301 Redirect Only Home Page/Root Domain via Domain Registrar Only

[MikeBlue1]

Hi All,

I am really concerned about doing a 301 redirect. This is my situation:

1. Both Current and New Domain is registered with a local domain registrar (similar to GoDaddy but a local version)

2. Current Domain: Servers are pointing to Wix servers and the website is built and hosted with Wix

3. I would like to do a 301 redirect but would like to do it in the following way with a couple of factors to keep in mind:

• 99% of my link are only pointed to the home page/root domain only. Not to subdirectories.

• New Domain: I will register this with wix with a new plan but keep the exact sitemap and composition of current website and launch with new domain.

• Current Domain: I want to change server pointing to wix to point to local domain registrar servers. Then do a 301 redirect for only the home page/root domain to point to the new domain listed with wix. So 301 is done via local registrar and not via Wix.

• Another point to mention is it will also change from Http to Https as well as a name change.

Your comments on the above will be greatly appreciated and as to whether there is risk in trying to do a 301 redirect as above. Doing it as above it also cheaper if I do the 301 via the wix platform I will need to register a full new premium plan and run it concurrently to the old plan whereas if I do it as mentioned above will only have the additional domain annual fee.

Look forward to your comments.

Mike

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Based on what you mentioned this will be your new path

• old domain --> domain register --> new domain ( too many redirections)

All redirects carry risk. While it’s super awesome that Google is no longer “penalizing” 301 redirects through loss of PageRank, keep in mind that PageRank is only one signal out of hundreds that Google uses to rank pages.

So your domain age is a factor that should keep in mind. Ideally, if you 301 redirect a page to an exact copy of that page, and the only thing that changes is the URL, then, in theory, you may expect no traffic loss.

There is evidence that Google treats redirects to irrelevant pages as soft 404s. In other words, it's a redirect that loses both link equity and relevance.

How to Completely Ruin (or Save) Your Website With Redirects

There are a few salient points to keep in mind about Google’s change to how PageRank passes through 3xx redirects.

• All redirects carry a degree of SEO risk.
• While 3xx redirects preserve PageRank, 301s remain the preferred method of choice for permanent redirects.
• keep in mind that PageRank — and other link equity signals — are only a portion of the factors used by Google in ranking web pages.
• Beyond PageRank, all other rules about redirection remain. If you redirect to a non-relevant page, you likely won’t see much of a boost.
• The best redirect is where every other element stays the same, as much as possible, except for the URL.
• Successful migrations to HTTPS are now less prone to lose PageRank, but there are many other crawling and indexing issues that may negatively impact traffic+rankings.

Happy redirecting!

[MikeBlue1]

Hi Roman,

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

If I only move from Http to Https (No 301 redirect, no name change).

What are the risks involved? Will I lose page rank while my website updates? Given that all the correct steps/measures are taken?

Will my current backlinks become ineffective do to the switch over?

Regards

Michael

[Roman-Delcarmen]

What are the risks involved? Lose Traffic and Rank you will found much information out there about that. In my own experience, you will have a drop in traffic that you will recover in time-frame 3-6 months. No matter how well you made the migration

What are the risks involved? In your case, I would be building links to your site even before running the migration also creating social signals in order to avoid the Google sand box