23
votes
Is there a safe way to redirect traffic from a dozen old websites to a new (unrelated) website?
You can't redirect your old sites without losing 90% of their value and risking a penalty on your new site.
There usually isn't a huge cost to leaving old sites up and running. You could use them ...
- 99.2k
22
votes
Accepted
Why do browsers know to lookup the `www` record if DNS query for @ gets NXDOMAIN?
Browsers generally have heuristics built in to add missing www. from domain names, but it isn't something you should rely on:
Browsers typically have a setting to turn off this "www fix up."...
- 99.2k
17
votes
Accepted
SEO effect of http-equiv="REFRESH" for redirect
This might help:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects
meta refresh and its HTTP equivalent
If server side redirects aren't possible to implement on your platform, ...
- 338
13
votes
Redirecting with Namecheap removes the path and sends all URLs to the home page
https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/385/2237/how-do-i-set-up-a-url-redirect-for-a-domain documents NameCheaps redirecting rules:
It is important to note that the value in ...
- 99.2k
12
votes
Is there a safe way to redirect traffic from a dozen old websites to a new (unrelated) website?
First, something that's implied in other answers, but should probably be spelled out: the situation you describe is something Google actively wants to discourage -- you're not "collateral damage" in ...
- 221
12
votes
How to avoid SSL warnings about certificate not for the current site when redirecting alternate domains?
Cloudflare is a free solution for redirecting your alternate domains with HTTPS support. Here are detailed instructions for setting it up:
Visit Cloudflare
Create an account and verify your email ...
- 99.2k
12
votes
Accepted
Redirect all subdomains from one domain, to the equivalent subdomain of another domain using DNS and nginx?
You have a misconception about what DNS can do. You say, "I know I can redirect all subdomains ... using a wildcard DNS record." However, DNS can't do redirects at all. All DNS can do is point ...
- 99.2k
11
votes
Is large scale of 301 redirects for URL change harmful for SEO?
This is actually outdated. It is now stated that there is no link equity lost through 301 redirects. However, there are still risks linked with changing the URL structure and redirecting. For example, ...
- 1,257
11
votes
When you move a site via a 301 redirect should you setup a robots.txt disallowing robots to crawl the old address?
Your suspicions are right, with the exact reasoning that you mentioned. If you disallow robots from accessing the old site, they won't be able to see the 301 redirect.
- 1,319
8
votes
Should my users' profile page URL be /user/bob or just /bob?
Do the /user/bob style, as there's a very good reason why you should not use /bob.
Specifically, that means you can't have any other paths in your website, as they might collide with a user name. ...
- 191
7
votes
Is there a safe way to redirect traffic from a dozen old websites to a new (unrelated) website?
Bad Idea! Never, I repeat NEVER do that.
I tried that 3 days ago and after couple of days the site to which I redirected completely lost all its rankings. Not even it was ranking on searching domain....
- 374
7
votes
Accepted
What is SymLinksIfOwnerMatch?
From the Apache docs
SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
The server will only follow symbolic links for which the target file or directory is owned by the same user id as the link.
So, enabling this option (as ...
- 43k
7
votes
Accepted
Should I use 301 or 302 for location-based redirects?
As Stephen points out in comments, geo-IP redirects are generally bad for SEO (it prohibits the site from being crawled naturally and can at times hinder users through being redirected incorrectly). ...
- 43k
7
votes
Are drops in Google ranking common after switching to https?
Yes it is common. We get questions about it here all the time:
Huge drop (50%) in traffic after HTTPS move
Search traffic dropped with HTTPS implementation
Organic Traffic down after HTTPS (SSL) ...
- 99.2k
7
votes
Accepted
Execution order of different htaccess redirects
Redirect belongs to mod_alias, whereas RewriteRule is a mod_rewrite directive. Two different modules. Different modules execute independently and at different times during the request.
Unless you ...
- 43k
7
votes
Accepted
What causes "redirect notice" in Google search?
I think there may be (or may have been) a few scenarios that can trigger this "redirect notice" from the Google SERPs. Some of these may have been historical "glitches" judging by some of the articles ...
- 43k
6
votes
Accepted
301 redirects for /blog to blog subdomain not working
...do I put it after the # END Wordpress in the htaccess or am I missing something?
No. Any external redirect should come before the # BEGIN WordPress code block. ie. Before WP internally rewrites ...
- 43k
6
votes
Site hosted with 1and1 redirects to defaultsite
I called 1and1 support and he made some changes to my home page. One thing he did is to remove the following:
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0;url=defaultsite" />
Without that I get my ...
- 311
6
votes
When you move a site via a 301 redirect should you setup a robots.txt disallowing robots to crawl the old address?
I believe no because the crawlers won't be able to crawl the old site to see the 301 status codes.
Yes, exactly - this is not the "right move". If you implement a 301 redirect, presumably to preserve ...
- 4,297
6
votes
Accepted
How to implement WordPress in a subdirectory, hosted on a different server?
The subdomain is certainly the easiest option since you are wanting to host the site on another server. The reason for this is that a hostname can only ever resolve to a single location. If you are ...
- 645
6
votes
Accepted
When the root URL of a domain doesn't have a specific site, how should visitors be directed to language folders?
Many multi-lingual sites don’t have the language tag for the default/primary language in the URL¹, but I think it’s better to include it. So yes, in my opinion, it’s not only good design, it’s the ...
- 21.8k
6
votes
Are there downsides to using a 301 redirect from a shorter URL on our own domain rather than using a URL shortener service?
The only real downside is that if you set up a lot of redirects, it can eventually start to be a load on your server. Since servers vary widely, along with traffic and code performance, there's no ...
- 1,920
6
votes
Is an .htaccess edit necessary when enabling Cloudflare SSL?
It's really to do with when the redirect occurs.
WordPress/PHP naturally occurs later than .htaccess, so the HTTP request has already passed to PHP before the redirect occurs.
.htaccess is processed ...
- 4,297
6
votes
Accepted
When an attribute value ends in a slash, can I omit the quotes? It looks confusing when the trailing slash is next to the closing angle bracket
Here is what the HTML spec says about using unquoted attribute values:
An unquoted attribute value is specified by providing the following parts in exactly the following order:
an attribute name
...
- 99.2k
6
votes
Accepted
HSTS affect on SEO
To my knowledge Google does not give any special weight to HSTS as a ranking signal, though they do recommend using it. They do use HTTPS as a ranking signal.
The best take-away I could get from ...
- 7,805
6
votes
How Can I Debug a Redirect Error in Google Search Console?
This error in GSC is terribly vague and it is really hard to know what they are referring to when you see this in the reports. So, don't feel alone in finding this report confusing! When you see this ...
- 1,471
5
votes
Proper status code for language redirection (301, 302, … 307)?
For users either a 302 or 307 redirect is fine. The only practical difference between those and a 301 redirect is caching. Browsers cache a 301 redirect. If the user changes their browser language ...
- 99.2k
5
votes
Is there a safe way to redirect traffic from a dozen old websites to a new (unrelated) website?
One thing that all your sites have in common is you.
Why not throw a designed by link at the bottom of your site that links to your "portfolio" where your new business is prominently displayed.
- 51
5
votes
Is there a safe way to redirect traffic from a dozen old websites to a new (unrelated) website?
301 Redirects are completely fine if they're real.
If you had an old site and then decided to move/combine it with some other related site, there's absolutely no problem putting up a 301 redirect on ...
- 159
5
votes
Is it bad for SEO to return a 404 for a page that is temporarily unavailable instead of a redirect to the home page?
A 302 to the home page is likely to be seen as a soft-404 anyway, so that's unlikely to be of any benefit.
A 404 can be perceived as temporary (a 410 is more permanent) and if the page doesn't exist ...
- 43k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible