2

For context, my company uses a 3rd party website to house Instructions for Use manuals for the products we manufacture. We use a 3rd party to house these manuals as they are very large and often need to be updated. The 3rd party website makes it easier for our Quality team to make updates when needed, and not hosting these manuals on our website, ensures we’re not being bogged down by them.

This 3rd party is now requiring that we have our own URL’s that can then redirect to their website (where the manuals are housed) because they will be changing platforms and the current URL’s will no longer work.

What this essentially means is, we will need to create dozens of pages that will then redirect to a completely different domain. I noticed that we already started doing this, by simply creating a redirect for a page that doesn’t and hasn’t existed in our redirection plugin. Example: https://www.website.com/example/1233 REDIRECTS TO https://www.otherwebsite.com/1233

I’ve never seen this done before and am unsure of the negative implications this may have. Has anyone else tried it? Did you experience any negative SEO affect?

3
  • Presumably you were previously linking directly to the 3rd party website? Or were you retrieving these documents in some other way that hid the 3rd party website from the user?
    – MrWhite
    Dec 7, 2019 at 17:25
  • We were linking directly to the 3rd party website Dec 10, 2019 at 18:25
  • Are these manuals html pages or downloadable files like PDFs?
    – Kannan
    Sep 5, 2020 at 17:17

1 Answer 1

1

Simple answer is yes, it will have negative impact on your SEO. Why?

World wide web is all about the content, by redirecting to other websites your own domain will not have good content which can be indexed by Google and bring you more traffic. The other thing is if you write an article about the manual (so create content Inder your own domain) and then put a link to other website for new information which is not the case here since you mentioned redirection only.

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.