I need help from all the SEO experts out there in Active Rain. I got a new website Michigan Lake Homes for sale through my company Remerica Hometown One and Delta Media. But I am trying to do some things that I have never done before.
My sites domain name is MichiganLakeRealEstateHomes.com but I bought two others Livingston County Lake front homes.com and Oakland County Lake front homes.com I know how to do the 301 redirects but I am wondering about the best way for SEO purposes and should I also be hyperlinking to those domain names also from blogs.
My questions are:
- Should I do a interior page on the website title Livingston County lake front homes and then do a 301 redirect to the page or should I just redirect to the main page of the site?
- Does a redirect or can a redirect hurt the SEO of the main site?
- Should I be submitting a redirect to directories?
- When you hyperlink should you hyperlink to the redirects or to the main site?
So all you smart SEO people let me know what you think.
__________________________________________________________
My Month of December quote:
~ Mark Twain”
Russ Ravary
"helping make your move easier"
your local Metro Detroit Realtor helping clients like you sell and buy homes through out the entire Metro Detroit suburbs. I love showing and selling Oakland County and Livingston County Lake front homes too.
Unless you are building a distinct and unique website or at least page around the domain name then its best to keep to the main domain you have been using and build links only to that. Its probably better to build up links to one site than try to build links up to 3 sites.
Russ,
What Shane has to offer makes perfectly good sense to me but I am not going to assume I understand well enough...but I will be following this post....
Depends on how you do the redirect - better to 404 the page first - redirects - especially too many can definitely HURT the SEO of the page and the overall site. You need to use them strategically and only in very specific circumstances. Also be aware if you redirect a page you can (if done improperly) loose backlinks if any exist to that page.
1. ONLY USE 301 redirects - 302s DO NOT TRANSFER PAGERANK or link juice
2. Try to redirect pages to other pages about the same topic - NOT TO THE HOMEPAGE - you will screw up your SEO for sure. I recommend redirecting them to the category main page on the same topic. this helps with both usability and SEO.
Resouces:
http://www.stephanspencer.com/search-engines/redirects-and-seo-best-practice
Wow I need to read up on SEO, I have no clue what a 301, 404, and 302's are.
Good advice from Mary.
Basically a 302 is announcing a TEMPORARY move and asking the search engines to ignore it. Doing alot of this can flag you as a spammer and hurt your rankings.
A 301 is announcing a permanent move or change of content and requesting that the search engines read and index. Abusing this can also hurt you.
The key is to use these as they were intended. here are some resources.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40132
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.htm
l