Using RewriteRule - SEO Implications

activenz

Hi There,

My client has a website (www.activeadventures.com) which they relaunched in April 2013. The company sells inbound tourism trips to New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. Previously, the websites for these destinations were on their own domains (activenewzealand.com, activehimalayas.com, activesouthamerica.com).

With the launch of the new website those domains were all retired (but had 301 redirects put into place to the new site), and moved into sub directories of the activeadventures.com domain (eg: activeadventures.com/new-zealand).

There has been no indication that this strategy has improved organic search results (based on analytics) and in my opinion I believe that having this structure has been detrimental to their results. My opinion is based off the following:

Visitors to the websites are coming into the site with a specific destination in mind that they want to travel to. Thus... having the destination in the URL I believe provides more immediate relevancy and should result in a higher CTR.
I also feel that having the sites on their own URL's will provide a more concentrated theme for the destination based search phrases.

The new site is a custom Joomla build and I want to find the easiest way to keep the current Joomla set up AND move the country specific sections of the site back onto their original URL's.

It seems on the face of it that the easiest way to get this done is to use the htaccess file and use "RewriteRule" to push all the relevant pages back onto their original domains. Obviously we will ensure we also cover off pointing the existing 301's from the new site and the old sites to this new structure.

My question is, are their any potential negative SEO implications of using the RewriteRule in the htaccess file to achieve this?

Many thanks in advance.

Kind Regards
Conrad Cranfield

MoosaHemani

I don’t see any negative SEO effect with what you have explained here but just to tell you what I have encountered with my client’s website in the past!

When working with .htaccess file try to use it carefully because this can even lead to a big disaster if something gone wrong! (Just sharing my experience).

Also, plan the redirections prior to the switch because without it you might see a big drop in traffic obviously shifting URL will hit you a bit in rankings and traffic but that will be mostly temporary.

Hope this helps!!

BlueprintMarketing

you need to tell people where you can take them in the section above the fold in your website. I would have a very large text that is clickable stating

We give guided tours to then allow people to click on their destination of choice.

New Zealand,

South America

Himalayas

If you want to get clients that are in the United States for instance, and you use a New Zealand TLD you will be unable to geo-target in Google Webmaster tools therefore it will rank better in New Zealand than the states.

Moosa

is right on the money asking about what you did prior to changing your domain.

Then you converted everything to one site did you use a tool similar to screaming frog let you 301 redirect all the pages perfectly to their new domain?

http://activeadventures.com/

Did you tell Google you are moving domains in all 3 instances?

Try using screaming frog with this guide http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide

this post as well should be of help to you.

http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch

&

http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

I hope this is of some help,

sincerely,

Thomas

PS if the photograph is too small use this link

http://i.imgur.com/LfTUEjO.gif