will open yourself up for a possible penalty from Google.
The immense amount of duplicate or identical content that I don't know if you use Google Webmaster tools am assuming that you do but do have it set up for all 500 websites?
That will tell you if you have a penalty.
My thinking on this is you created a bunch of identical websites 500 of them. Whenever you make large changes to a website Google reevaluates it looks at it.
In my opinion by 301 redirecting 500 sites page 2 page or even to homepage you're just asking for a possible Extremely bad penalty or you might get away with it I don't know but if it were me I would not do it.
The real question is what is the chief site worth?
would you be okay with it being penalized because you 301 redirected all of the sites?
if the answer is this is a valuable website to me I would not risk it.
The problem is you did something that is very far into the black hat arena I'm not judging however you want to show Google you're not going to continue to try to take advantage of any part of the search engine in order to gain rank when the parts that your talking about our exact match duplicate content that you created.
I honestly would kill the content on the sites than 302 redirect them if you want to have the traffic from the links.
What you said about a 301 is pretty much where the money however you're going to open yourself up to a possible penalty or even removal from Google's index which is what happens with most penalties.
It's up to you however I would not do it.
Best of luck to you,
Thomas
-
301 redirecting entire identical sites to different pages sounds extremely dodgy, just to the homepage was bad enough.
-
So if 301 redirecting all of them is seen as negative, what is the best way to consolidate all of these sites? I thought the purpose of a 301 redirect was to permanently transfer traffic from one site to another - which would mean that a 301 redirect would be the ideal method for consolidating multiple versions of an identical site.
In essence, is there a way to gain at least some advantage from the links that these sites of garnered over time?
-
I agree with Alex on a lot of it
however 500 of the same website with identical content is extremely black hat
it would depend on how much traffic is coming from these domains? Which one of them is performing the best? There must surely be a standout hopefully if it's not a lot of traffic I would delete the content on the other domains and pray that Google is not going to penalize you. By 301 redirecting any of those sites to your current chief site used and only to lose quite a bit from Google this is something that will happen if you are using the same hosting providers or not they will consider this less than good
-
Hey,
I would be redirecting each entire site to a specific page on my chief website. Admittedly, this means that there is some precision lost because each site is a copy of the chief site but all the affiliated pages on a copy link to only one landing page on the chief site. For instance:
- www.1099softwarepro.com and all affiliated pages would redirect to www.1099pro.com/software.asp
- www.W2Professionals.com and all affiliated pages would redirect to www.1099pro.com/prodw2pro.asp
-
In 2011 Matt Cutts said there isn't a limit. 500-600 sounds A LOT. If I was in this situation I'd just 301 the domains that have the most traffic and best links.
Are you redirecting each page on the other websites to the matching page on the chief website?
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
-
If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance?
Hi, If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
Problem with redirects in coldfusion
How to redirect pages in cold fusion? If using ColdFusion and modrewrite, the URL will never be redirected from ModRewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexkatalkin0 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0 -
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