Should we forward our root domain to our new homepage?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Thomas Davis: Hi all, us again at Meningitis Now! We've been advised to forward our root domain to our new homepage to 'mop up' all links not covered by our 301 page-to-page redirects. Will the 301s continue or be superseded by this and more importantly, should we do this?!
• 
  Brent Wildman: You should be able to see any 404's from left over pages that were not redirected in Webmaster Tools. Just add those to the list. No need to mess with an entire root 301.
  
  Couple questions though they would change my answer:
  
  Are you redirecting a new different/domain name? ;
  
  Or just a different URL structure on the same domain?
• 
  Andy Wigglesworth: Hi +Thomas Davis ;
  
  Edited, as everyone else's advice is awesome... and I misstyped the domains out ; ) - would be good though if you could clarify further.
  
  As +Brent Wildman ;mentions and gives good advice about checking 404's / not found pages...
• 
  Karen Jones: you need to set up 301 redirects from your old links to your new links or to the root domain, then if you have done any seo in the past there will be no ; broken links. ; Broken links will cause your rankings to drop. You should not have to redirect an exact link for an exact link however you should redirect http://www.meningitisnow.org/ to http://meningitisnow.org/ as google classes this as two seperate websites and therefore cuases a duplicate content issue
• 
  W.E. Jonk: - Although G stated that a period of 180 days is enough I would keep the 301's active as long as I would own the old TLD. [1]
  
  - If you are sure that the move is completed you can go to Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) and tell them that you have moved [2] [3]. This will help to speed up the move.
  
  - Watch your server logs/GWT/BWT for 404's on both the new domain and the old domain. You want to monitor 404's on the new domain because maybe you made a spelling mistake or something in the 301 went wrong. You want to monitor 404's on the old domain for 301's that you missed. The 404's that happen because you missed it or misspelled it can be 301'ed.
   ;
  - Now you can focus more on the site. That is, you can implement the rel canonical [4]. In your former post I gave you some code to set up the rel canonical on Concrete5. It is pretty easy because you can use the API from Concrete5. You can add this code to your header.php in your theme:
  
  <?php
  $url=Loader::helper('navigation');
  if ($url->getCollectionURL($c)=='http://www.example.com/index.php?cID=1')
  { $canonical = 'http://www.example.com/';}_
  else
  { $canonical=$url->getCollectionURL($c);} ?><link rel="canonical" href="<?php echo $canonical; ?>" /> [8]
  
  - You can also implement 301's from the URL parameter cID to the canonical URL. When searching the web for [url parameters] you will probably notice references for the "URL Parameter Tool" [5] [6]. Do not use that tool because a 301 is much better and if you use this tools you are blocking the bots and they will not see the 301's. By adding this to the config/site.php [7] you can implement a 301:
  
   ;$req = Request::get();
  if ($req->getRequestCollectionID() > 1 && $req->getRequestPath() == '' && $SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] != 'POST')
  {
  // This is a request that is directly for the cID, rather than the path
  $u = new User();
  // If the user is logged in we do NOT redirect
  if (!$u->isRegistered())
  {
  // Get the page object for the current cID
  $c = Page::getByID($req->getRequestCollectionID());
  if (!$c->isError()) {
  $nav = Loader::helper('navigation');
  header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
  header('Location: ' . $nav->getLinkToCollection($c, true));
  exit;
  }
  }
  } [8]
  
  - You want to be as consistent as possible. Therefore you want to link to the canonical URL internally. You probably us " Insert Link to Page " in the wysiwyg. Don't use this because this will add the cID URL instead of the canonical one. You can solve this by hacking this the standard Concrete5 plugin, alternatively add the internal links manually.
  
  - There are probably more things but I am empty now. ;-) ;
  
  [1] ;https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105?hl=en
  [2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106
  [3] http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/how-to-use-the-site-move-tool-bb8f5112
  [4] ;https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en
  [5] ;https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en
  [6] ;http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/ignore-url-parameters-d7496c65
  [7] ;http://andrewembler.com/posts/seo-tip-force-concrete5-pages-to-display-at-one-url/
  [8] before implementing any code please test it first, maybe your dev team did something and thereby it wouldn't work, maybe I made a spelling mistake, maybe other things are happening....
• 
  Jim Munro: + 10 ^^ :)
• 
  W.E. Jonk: Re-thinking I am not fully empty. You can add HTTP headers to speed up your site.
  
  - To serve the cashing header (in your theme header.php) it would look something like:
  
  $u = new User();
  if ($u->isRegistered()) {
   ; header("Pragma: no-cache");
   ; header('Expires: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 14:19:41 GMT');
   ; header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");
  }else{
   ; header("Pragma: cache_asset");
   ; header('Expires: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s GMT', time() + 2592000));
   ; header("Cache-Control: max-age=2592000, public, must-revalidate");
   ; header("Last-Modified: ".gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s GMT', strtotime($c->cDateModified)));
  }
  
  What this does is when you are logged in you do not get the HTTP header to cache. But if you are logged out you get browser caching, which means that your page feels more speedy once it is loaded. ;2592000 is one month (30 days) or 60x60x24x30, you can change that if you want to. For example a week is 60x60x24x7 = ;604800
  
  P.S. I edited my former post because I forgot to put <?php in front. ;
• 
  Thomas Davis: Hi all, thanks for all your advice +W.E. Jonk ; +Karen Jones ;+Andy Wigglesworth ;+Brent Wildman ;. ;
  
  We are still working on getting some value back from www.meningitis-trust.org, to our new domain - www.meningitisnow.org ;
• 
  Jim Munro: Hi Thomas. :)
  
  +Alistair Lattimore ;and +Eric Wu ;would know way more than me on this one and it's for a good cause. :)
  
  I think Googlebot must great respect for the old trust site as the total numbers indexed as listed in a site query seems to be growing even though they are 301 redirected to the new site. Many of them are tag listings which redirect OK but there are still some other page types that 404. I think you should try to identify these and redirect them.
  
  I think the landing pages should all have a rel=canonical tag pointing to themselves as soon as possible but Eric and Alistair would know best.
• 
  Eric Wu: Definitely have rel=canonicals everywhere (and implemented properly)!
  
  Hmm, hopefully you don't ever have to do this again, but if you do ... I would suggest using cross domain canonicals first before you use 301s. But I think we're already past that point.
  
  I think you've gotten some pretty solid advice already. ;
  
  You really shouldn't have a "catch all" 301 that redirects to the homepage. When you redirect a content page to the homepage, there's a strong likelihood that you'll lose nearly 100% of the link value that you once had for that content. For navigational pages like global navigation, categories, or tag pages it can vary but over time most global 301 value dissipates. ;
  
  You're better off, as others have suggested, to monitor for the 404s and try to re-map those 404s to their nearest equivalent. You'll especially want to make sure the page types match (content to content, tag to tag, category to category, etc.)
  
  If you feel that most of your 301s are redirecting from old URL to same content / page type on new URL ... than you really shouldn't see more than a 25% drop in organic traffic. If you're seeing more than that, you likely have a crawlability issue. ;
  
  You should then check your crawl rate within Google Webmaster Tools and compare it to the avgs in the past 2 months before the domain migration. Hopefully you # of URLs crawled per day are close to the same # of pages your site has (i.e. if the site is 100,000 pages ... you should be near or above 100,000 URLs crawled per day). Also hopefully your crawl averages are not below where you were before. If they are, then you might have a trust issue.
  
  If that's the case, you'll want to figure out how to tweak your internal link structure to help lead Googlebot to those sections of the site that were getting decent organic traffic that aren't anymore. Or at the very least, indicate to Googlebot the most important pages you want them to reach on a frequent basis. ;
  
  Hopefully you're not in this spot. In the future, know that these issues can be avoided if you migrate a site in chunks. It's usually prudent to organize your migration into logical sections and then sort ordering those sections by organic traffic volume (i.e. PageViews, Visits, Visitors, whatever metric is most important to your business). I usually break down the pages into deciles (10 equal parts), and migrate a low trafficked and a medium trafficked decile. Then selecting something similar in the next batch, before trying to migrate any of the top 3 deciles. ;