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View Full Version : Does a 301 redirect on an entire domain hurt the target domain?



Brian Altenhofel
07-29-2015, 05:45 PM
So we bought another forum. We determined that it just isn't worth it to merge their threads over and I planned on setting up a global 301 redirect to the home of our primary forum. However, I don't keep up on SEO as much as others here since it's not a primary revenue stream for me, so I don't know how that will impact the target forum. I know that it hasn't had negative impacts in the past, but that was several updates ago. Are there currently negative impacts to the target domain if another already-established domain is globally 301'd to it?

vangogh
07-29-2015, 07:32 PM
I don't know that it will hurt. I don't think it would help, but I don't think it would hurt. Thinking out loud, I suppose it's possible search engines might think you purchased the other domain just to redirect it as an SEO boost. They might see that as an attempt to manipulate their algorithms. I don't think they will. Just throwing out possibilities.

Ideally you would pull in some or most of the threads into your forum and redirect them 1:1 with the rest redirecting to the home page. You could redirect the threads to good matches on your forum, though I'm guessing that would also be more work than you'd want to do.

I'd mainly be concerned with the real people of that forum and not so much about search engines. Generally if you do what's right for the people visiting, it'll be fine for search engines as well. Not always, but it works as a general rule.

Brian Altenhofel
07-29-2015, 08:13 PM
There is a greater-than 95% overlap in users according to a db dump of email addresses, so not too concerned there. I might see if I can come up with a good way to import their threads and redirect to them, but not sure at the moment since neither of us use the vbSEO plugin.

Harold Mansfield
07-29-2015, 09:07 PM
It won't hurt the target domain. For best practices make sure it's a permanent 301 and not merely a temporary. A permanent 301 redirect passes link juice to the target page. Eventually the old redirected URL and all of it's pages will fall to the back of the serps. That's it.