I’m having an ongoing (Friendly) debate between myself (I do SEO) and a WP developer. The client has a site built in DW, .html extensions. He’s moving it to WP. We’re going to 301 all the old pages to the new corresponding pages. Not a prob, done it over 1000 times.
The question is his backlinks. He’s has over 3000 of them. Some are bogus, coming from another site of his (not related in topic) so I really don’t care about that especially since they’re 404 pages. The question is… will the backlink “juice” be redirected as well? I don’t think it will, the WP developer thinks it will.
Old school was to contact the Webmaster of each site and ask for an update but we all know how successful that is. Does this scenario make sense and does anyone have any comments/thoughts as to how to make sure his backlinks still provide him with what they were meant to do?
One tool, and I used several (one a paid very popular tool from one of the top 10 seo’s imo), says we have about 48 backlinks from high authority sites… one is an EDU along with several big publications. I’d hate to loose those.
The question is… will the backlink “juice” be redirected as well? I don’t think it will, the WP developer thinks it will.
The developer is right. With a 301 redirect, any page rank (which is what actually matters in terms of “backlink juice”) which would otherwise have gone to the original site will be passed to the target site. So you can safely go ahead and do your 301s.
Ideally, once the new site is in place, you should try contact the webmasters of the originating sites to ask them to change their links, but don’t expect to have much success in doing that.
I think I miss worded my question, my bad. We’ve updated many sites, changed them to WP using the 301 redirects and recaptured rankings in a few weeks, no problem.
Our question is the backlinks to the old site. My thought is that, the “juice” won’t be passed. We’d have to “old school” it and contact Webmasters in the hopes they’d update the link which we all know is not that successful. I’m guilty of it myself.
Would you concur on the “non passing” of the “juice” from the old to the new site? I don’t think it’s carried along with the 301 baggage.
Mike is right…301 redirect all the property of old domain to the new one and back link juice will also passed along with all the property but its better to contact the corresponding site web masters to place the new domain.
As you already have experience in updating many sites, redirecting 301 and gained ranking in few weeks–this is because of 301 redirection.
Just a quick point on ‘out of stock’ type messages and place " Related Items". Beware the fact that these can be seen by google as ‘soft 404s’ which Google doesn’t seem to like either. A few is probably ok, 3000 of them, probably not.