Registering multiple domain names is, and should be, common practice for businesses wishing to protect their brands. Once purchased, what you do with these domains can have a positive or negative impact on your main URL. Here are some tips on how to set up alternate domains to prevent the search engines from seeing duplicate content. Domain Name Redirects The first thing you need to consider after you've purchased additional domain names is to decide what you want to do with them. Not every domain name needs to have a site on it, though it wouldn't be a bad idea to have some kind of generic company page in place for lack of anything else. But for the most part, you will probably want to redirect all your alternate domain names to your main company site. The question then becomes, how best to implement those redirects. There are many ways to redirect websites, most of them will often do more harm than good. One of the most common ways to redirect domain names is to "park" them and … [Read more...] about Redirecting Alternate Domains to Prevent Duplicate Content
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Does the Ownership of Redirected URLs Matter to Search Engines?
Webmasters sometimes move web sites from one domain to another, change the URL structures pointing to their web pages, or rename those pages themselves. Changing the URLs for pages isn’t something that should be done without a lot of thought, and without very good reasons. Especially if there are many links and references on the Web to the old URLs. See Cool URIs don’t change for a number of technical ideas on planning what to use for your URLs so that it’s less likely that you might need to change them. Regardless, webmasters do sometimes change the URLs for pages found on the Web. This can sometimes happen when the owner of a site decides to change its name, or to rebrand its products, or merges or acquires another site or business and wants to consolidate the web pages from the other site under one name. It can also happen when a blogger decides to change the permalink structure of their URLs. Sometimes product lines are renamed, and the sellers of those products … [Read more...] about Does the Ownership of Redirected URLs Matter to Search Engines?
Redirects: Good, Bad & Conditional
Whenever you make changes to a web site, one of the most important considerations should be how to use “redirects” to alert the search engine to your changes to avoid having a negative impact on your search rankings. Whether you’re moving pages around, switching CMS platforms, or just wanting to avoid duplicate content and PageRank dilution, you’ll want to employ redirects so as not to squander any link juice (PageRank) that your site has acquired. There are multiple ways of redirecting, and it’s important you get it right if you want the SEO benefit without risk of falling outside search engine guidelines (such as is the case with “conditional redirects”). Programmers and sysadmins who are not SEO-savvy will likely default to using a “temporary redirect,” also known as a “302 redirect.” Unfortunately, such a redirect does not transfer link juice from the redirected URL to the destination URL. It isn’t that the … [Read more...] about Redirects: Good, Bad & Conditional
How QR Codes Disrupt More Than URLs
Last month, I introduced the idea that QR codes could disrupt your URL strategy. This led to quite a lively discussion! With dozens of comments, over 850 retweets, and hundreds of QR scans for the mobile article, this is obviously an important topic. Today, I’ll complete the theme with examples, and best-practice methods for optimizing QR code URLs. Let me summarize my point of view: Barcodes (the Quick Response format, in particular) are more than merely mobile campaign conduits; they are mobile site links. They are the mechanism through which we as mobile consumers will expect to access mobile site pages, without typing or searching. Making mobile site content accessible in this manner – from everywhere your consumers are – has a name search marketers are familiar with: it’s called link building. In short, I believe QR codes will be how you as a marketer (and how your fans, customers, and community) will weave a web of mobile links around your brand, products, … [Read more...] about How QR Codes Disrupt More Than URLs
Why crawl budget and URL scheduling might impact rankings in website migrations
Earlier this year, Google’s Gary Illyes stated that 30x redirects (301, 302, etc.) do not result in a loss or dilution of PageRank. As you can imagine, many SEOs have greeted this claim with skepticism. In a recent Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangout, I asked Google’s John Mueller whether perhaps the skepticism was because when SEOs experience loss of visibility during migrations, they might not realize that all signals impacting rankings haven’t passed to the new pages yet, so they assume that PageRank was lost. Mueller’s reply: Yeah, I mean, any time you do a bigger change on your website — if you redirect a lot of URLs, if you go from one domain to another, if you change your site structure — then all of that does take time for things to settle down. So, we can follow that pretty quickly, we can definitely forward the signals there, but that doesn’t mean it will happen from one day to the next. During a migration, Googlebot needs to … [Read more...] about Why crawl budget and URL scheduling might impact rankings in website migrations