Question

Question: When setting up a 301 to a new domain, do you send all of the old urls to the homepage of the new site? Or do you spread around the 301 redirect 'juice'?  

Answer 1

Spread it around to the right pages. i've heard that 301 all to the homepage is just IGNORED.  

Answer 2

Think about it from the user perspective. If they expect to see a page about tomatoes and you redirect to a homepage for a nursery, they're going to get annoyed and bounce.  

Comments

The user will not likely see the old url as it will be removed from the index, this is more for SEO value

Answer 3

Epic. The guy above me has the best reply yet.  

Answer 4

301s to the home page are treated as soft 404s. So I wouldn’t redirect a domain to the home page.  

Comments

Hi @gomes - can you add anything else to this please? To give you context I had to redirect 500K urls from various domains to a new one. 200K of the most valuable were 1-2-1 redirected to relevant pages and the rest had a catch all rule to the new home page. Are you saying this is really bad? And if so can you share a link with more info. Thanks

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@boule162 I think that’s your problem. I would never ever redirect that many URLs. Even sites with millions of pages that I’ve worked on, no need to 301 that many URLs.  

Answer 5

301- means you are redirecting a page that is no longer there to where you moved it to. If you didnt "move" that page then you should 410 because it no longer exists.  

Comments

If you can make sure the url you are redirecting has the same keyword in it as the url you are redirecting to. Shows relevance.  

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Yes but if we want to harness the seo value of the old urls then this would be of no benefit right? I am trying to transfer the seo value of the old domain to the new domain

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Thats not going to happen. And the links that were in that page won't give credit to the new page either. Because you're gonna lose like 30% of your juice for page rank on the redirect and then if the redirect is not the same contextually or has a higher bounce rate because your traffic was expecting to land somewhere else it will hurt you in the long run.  

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@rhodonite Bee Yes this is exactly what I said! :) Great article (if you read all the way to the end! ) ;) Thanks for sharing.  

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The second article I don't agree with entirely but . it's more because of an opinion and not a fact or rule. :) js

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@rhodonite Bee okay so think of it like this. SEO is really just relevance. You search for a keyword and the website with the most words/pages that match that search term wins. (I realize there's a million other things but I'm trying to keep it at the most basic level here) So you have a page that ranked well but you now want to redirect it. That page ranked well for that search term because it had the most key words on it and links pointing to other websites that also had the most of those same keywords. Now that page no longer exists and you want to point only the link of that page to a different page. That page you are forwarding to has its own ranking factors, because of its own content and keywords. So if the content and keywords are similar, great! But if they're not, that new page is eventually not going to rank well for the same key word as the old page did because it doesn't have the same links and content on it to support that keyword. Does that make sense?  

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It's not a magic trick, its just simple relevance.  

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@glarus I would still take 70% juice rather than not do a redirect and get 0%

Answer 6

Thanks for all the responses guys, what about 301'ing within the same domain, do the same rules apply?  

Comments

@glarus If you had pages with good links and wanted to 301 to a page in the same domain but that page would more likely be unrelated 'money' page, would you insert some relevance to the old page in the content to make the redirect itself be more relevant?  

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@undershot when you 301 a link to point to a new page, the old page is no longer there. Does that make sense? Its like moving to a new home and forwarding your mail to your new address. Do you landscape the yard at your old house so that the postman can find your new house easier? No! Because you no longer live in that house. Does that help?  What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Maybe there's a better way? If you want pm me and we'll set up a phone call.  

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@undershot it's not the link that gets the SEO score, its the page thats tied to that link.  

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@ashleyashli sure

Answer 7

To be honest? Unless the content is the same (on the new site) I would check to see if the page has any actual equity (rankings, links, traffic). Because if it don't? Redirecting is kind of a moot point