Should you wait until peak traffic season to move traffic when you can't use SEO friendly redirects?

Should you wait until peak traffic season to move traffic when you can't use SEO friendly redirects? - If a page has internal and external outgoing links to redirecting URLs, it’s returning 3xx (301, 302, etc.) HTTP status codes standing for redirection. This issue means that the page does not exist on a permanent or temporary basis. It appears on most of the popular web browsers, usually caused by a misconfigured website. However, there are some steps you can take to ensure the issue isn’t on your side. You can find more details about redirecting URLs by reading the Google Search Central overview. In this article, we’ll go over how you can fix the Should you wait until peak traffic season to move traffic when you can't use SEO friendly redirects? error on your web browser. Problem :

I have been running a Google Site for some time now and it has managed to gain decent traffic as well. At this Google Site, I have some content on the website itself and some content is uploaded to Google Drive and I have hyperlinked them on the website.

To better monetize my content, I have now created a new website (http://www.example.com) which has lot of new content and some content from the earlier Google Site (Eg url – https://sites.google.com/site/example/). I want to get hold of the traffic from my earlier Google Site.

Now my issue is that my Google Site gets its peak traffic from 15 Jan to 15 Feb of each year. So should I wait to move Google Sites content to my new website till that time or should I start moving the content now?

I plan to redact some content on the Google Site and put up a huge hyperlink titled ‘Continue’ there which will take user to my new website. My concern is that if I direct traffic to my new website right now, the Google Site may start fading by the time peak traffic arrives. Or am I safe to make the changes now?

Last but not the least, I have some Adwords Voucher (INR 2000) which I have to redeem by December 31, 2017 so if that changes anything do let me know.

Solution :

You need to drill down the real impact that this change will have to your audience. Essentially if you are running an AdWords campaign, the % of traffic coming from Google/PPC won’t really be affected. Similarly, referrals and direct traffic are not going to be affected. Only the seasonal organic traffic will be affected slightly.

If you are tracking your traffic sources it is important to find out the organic traffic in relative and absolute numbers, then you would be able to measure the level of risk and establish with a certain level of confidence the real costs.

If you do this properly I probably won’t be concerned about losing your audience if the google site is still ranking. You can educate your audience by letting them know your new location, keep the old content up in google sites and star developing the new content in the new domain. I won’t be taking any old content to the new site, if you need to do it, here I highly recommend you to paraphrase or re-write the old content completely. If no more than 15% of the old content is in the new domain I will use canonicals to let google create a relationship with your traffic source or referral website.

If you keep both websites up you don’t need to worry about losing organic and referral traffic to your new site in jan-feb. in other words, no need to worry about waiting.

The only real issue I can see coming is about the user trust, would you be able to guarantee that users will feel confident in being taken onto another website after clicking “continue”? Would this action increase the exit rate down the conversion funnel? To me this is what really matters, it is up to you to come up with the best solution here.

Based on my own experience, my recommendation would be, to keep both websites online, leave the old content where it belongs and start developing your new domain, make the old website a referral site and one that respond to your potential audience at the very top of your conversion funnel.

We hope that this article has helped you resolve the seo, redirects, links error in your web browsers. Enjoy browsing the internet uninterrupted!