Too many 301 redirects?

[Stew222]

Hey,

My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website.  These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic.

I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website?  If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content?

For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site:

• 1099softwarepro.com
• 1099softwarepro.info
• 1099softwarepro.net
• 1099softwarepro.biz
• 1099softwareprofessionals.com
• 1099softwareprofessionals.info
• ...you get the point

[Everett]

Michael I don't think you will get anymore benefit from a 301 than you're getting from the cross-domain rel canonical tags that are already in place.

However, I think the fact that you already have these cross-domain rel canonical tags i place, and that the content is identical, will make it much less likely that 301 redirecting those domains would be seen as any type of spam.

If it were me, just so all of my users were on the same domain - and to keep the problem from getting worse over time - I would go ahead and 301 redirect the other domains, but on a page-to-page basis. In other words, each page would link directly to the page it is currently referencing as the rel canonical. This would be much better than redirecting them all to a single landing page, and would send signal that is consistent with the current one you are sending via the cross domain rel canonical.

You might try this one domain at a time. Let the dust settle on that domain and, if all goes well, move on to the next. It may take a year to complete the project, but it might be the safest way to go.

Alternatively, you could just continue to leave the other sites up with the cross domain rel canonical tag - but the problem is likely to just worsen over time as more people link to the other domains, and they develop their own sources of traffic via direct links, social, bookmarks, etc... outside of the SERPs.

[BlueprintMarketing]

PS you have a decent thing going with your links already and you are not in a bad spot for page rank.

| Page Authority (PA) | 53 | Domain Authority (DA) | -- | 46 |
| MozRank (mR) | 5.94 | Domain MozRank (DmR) | 4.81 | 4.72 |
| MozTrust (mT) | 5.83 | Domain MozTrust (DmT) | 4.51 | 4.30 |
| Total Links | 1,635 | Total Links | 15,333 | 52,916 |
| External Followed Links | 1,589 | External Followed Links | 10,939 | 12,132 |
| Internal Followed Links | 39 | Linking Root Domains | 566 | 701 |
| Linking Root Domains | 399

|

I would not jeopardize you have that's my $.02.

[BlueprintMarketing]

301 redirecting is not bad at all in itself.

It is simply a method of redirecting links. However because of the quantity of exact match sites I believe you can only put yourself in danger Google is getting and more aggressive every day I would rather sleep soundly if I were you or myself obviously. And not redirect possibly spamish websites to my main site where I do business.

If this was not regarding 500 duplicate sites I would say go for it

unfortunately I believe that you will open yourself up for a possible penalty from Google.

The immense amount of duplicate or identical content that I don't know if you use Google Webmaster tools am assuming that you do but do have it set up for all 500 websites?

That will tell you if you have a penalty.

My thinking on this is you created a bunch of identical websites 500 of them. Whenever you make large changes to a website Google reevaluates it looks at it.

In my opinion by 301 redirecting 500 sites page 2 page or even to homepage you're just asking for a possible Extremely bad penalty or you might get away with it I don't know but if it were me I would not do it.

The real question is what is the chief site worth?

would you be okay with it being penalized because you 301 redirected all of the sites?

if the answer is this is a valuable website to me I would not risk it.

The problem is you did something that is very far into the black hat arena I'm not judging however you want to show Google you're not going to continue to try to take advantage of any part of the search engine in order to gain rank when the parts that your talking about our exact match duplicate content that you created.

I honestly would kill the content on the sites than 302 redirect them if you want to have the traffic from the links.

What you said about a 301 is pretty much where the money however you're going to open yourself up to a possible penalty or even removal from Google's index which is what happens with most penalties.

It's up to you however I would not do it.

Best of luck to you,

Thomas

[Alex-Harford]

301 redirecting entire identical sites to different pages sounds extremely dodgy, just to the homepage was bad enough.

[Stew222]

So if 301 redirecting all of them is seen as negative, what is the best way to consolidate all of these sites?  I thought the purpose of a 301 redirect was to permanently transfer traffic from one site to another - which would mean that a 301 redirect would be the ideal method for consolidating multiple versions of an identical site.

In essence, is there a way to gain at least some advantage from the links that these sites of garnered over time?

[BlueprintMarketing]

I agree with Alex on a lot of it

however 500 of the same website with identical content is extremely black hat

it would depend on how much traffic is coming from these domains? Which one of them is performing the best? There must surely be a standout hopefully if it's not a lot of traffic I would delete the content on the other domains and pray that Google is not going to penalize you. By 301 redirecting any of those sites to your current chief site used and only to lose quite a bit from Google this is something that will happen if you are using the same hosting providers or not they will consider this less than good

[Stew222]

Hey,

I would be redirecting each entire site to a specific page on my chief website.  Admittedly, this means that there is some precision lost because each site is a copy of the chief site but all the affiliated pages on a copy link to only one landing page on the chief site.  For instance:

• www.1099softwarepro.com and all affiliated pages would redirect to www.1099pro.com/software.asp
• www.W2Professionals.com and all affiliated pages would redirect to www.1099pro.com/prodw2pro.asp

[Alex-Harford]

In 2011 Matt Cutts said there isn't a limit. 500-600 sounds A LOT. If I was in this situation I'd just 301 the domains that have the most traffic and best links.

Are you redirecting each page on the other websites to the matching page on the chief website?