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.
How long should an old site redirecting to a new site remain activated on a server?
-
Once I switch a site to a new domain (with links to corresponding/relative pages), will I have to keep the old site live forever for those links to work, or how long should I wait before I inactivate the old site on our server?
-
301 redirects are called permanent, but that's not really the case. They are permanent only as long as they are in place. If you want to see this, do everything as Andy said and then remove the redirect. You'll notice your traffic drop and when you put the redirects back the traffic will recover. Go ahead and do this every year and you'll see that each time it drops. We've dealt with drops that happened from domains that haven't been active in over 5 years, so as EGOL alluded to, keep them forever.
-
Google has an extremely long memory for old URL's being live and linking. It is anoying realy.
Links from websites to your old domain are still there, you want to hold on to that value. Thus you will keep the old domain redirected. You do not need a server for that, just the domain pointing to the server and redirecting it on your server. Your web hosting support can help you with that (if not, switch to wp engine)
-
Mine will still be there when I attend my funeral.
-
Not at all - on the new site, setup a list of pages to be redirected (301) to corresponding pages on the new domain and make sure you advise Google through Webmaster Tools that the site has moved.
However, don't turn everything off on the old server until you have confirmed all is working on the new one.
-Andy
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
-
Moving pages to new domain
Hello, Our product pages are ranked #1 on google for our target keywords using our domain e.g. www.olddomain.com/cases/productxyz and sell about 20 products all ranked #1. We have a new company called www.newco.com/case/product1, 2, 3 etc. We use woocommerce e-commerce for both old and new sites. What is the best way to list our old co-products on our new site and move over the #1 rankings? Do we create new products (using our new nice design) in the newco.com woo commerce and then redirect old co links? do we copy and paste all that old content into the newco.com? Totally confused. Thank you!
Web Design | | Jamesmcd031 -
What’s the best tool to visualize internal link structure and relationships between pages on a single site?
I‘d like to review the internal linking structure on my site. Is there a tool that can visualize the relationships between all of the pages within my site?
Web Design | | QBSEO0 -
How to find out that none of the images on my site violates copyrights? Is there any tool that can do this without having to check manually image by image?
We plan to add several thousand images to our site and we outsourced the image search to some freelancers who had instructions to just use royalty free pictures. Is there any easy and quick way to check that in fact none of these images violates copyrights without having to check image by image? In case there are violations we are unaware of, do you think we need to be concerned about a risk of receiving Takedown Notices (DMCA) before owner giving us notification for giving us opportunity to remove the photo?
Web Design | | lcourse1 -
301 Redirect all pictures when moving to a new site?
We have 30,000 pictures on our site. Moz will return 404's on some occasionally, but Google seems to ignore those. Should I 301 redirect all those images when we move to a new site lay-out? Appreciate your views!
Web Design | | Discountvc0 -
Lots of Listing Pages with Thin Content on Real Estate Web Site-Best to Set them to No-Index?
Greetings Moz Community: As a commercial real estate broker in Manhattan I run a web site with over 600 pages. Basically the pages are organized in the following categories: 1. Neighborhoods (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/neighborhoods/midtown-manhattan) 25 PAGES Low bounce rate 2. Types of Space (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/commercial-space/loft-space)
Web Design | | Kingalan1
15 PAGES Low bounce rate. 3. Blog (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/how-long-does-leasing-process-take
30 PAGES Medium/high bounce rate 4. Services (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/brokerage-services/relocate-to-new-office-space) High bounce rate
3 PAGES 5. About Us (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/about-us/what-we-do
4 PAGES High bounce rate 6. Listings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf)
300 PAGES High bounce rate (65%), thin content 7. Buildings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/928-broadway
300 PAGES Very high bounce rate (exceeding 75%) Most of the listing pages do not have more than 100 words. My SEO firm is advising me to set them "No-Index, Follow". They believe the thin content could be hurting me. Is this an acceptable strategy? I am concerned that when Google detects 300 pages set to "No-Follow" they could interpret this as the site seeking to hide something and penalize us. Also, the building pages have a low click thru rate. Would it make sense to set them to "No-Follow" as well? Basically, would it increase authority in Google's eyes if we set pages that have thin content and/or low click thru rates to "No-Follow"? Any harm in doing this for about half the pages on the site? I might add that while I don't suffer from any manual penalty volume has gone down substantially in the last month. We upgraded the site in early June and somehow 175 pages were submitted to Google that should not have been indexed. A removal request has been made for those pages. Prior to that we were hit by Panda in April 2012 with search volume dropping from about 7,000 per month to 3,000 per month. Volume had increased back to 4,500 by April this year only to start tanking again. It was down to 3,600 in June. About 30 toxic links were removed in late April and a disavow file was submitted with Google in late April for removal of links from 80 toxic domains. Thanks in advance for your responses!! Alan0 -
Infinite Scrolling vs. Pagination on an eCommerce Site
My company is looking at replacing our ecommerce site's paginated browsing with a Javascript infinite scroll function for when customers view internal search results--and possibly when they browse product categories also. Because our internal linking structure isn't very robust, I'm concerned that removing the pagination will make it harder to get the individual product pages to rank in the SERPs. We have over 5,000 products, and most of them are internally linked to from the browsing results pages in the category structure: e.g. Blue Widgets, Widgets Under $250, etc. I'm not too worried about removing pagination from the internal search results pages, but I'm concerned that doing the same for these category pages will result in de-linking the thousands of product pages that show up later in the browsing results and therefore won't be crawlable as internal links by the Googlebot. Does anyone have any ideas on what to do here? I'm already arguing against the infinite scroll, but we're a fairly design-driven company and any ammunition or alternatives would really help. For example, would serving a different page to the Googlebot in this case be a dangerous form of cloaking? (If the only difference is the presence of the pagination links.) Or is there any way to make rel=next and rel=prev tags work with infinite scrolling?
Web Design | | DownPour0 -
Should I use the google mod_pagespeed in my apache server?
Anyone already use it? There is some speed benefit? http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/module.html
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
Optimal redirect configuration from a misspelled domain that we own.
We have a handful of inbound links to www.t-chek.com (note the hyphen). Our normal site is www.tchek.com (no hyphen). We own both domains and have some sort of domain-wide redirect set up now. This works fine for traffic, but I suspect it's not optimal for SEO purposes. I came to this conclusion by looking in OSE and noticing that none of the inbound links to www.t-chek.com were also being attributed to www.tchek.com. 2 questions: Is it immediately evident what type of redirect I have in place now, or do I need to figure that out? Is the fix as simple as editing the .htaccess file on the hyphenated domain? I don't have direct control over the hyphenated domain, and I'd like to be able to know exactly what we need to do so I can request help from my IT department. I'd appreciate hearing your wisdom. Thanks!
Web Design | | SheriGolla0