Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
301 with nofollow ?
-
Hi,
our ecommerce link penalty was revoked by google back in Feb 26th 2013, but to this day we have not seen any improvement on our rankings. Due to 80% revenue loss we had to layoff quite a few people to stay alive. Situation now is more dire then ever for our company. We have millions of dollars invested in our business and google just busted it for some "low quality" or "spammy links" as they call it. We want to try to move to a different domain and do a 301 from the old domain to make sure our previous customers can still find us as a last effort to stay alive. But doing so we do not want to the bad links juice to flow to our new domain. Can we do a 301 with nofollow and will that have any negative impact or any impact at all.? any suggestion is greatly appreciated.
Thank you
Nick
We are planning on moving to a different domain after 10 years, and laying off bunch of people due to loss of revenue.
-
Google have said that if you have the same site at a different URL then they may apply the same penalty to the new site as they did to the old one, therefore if you wish to redirect a site, I would recommend doing it at the same as you make some other significant changes to it.
I came up with a way of doing this which should work.
On the old domain redirect everything to the home page and then on the home page create a noindex, nofollow page with the following line of code in it:
Where example.com is your NEW domain name.
This way you're using a redirect at the html level, but telling search engines to not index or follow the page. This should work!
-
Nick
Your 301 redirect will take place on the server level and your nofollow will take place on the page level. The server is going to redirect the bot to the new resource before it gets to the nofollow. As far as whether you can use a 301 to escape a penguin penalty is the subject of substantial debate but it's generally not thought so. Here's one of the most authoritative and interesting threads on that subject: Google 2.0 - How To Recover.
-
Hi Nick,
My hart goes out to you and your company for having to deal with this. However I do believe that you should use a 302 redirect along with a no flow just to be certain. Here's some more information.
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/11285/SEO-Are-Nofollow-Links-Still-Valuable.aspx
http://moz.com/blog/nofollow-is-dying-the-impact-of-microblogging-and-nofollow-on-seo
Google lists the three main intended uses of nofollow as:
- Linking to untrusted content
- Paid links
- Crawl prioritisation (typically linking to yourself with nofollow)
Leaving aside for a second the ability / likelihood of webmasters using nofollow correctly (which means that the search engines need to work even with broken implementations just as they often rank HTML code that doesn't validate), there are two big uses of nofollow that are breaking the model:
- Complete "silo-isation" of large sites
- Domain owner not trusting trusted content authors' links
"Silo-isation"
Disregarding the fact that I just made that word up, there is a very real trend of powerful sites nofollowing all (or nearly all) outbound links even though they are the very definition of editorial links. The site owners have presumably seen the ranking power achieved by Wikipedia nofollowing all outbound links and are trying to form their very own black hole.
Lack of trust
My understanding of the original intent of proffering nofollow as a solution to the problem of linking to untrusted places was that it was mainly intended for situations like blog comments, profile links, etc., where users of your site could create links to wherever they pleased.
This is definitely valuable (as anyone who has ever had to moderate blog comments can attest) but what about once you do trust the commenter? Since so many sites have no mechanism whereby that nofollow is ever removed, we end up in a situation where people are creating huge amounts of really valuable content and the links they create are nofollow.
Sincerely, Thomas
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should internal links in my table of contents be tagged as nofollow?
Hi All, I have the LuckyWP Table of Contents plugin installed. I recently noticed that you can tag your internal links with and nofollow. I understand that it's always a good idea to link internally and to pass link juice to my own content. But with detailed posts that have over 20 headings, I'm thinking that internal linking for headings may actually hurt me because it takes my links well above 100. Any ideas what the best practises are in this scenario? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nomad_blogger0 -
301 redirect syntax for htaccess
I'm working on some htaccess redirects for a few stray pages and have come across a few different varieties of 301s that are confusing me a bit....Most sources suggest: Redirect 301 /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html or using some combination of: RewriteRule + RewriteCond + RegEx I've also found examples of: RedirectPermanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html I'm confused because our current htaccess file has quite a few (working) redirects that look like this: Redirect permanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html This syntax seems to work, but I'm yet to find another Redirect permanent in the wild, only examples of Redirect 301 or RedirectPermanent Is there any difference between these? Would I benefit at all from replacing Redirect permanent with Redirect 301?
Technical SEO | | SamKlep1 -
301 redirects delay in picking up
Hi I have been involved in the redesign/development of a website which has up until now had a lot of international traffic. On day of migration I uploaded all the 301 redirects to the website (wordpress) using Simple 301 redirect plugin. I tested a number of them and they appeared to be working. I also submitted the new sitemaps to Search Console. Since migration international traffic - particularly from countries such as india, Phillipines, Sri Lanka etc have significantly dropped off whereas the local traffic and some of the international traffic such as USA has remained fairly consistent. Looking at Analytics and entrances recently it appears as though search results are/were showing a number of pages with 404's (one in particular which received significant traffic and for which I had created a 301 redirection) - I have checked this page using the old url and it re-directs correctly for me and today asked a colleague in India to also check - he is getting the redirection fine. Does Google.in take a significantly longer time to pick these up in search results? Or am I missing something?
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing0 -
301 Redirect non existant pages
Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Changing title tags, do we need 301 redirects
I found many duplicate title tags and I'm in the process of changing it Do I need 301 redirects in place when I switch it? I am only changing the title tag. Also, we are switching over to a new site very soon, I am worried that we might be using too many 301 redirect "hops" because we are doing a lot of optimization as well. (video from matt cutts describing 301 redirects and hops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA. Does anyone have any experience in doing too many redirect hops that it affected your rankings? Any good ideas to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Rel next prev, should i nofollow pagination links
Hi Everyone. When implementing rel next and prev on pagination pages, should I make the pagination links themselves no followed? Have seen people saying yes and no so just want a final answer! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
How much authority does a 301 pass to a different domain?
Hi, A client of mine is selling his business to a brand new company. The brand new company will be using a brand new domain (no way to avoid that unfortunately) and the current domain (which has tons of authority, links, shares, tweets, etc.) will not be used. Added to that, the new company will be taking over all the current content with just a few minor changes. (I know, I wish we could use the old domain but we can't.) Obviously, I am redirecting all pages on the current domain to the new domain via 301 redirects on a page by page basis. So, current.com/product-page-x.html redirects to new.com/product-page-x.html. My client and the new company both are asking me how much link juice (and other factors) are passed along to the new domain from the old domain. All I can find is "not the full value" or variants thereof.My experience with 301 redirects in the past has been within a single domain and I've seen some of those pages have decent authority and decent rankings as a result of the 301 (no other optimization work was done or links were added). Are there any studies out there that I'm missing that show how much authority/juice gets passed and/or lost via a 301 redirect? Anybody with a similar issue see any trends in page/domain authority and/or rankings? Thanks for any insights and opinions you have.
Technical SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
301 Redirect vs Domain Alias
We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?
Technical SEO | | briankb0