Link Reclimation & Redirects

[PCampolo]

Hello,

I'm in the middle of a link reclamation project wherein we're identifying broken links, links pointing to dupe content etc.

I found a forgotten co-brand which is effectively dupe content across 8 sub-domains, some of which have a significant number of links (200+ linking domains | 2k+ in-bound links).

Question for the group is what's the optimal redirect option?

Option 1: set 301 and maintain 1:1 URL mapping

• will pass all equity to applicable PLPs and theoretically improve rank for related keyword(s).

• requires a bit more configuration time and will likely have small effect on rank given links are widely distributed across URLs.

Option 2: set 301 to redirect all requests to the associated sub-domain e.g. foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page1.html and foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page2 both redirect to foo.mybrand.com/

• will accumulate all equity at the sub-domain level which theoretically will be roughly distributed throughout underlying pages and will limit risk of penalty to that sub-domain.

Option 3: set 301 to redirect all requests to our homepage.

• easiest to configure & maintain, will accumulate the maximum equity on a priority page which should positively affect domain authority.

• run risk of being penalized for accumulating links en mass, risk penalty for spammy links on our primary sub-domain www, won't pass keyword specific equity to applicable pages.

To be clear, I've done an initial scrub of anchor text and there were no signs of spam.

I'm leaning towards #3, but interested in others perspectives.

Cheers,
Stefan

[TakeshiYoung]

I would personally go with Option 1. The purpose of 301 redirects is to say that a piece of content has permanently moved from one location to another. Therefore the content on the old location should point to the content on the new location, not the homepage.

Google will often not pass link equity if the new page is completely different from the original, which is why redirecting a bunch of domains to a new site isn't going to pass all their link equity to the new site. Like you pointed out, you will also dilute the value of the keyword relevancy.

It's also bad from a user perspective-- if you have a lot of links going to your co-brand, and people are clicking on those links, having them taken to your homepage is a poor user experience, and can result in increased bounce rate. If those visitors are getting to your co-brand through search, it could even be a negative signal for the search engines.

301s should be directed at content that's as similar as possible to the original content, that's the general rule.

[jesse-landry]

+1 to option 1 and Takeshi's response.

You should consider user experience as a huge decision-making factor in this. Landing on a page the user is looking for will ultimately provide a better user experience and therefore you should go with that option. That said, it's also slightly better for SEO purposes imo.

I have 2 sites I monitor. One I was allowed to redesign and the other is a disaster. Of the two sites, they both get similar keyword ranking and similar traffic. But about 65% more leads are generated through the purdier site.

TL;DR - make it purdy, make me happy = win.

[tfbpa]

The optimal redirect for both visitors and search engines is to keep the structure as it was, meaning #1.

The optimal solution also follows your options numbering, meaning that for both search engine and visitors the last options is the least desirable.

The optimal solution workload wise, is the exact opposite, as it often is.

Depending on how well related the content is, it might be possible to opt for #2 but it is very rare that option #3 would work well as the content of the entire website, including all its subdomains, has to be extremely well related and basically only cover one single topic.

A few simple questions might help:

• Are all the topics of every single page of the forgotten co-brands present on the homepage? If not, then #3 is not a very good option.

• Are all the topics of every single page of the forgotten co-brands present on the associated subdomain? If not, then #2 is not a very good option.

Another thing to consider is the amount of pages that will be re-directed. I actually have a problem with that at the moment, as I am really not sure how well that will be treated by the search engines.

IMHO you should look at how the redirects are for people first, bots second and equity/domain authority/etc. last. Not to mention that I think that no matter which group you put first, the optimal solution out of the 3 options stays the same as your numbering anyway.