Updates to Domain Redirect Setting

May 29, 2007 | In Best Practices, SEO/SEM | 17 Comments

In our ongoing effort to help you become more successful, we will update the Domain Redirect Setting with our 05/30 release tomorrow to help improve search engine visibility for your store. Once released you can perform a 301 (permanent) redirects for all domains and hostnames pointing to your store to a single store domain of your choice.

What will change?

The existing Domain Redirect Setting allows you to perform a 301 redirect on all Yahoo! created domains (e.g., store.yahoo.com/accountname, shop.yahoo.com/accountname) pointing to your store to the single domain of your choice.

We have now expanded the list of domains for the 301 redirect to include ALL domains and hostnames that are pointing to your store (www.acme.com, http://acme.com, www.myacmestore.com). This means that you will now to able to perform a permanent redirect of all your web traffic to a single domain of your choice. This update will allow you to consolidate all URLs that are pointing to the same page to a single URL.

What are the benefits?

Many merchants believe that by consolidating multiple URLs that are pointing to the same page to a single URL will combine the search engine ranking for those URLs into a single URL. So instead of having two URLs (www.acme.com, http://acme.com) each with some value in terms of ranking in search engine results, you can have one URL with a consolidated value in terms of ranking in search engines.

Since the exact details regarding search engines ranking elements are not communicated by search engines, no guarantee can be made about how this change will impact the ranking of your store in search engines.

Duncan Shen
Yahoo! Small Business

17 Comments »

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  1. Very good news Duncan. Keep up the good work!

    Comment by bobsc — May 29, 2007 #

  2. Woo hoo! That’s AWESOME! Congrats. I cannot tell y’all how happy this makes me!

    “…no guarantee can be made about how this change will impact the ranking of your store in search engines.”

    The ability to choose one URL for a Store Editor page will make Yahoo! Store SEO SO MUCH EASIER! Now PageRank, link popularity, linkjuice etc. will all accrue to ONE DOMAIN which will help Yahoo! Store owners rank better in ALL the search engines. — Rob

    Comment by Rob Snell — May 29, 2007 #

  3. Definitely a great move. Not to sound ungrateful,but now how about giving us the ability to 301 individual pages.

    Comment by Jordan Glasner — May 30, 2007 #

  4. Jordan,

    Just so I understand your request, what functionality are you looking for with individual page redirects? Are you looking to redirect one page to another such as when renaming a page or perhaps moving an entire category into another category?

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — May 30, 2007 #

  5. This is fantastic news! Can’t wait for it to be implemented.

    Also, I second Jordan’s request.

    Comment by Greg Tice — May 30, 2007 #

  6. Paul,

    I think that is exactly what Jordan is referring to. Sometimes people want to get rid of a category and 301 the old category page to a new category or just 301 an old product page to the homepage. This is great news though. I’ve been waiting over 2 years for this. Thank you!

    Comment by gzlatin — May 30, 2007 #

  7. There still seems to be a problem with all Yahoo! generated URLs.

    I checked store.yahoo.com/accountname, shop.store.yahoo.com/accountname, stores.yahoo.com/accountname and you still get a 302 status code.

    Comment by bobsc — May 31, 2007 #

  8. Paul,

    Yes, I would love the ability to redirect individual pages via a 301 instead of deleting them.

    Currently I have a “redirect” template that takes a page id and redirects to it using a meta refresh, but I would be in heaven if I could use a 301 instead.

    Feel free to email me if I’m still being unclear.

    Comment by Jordan Glasner — May 31, 2007 #

  9. Any news on when this will be rolled out and how to implement this? Do I do this through the domain control panel or through the yahoo store control panel? This is great news. Thanks.

    Comment by Scott — May 31, 2007 #

  10. Bob–
    Please contact our support team for the issue you are seeing. The Yahoo!-generated urls were fixed years ago and were functioning properly when the redirect is set. I have heard no reports to the contrary so I do not believe the issue you may be seeing is wide spread.

    Jordan (and George)–
    Thanks for the feedback. I agree that a meta refresh is not ideal in terms of passing any relevancy a page may have. We will need to determine where this enhancement fits in terms of the overall roadmap. It is always a good thing for you to pass along the problems you encounter for which we do not have a solution and where each problem is in terms of importance of addressing.

    Scott–
    This feature rolled out yesterday by 4pm PDT. You should see this option in the Domain Names page accessible from the Store Manager under Settings.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — May 31, 2007 #

  11. The Yahoo!-generated urls never had 301 status codes.

    Comment by bobsc — May 31, 2007 #

  12. First of all, I’m glad everybody is excited about the new changes to the 301 redirect feature. I hope this change will translate to real $$$ success for your businesses. Secondly, thank you for pointing out the issue regarding the 302 redirect problem on some of the Yahoo generated URLs. Please note the problem has now been addressed and the desired 301 redirect is now in place. Thanks again for the feedback.

    Regards,

    Duncan

    Comment by Administrator — June 1, 2007 #

  13. Thanks Duncan for your quick response.

    Comment by bobsc — June 1, 2007 #

  14. Hello,
    Any update on whether the requested feature of setting individual page redirects will be implemented? I could really use this feature too.
    Thanks

    Comment by Rachael — July 9, 2007 #

  15. Rachael–We have this one our radar now but do not have a date for when it may be released.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — July 9, 2007 #

  16. Is there an update on when 301 redirects will be supported for individual pages?
    Thank you.

    Comment by ole — December 29, 2007 #

  17. Great advice: Consolidating sites and pages. I can assume yahoo store / yahoo search works broadly the same. Another tip is there is very little up to date feedback on webmasters’ success with 301 moving sites. On that note, I’ll post back in 12 months time…

    Comment by PS3 — May 18, 2008 #

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