Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it safe to redirect our .nl (netherlands) domain that we have just purchased to our .com domain?
-
Hi all!
We've recently developed a German version of our website with German translation and now we have just purchased a .nl domain, but with this one, we want all of the copy to remain in English. Is it ok to redirect our .nl domain to our current .com website or will this give us bad SEO points?
Thank you!
-
I would add a link from the home page to the rest of your content (the .com site) but make it clear that people will be taken to a new site.
Redirects not required.
-
Thank you so much for all of your responses.
I thought the redirect would be the easiest option for now but then we would want the contact page, and preferably the homepage, to have the Dutch telephone number, email address and map (of the Amsterdam office).
At the moment, translation for the .nl website is not an option, but this is something we are thinking about for phase 2. Our .de domain has been translated, and for now, we just want to get the .nl domain up and running!
Is there a way we would be able to have a dutch homepage, with the correct telephone numbers and map, but then redirect to the rest of the website on .com?
Building links to .de and .nl will be something to think about in the future but for now we just want the sites to be indexed and accessible to users from their respective countries.
Thank you!
-
The 301 shouldn't be a problem but as stated it might be odd if used on advertising and then people end up on a different domain. It will help you snap up domain name so no-one else can use it though.
If you don't want a duplicate nl site in Dutch, you could keep the nl domain to a single page with Dutch content and then suggest Dutch visitors visit your main .com site. Would be worth having a contact page with address in Holland too.
If you make the nl site a re-gig of your .com site, make the content as different (and appealing to Dutch visitors) as possible.
Although many Dutch can speak English, they can't all, especially older generations so bear in mind when thinking about just serving English content.
-
If you made the .nl site the same as the .com com site, you could also cross-domain rel=canonical each page over to the .com site, which would leave visitors on the .nl site but assign all value over to the .com. As Ash said though, putting unique content--either Dutch or English--might me your most effective option. It may be even more effective if you host it in the Netherlands, too.
-
Yes, doing a 301 redirect from your .nl to the .com site will be fine, but why are you doing that?
Are you going to advertise in Holland and show the .nl URL? If so, users might be unsettled if they end up at the .com site. If it is just 301'd and that's all you do, then hardly anyone other than a person guessing your URL will even use it. You might not even rank in Holland.
There are no bad SEO points for the .com site, but you could be losing the chance to rank on Google.nl. I don't think Google.nl will note the 301 and therefore show the .com as well as a well-SEO'd .nl site.
You could put English content on the .nl site, preferably a rewritten version of the .com site. The key is to get .nl links to the .nl domain (if not 301'd). Make it a Dutch site as much as you can - get listed in Dutch directories, get Dutch citations, etc.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
Canonical Question: Root Domain Geo Redirects to SubFolder.
Howdy, Working on a larger eComm site that 302s you based on your location. With that in mind should I canonicalize the final page. domain.com => 302 => domain.com/us/, domain.com/fr/, etc... (Should these all have a canonical pointing to the root domain.com?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blake.runyon0 -
Referring domain issues
Our website (blahblah).org has 32 other domains pointing to it all from the same I.P address. These domains including the one in question, were all purchased by the website owner, who has inadvertently created duplicate content and on most of these domains. Some of these referring domains have 301's, some don't - but it appears they have all been de-indexed by Google. I'm somewhat out of my depth here (most of what I've said above has come from an agency who said we should address this before being slapped by Google). However I need to explain to my line manage the actual issues in more detail and the repercussions - any anyone please offer advice please? I'm happy to use the agency, or another - but would like some second opinions if possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LJHopkins0 -
Redirecting to a new domain... a second time
Hi all, I help run a website for a history-themed podcast and we just moved it to its second domain in 7 years. We've had very good SEO up until last week, and I'm wondering if I screwed up the way I redirected the domains. It's like this: Originally the site was hosted at "first.com", and it acquired inbound links. However, we then started to host the site on blogger, so we... Redirected the site to "second.blogspot.com". (Thus, 1 --> 2) It stayed here for about 7 years and got lots of traffic. Two weeks ago we moved it off of blogger and into Wordpress, so we 301 redirected everything to... third.com. (Thus, 1 --> 2 --> 3) The redirects worked, and when we Google individual posts, we are now seeing them in Google's index at the new URL. My question: What about the 1--> 2 redirect? There are still lots of links pointing to "first.com". Last week I went into my GoDaddy settings and changed the first redirect, so that first.com now points to third.com. (Thus 1 --> 3, and 2-->3) I was correct in doing that, right? The drop in Google traffic I've seen this past week makes me think that maybe I screwed something up. Should we have kept 1 --> 2 --> 3? (Again, now we have 1-->3 and 2-->3) Thanks for any insights on this! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC1 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas0 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
302 redirects in the sitemap?
My website uses a prefix at the end to instruct the back-end about visitor details. The setup is similar to this site - http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=sf with a 302 redirect from the normal link to the one with additional info and a canonical tag on the actual URL without the extra info ((the normal one here being http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com,) However, when I used www.xml-sitemaps.com to create a sitemap they did so using the URLs with the extra info on the links... what should I do to create a sitemap using the normal URLs (which are the ones I want to be promoting)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0