Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
lets say I have two domains. Each has many backlinks on the same subject .
Lets say I redirect one domain two the other one via a 301 and keep the redirect in place for half a year.
After that period of time I remove it.
My question: Will google then regard the domains again as seperate entities as it did before the redirect was installed?
My question: Will google then regard the domains again as seperate entities as it did before the redirect was installed?
We don't really yet know exactly how long Google requests "old" URLs. We do know that it continues to request them quite actively for at least a year, then with decreasing frequency thereafter.
My advice when 301 redirecting a previously active domain to another is to do it on a page-by-page basis and plan to keep the redirects in place permanently or at least for the long term (talking in years).
But what do you mean if the domain is still active?!
on a per page basis is not possible, because the site structures and content differs, but it's on the same topic.
The idea behind it is trying to increase the positions by merging the domains and giving up one site.
However, if the positions would not improve, then of course I would like to reverse the effect of the 301, without damaging the domains.
If there *are* sub-page links that exist, or sub-pages with decent PR, I would find the best new home to redirect them to.
on a per page basis is not possible, because the site structures and content differs, but it's on the same topic.
I'm not sure if I understand...
Are you thinking about redirecting an entire domain to another domain, without moving the content, even though it's not the same?
The reason I ask, is the suggestion to redirect on a page level seems possible either way: If the content is the same, or 'essentially the same' then the redirects on a page level should be possible. If the content is not the same, then move the content, and redirect on a page level...
I would not suggest giving away 'substance' from either website, especially if both have inbound links, content and some rankings.
[edited by: TheMadScientist at 2:55 am (utc) on April 16, 2008]
As minnapple said, the redirect's effect is not permanent in Google. But if you firsts set it up and then remove it and set things back to the previous condition, you may well find that it takes longer to rank as well as you used to - and in fact, rankings may not ever go all the way back. In some cases, people have apparently killed off trust for both domains with a lot of redirect tinkering.
This would fall into the area of making a change just for Google and not for your visitors. It may work and it may not - probably depending on the strength of trust you've already established.
Around the first I removed all the 301 redirects so that we just had the one domain, our main domain <snip>. However i used one of the old ones <snip> to use on a newly developed site.
I think google still thinks both domains are the same as when i check the links by doing a link:www.example.com and a link:other.example.com search on google the results are identical.
How do i tell google that <the old domain> is not related to <the main domain> anymore ?
[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 1:33 pm (utc) on July 16, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specifics: please use example.com [/edit]
Also, when a URL stops being a redirect, and now begins to serve content, new links incoming to that URL may be a signal that Google can use to see that new content has returned to that URL.
Google likes to hold on to content that no longer exists, so that searchers can still find it long after the real site has gone.
