Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Can anyone help with this?

Thank you so much for the response! That is very helpful. Cheers, Erin

To directly answer your question, Erin, a 301 redirect will indeed prevent users from accessing the https versions of your pages and is not the recommended approach. Is there a reason you want to prevent users/search engines from accessing the https versions of your pages? Simply ensuring that all links within the site navigation point to http versions, and setting a rel=canonical on all https versions back to the http versions, should do the trick. Best, Mike

Thank you so much for your response. It may be limiting to them in some ways for marketing, but its also a beneficial change as well. I think if domain age isn't going to play too much of a part, then all the other factors still justify the change. Thanks again!

Thank you everyone! As with anything there are two sides to ponder.

At the moment, it doesn't seem that rel=publisher is doing all that much for sites (aside from sometimes showing better info ion the knowledge graph listing on Brand searches)  but personally I believe it's functionality and influence are going to be greatly expanded fairly soon, so well worth doing. As far as it contributing anything to help speed up indexing... doubt it. P.

Tommy, Thank you for the input! I really appreciate it. Best, Erin

Hello Again Erin, 301s are used for 2 purposes.  One way is to tell or direct bots to crawl the other page and it will send linkjuices to the new page.  The second way is to redirect visitors to a new page.  If you are bulk redirecting all pages to the home page, it is kind of a waste.  Visitors want to visit a specific page but then you redirect them to the home page?  They will be frustated since it is not what they are looking for and may leave your page.  Bad user experience.  Furthermore, sending link juices to the home page might also be a waste. The best practice will be redirecting specific pages to a new specific page.  For example, Page A on old domain is about bikes, you want to redirect it to Page A on the new domain about bikes.  One, it will transfer all the old linkjuice on bikes to the new one and visitors are redirected to a page where they want. The canonical tag is for bots to know that you want one version to be crawled over the ones.  301 is kind of for visitors as well and redirecing linkjucies.  Depending on whether you want your visitors to visit only one version, then you might want to use the 301.  Furthermore, if different versions of your page is getting backlinks, maybe use 301 to send the linkjuice back to the canonical page. Hope this helps.

I think the ccTLD approach is better if you're going to build links to the new ccTLD domain.  It splits your domain authority between the two sites, but for many industries, UK people have a pretty good bias towards their own ccTLD.  The largest bias I've seen though is paying in British pounds vs. dollars.  In our experience, they really hate paying in dollars! If you go the subdomain approach, you can do all the same geotargeting stuff.  You can even do it for subdirectories (e.g. domain.com/en/ & domain.com/es/).

Hi Erin, Thanks for clarifying. Technically, this should not cause a problem for Google, but because of their history of issues with phone number confusion, when I'm optimizing a Local site, I put the 800 number in image text only. I don't include it in real text. I guess you could say I take a better-safe-than-sorry approach, just to avoid possible hassles down the road.

Steve, Thanks again for your help!!! Erin

Can Moz weigh in on this please? There is a lot of really  good discussion on this particular topic across multiple threads but no clear direction. What does Moz recommend and why? The why is important and here's why. If I have a client with an established blog that uses the blog.domain versus domain/blog structure, should I be recommending they migrate to a different structure?

Hi J.P. I just updated some title tags as well.  I just posted the page link to my google + profile.  I will let you know how quickly google updates them in the serps.