We have done many website redesigns before for companies looking to bring themselves into the 21st century. Most of them have low page rank when we are handed the project, so it is usually not a big concern of ours to maintain page rank.
However, we have recently obtained a client that is coming from a PHP-based architecture (we are a Microsoft .NET house), and one of the client's main concerns is the loss of their google page rank. Obviously the pages that have a high page rank have PHP extensions.
My questions are as follows:
Will a 301 redirect maintain page rank for each page, or is there something else we need to consider?
Since there are hundreds of pages, is there a nice "industry-standard" way of performing multiple 301 redirects? We are thinking of doing some URL rewriting of the PHP pages and performing the 301 redirect in the web form that we're redirecting to, but before we do this, we want to make sure there's not a better/cleaner way to do this.
Are there any other considerations we should take into account when dealing with a site of this magnitude with this amount of SEO success?
Any help, as always, is appreciated!
A 301 is the recommended way (straight from Google's Webmaster Tools documentation) of changing URL's for content. It is the "industry standard" and correct way of performing this task.
Your question is actually very similar to this one, so you could check there for some more relevant responses.
Look into the .Net Routing module. It would be a cleaner way to manage all those redirects in one go and in one spot.
You may have to set up IIS to send .php files to .Net
Yes, 301 redirects maintain the authority of a website or a page for SEO. (Most tests show that 90% or more of the old authority is passed).
One other related search engine optimization tip is to be sure that each page redirects / resolves only one time. i.e. not as a www & non-www or with a trailing / and without.
301
Redirect is Google Friendly and also Maintain Page Rank in Google. and second thing Web redesign is Best decision for Increase Page Rank and also Site Health.
Related
I wanted to know if buying expired domains has positive impact on SEO or not.
I mean if someone buys an expired domain, and 301 redirect it to his main website, does this trick help ranking?
Thanks.
Buying expired domains and the redirecting them has been an SEO trick for years. Google are aware of it and do stamp it out.
If you think about it it's easy to spot. The sites are not related or the same sector etc.
You also need to ask why the domain expired. Were they link building and have various penalties on the site that they couldn't fix so let the domain drop?
If you buy a site that had issues before such as manual actions, link building etc and then 301 redirect that domain to yours, then those issues then get passed on to your site.
So for me this is very risky and will most likely add benefit to your site whatsoever.
#WilliamHarvey
We have a website that is used to showcase our various products. The website uses MVC4 and subdomains areas.
product1.website.com
product2.website.com
We use the subdomain to determine which area to route the request.
Lately we have been getting http HEAD requests to our site using the IP only. Without the subdomain we can't know which area to send the request.
What should we do?
Send back a 404
Redirect to our most important area/product
Redirect to our company website
why not redirect users to an overview page where they see a short list of the products. In this way you can redirect them behind the screens to whereever you want without hem knowing and this also has the ability to be used when user make typo in the url so that they are 'guided' to the right product and even find other ones.
-a 404 usually makes people seek elsewhere since tey think they have the wrong IP
- redirect to most important product may result in confusion when you change your major product (users tend to bookmark a lot of useless urls)
- redirect to the company website is to my opinion the lesser of all evils, but users tend to get lost when redirected to a 'general' website.
example: you're looking for Windows 8 download and have the IP bookmarked
- 404 error: oh the page no longer exists
- main product: windows 9 is out but for some reason you still need windows 8: you spend more time looking for what you really need and probably find it elsewhere
- overview page: you see what you need in a list and if the list is short you quickly find it, otherwise a simple search reveals the item also.
so redirect to overview page is still a winning shot in my opinion
Alright, you think that this might be one of the most asked question on the internet, and you're tired reading the exact same answers. So let's focus on one of the most common answer, and forget about the others.
One of the common answer is:
"The https-site and the http-site are two completely different sites;
it’s a little bit like having a www version of the site and a non-www
version. Make sure you have 301 redirects from the http URLs to the
https ones." (source:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/seo-for-https-with-s-like-secure)
So here's my question:
Why are people saying that https and http are two different websites? How different is https://www.mydomain.com from http://www.mydomain.com?
The URI is the same and the content is the same. Only the protocol changes.
Why would the protocol have any impact on SEO? Whether or not the content is encrypted from point A to point B, why would that matter SEO wise?
Thanks for your help!
-H
Http and https could technically be two different sites. You could configure your server to server completely different content. They have two different urls (the difference being that s).
That being said, almost all webmasters with both http and https serve nearly identical content whether the site is secure or not. Google recognizes this and allows you to run both at the same time without having to fear duplicate content penalties.
If you are moving from one one to another, you should treat it similarly to other url changes.
Put 301 redirects in place so that each page gets properly redirected to the same content at its new url
Register both versions in Google Webmaster Tools
I have not personally done this switch, but it should be doable without problems. I have made other types of sitewide url changes without problems in the last couple years.
The other alternative would be to run both http and https at the same time and switch users over more gradually. As they log in, for example.
Update to above answer as on August 2014, Google has just confirmed that sites secured by SSL will start getting a ranking boost. Check official statement here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
Don't think about it in terms of protocol. Think about it in terms of potentiality from a search engines point of view.
http://example.com and http://www.example.com can be completely different sites.
http://example.com/ and http://www.example.com/home can be completely different pages.
https://www.example.com and http://www.example.com can, again, be completely different sites.
In addition to this, https pages have a very hard time ranking. google etc.
If your entire site is https and pops an SSL certificate to an HTTP request, G views them as secure and that they're https for a reason. It's sometimes not very clever in this regard. If you have secure product or category pages, for instance, they simply will not rank compared to competitors. I have seen this time and again.
In recent months, it is becoming very clear Google will gently force webmasters to move to HTTPS.
Why are people saying that https and http are two different websites?
How different is www.mydomain.com from
www.mydomain.com?
Answer: Use the site: operator to find duplicate content. Go to a browser and type:
site:http://example-domain.com
and
site:https://example-domain.com
If you see both versions indexed in Google or other search engines they are duplicates. You must redirect the HTTP version to the HTTPS version to avoid diluting your websites authority and a possible penalty from Google's Panda algorithm.
Why would the protocol have any impact on SEO?
Answer:
For ecommerce websites, Google will not rank them well without being
secure. They do not want users to get their bank info etc stolen.
Google will be giving ranking boosts to sites that move to HTTPS in
the future. Although it is not a large ranking signal now, it could
become larger.
The guys at Google Chrome have submitted a proposal to dish out
warnings to users for ALL websites not using HTTPS. Yes, I know it
sounds crazy, but check
this out.
Info taken from this guide on how to move to HTTPS without killing your rank.
Recently, if SSL is inactive in Firefox browser, it shows an error. You must enable SSL and redirect the URL to HTTPS 301
We are setting up an internal banner system, and we want to track links clicked. So within our website, we link to
http://example.com/forward/33
Which in fact forwards to
http://example.com/article/145
But by passing the forward page, we can record some statistics. Now, for SEO purposes I would guess a 301 forward would be best (we'd be using a PHP header), so that search engines consider this in fact a link to the final internal page, and not the forwarder page. Is this the recommended approach? Is there a problem with having tons of 301 within your website? And is there anything else to be taken into account when forwarding internal links?
301 redirect would be your best bet. However, with everything else I would use in moderation.
When I searching our web site on Google I found three sites with the same content show up. I always thought we were using only one site www.foo.com, but it turn out we have www.foo.net and www.foo.info with the same content as www.foo.com.
I know it is extremely bad to have the same content under different URL. And it seems we have being using three domains for years and I have not seen punitive blunt so far. What is going on? Is Google using new policy like this blog advocate?http://www.seodenver.com/duplicate-content-over-multiple-domains-seo-issues/ Or is it OK using DNS redirect? What should I do? Thanks
If you are managing the websites via Google Webmaster Tools, it is possible to specify the "primary domain".
However, the world of search engines doesn't stop with Google, so your best bet is to send a 301 redirect to your primary domain. For example.
www.foo.net should 301 redirect to www.foo.com
www.foo.net/bar should 301 redirect to www.foo.com/bar
and so on.
This will ensure that www.foo.com gets the entire score, rather than (potentially) a third of the score that you might get for link-backs (internal and external).
Look into canonical links, as documented by Google.
If your site has identical or vastly
similar content that's accessible
through multiple URLs, this format
provides you with more control over
the URL returned in search results. It
also helps to make sure that
properties such as link popularity are
consolidated to your preferred
version.
They explicitly state it will work cross-domain.