Reversing 301 Re-Directs
-
What's your philosophy on reversing 301 redirects? Does it depend on how long the redirect has been in place? Is it okay to implement a 301 redirect and remove it if the desired results aren't achieved?
Also, what about multiple 301 redirects and removing those? I'm working with a site that has several 301 redirects in place and there's no definite knowledge as to when these were placed. I know there's always a danger and the possibility of unintended results when moving these around. I'm just curious as to what others' experience has been with placing and removing these either within a short period of time or over the course of as much as a year.
Thanks in advance!
-
301 redirects can easily be reversed as needed. Think of it as call forwarding. You can cancel call forwarding or even re-forward a number.
Depending on the importance (i.e. PR) of the particular page which is being redirected, search engines may update their records in 1 hour or it may take several weeks. Sometimes the redirect goes smoothly, and other times there could be some bounce experienced, but things should settle in after a month.
301 redirects are a very natural part of the internet. Search engines are designed to handle them well.
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
-
301 Old domain with HTTPS to new domain with HTTPS
I am a bit boggled about https to https we redirected olddomain.com to https://www.newdomain.com, but redirecting https://www.olddomain.com or non-www is not possible. because the certificate does not exist on a level where you are redirecting. only if I setup a new host and add a htaccess file will this work. What should I do? just redirect the rest and hope for the best?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waqid0 -
Soft 404 error for a big, longstanding 301-redirected page
Hi everyone, Years ago, we acquired a website that had essentially 2 prominent homepages - one was like example.com and the other like example.com/htm... They served the same purpose basically, and were both very powerful, like PR7 and often had double listings for important search phrases in Google. Both pages had amassed considerable powerful links to them. About 4 years ago, we decided to 301 redirect the example.com/htm page to our homepage to clean up the user experience on our site and also, we hoped, to make one even stronger page in serps, rather than two less strong pages. Suddenly, in the past couple weeks, this example.com/htm 301-ed page started appearing in our Google Search Console as a soft 404 error. We've never had a soft 404 error before now. I tried marking this as resolved, to see if the error would return or if it was just some kind of temporary blip. The error did return. So my questions are:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R
1. Why would this be happening after all this time?
2. Is this soft 404 error a signal from Google that we are no longer getting any benefit from link juice funneled to our existing homepage through the example.com/htm 301 redirect? The example.com/htm page still has considerable (albeit old) links pointing to it across the web. We're trying to make sense of this soft 404 observation and any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Eric0 -
Where/how do you set up 301 redirects when keeping the same domain and not preserving the filename?
Hi there, I'm just reaching to to ask for some help in understanding where 301 redirects should be set up on a website when keeping the same domain but not preserving the original filenames? Essentially what is happening is an old website is being completely overhauled and brought up to date from a technical and usability standpoint. While the SEO isn't great naturally many of the pages have been indexed by google over time. A few pages have decent statistics and I don't want to lose the juice from them, but they do still need a lot of improving. So my question is this, would all the redirection take place in the .htaccess file only in this case? From reading here on Moz I think this is the case, but I need to confirm that. I was reading this article which has thrown me slightly: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection but this seems more complex as the website was actually moving domains. Open to any insight and if you need further clarification or information let me know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODarren0 -
Massive URL Migration with thousands of 301
Hey Everyone! I'm currently working on a project that we have A Lot of product pages and we have thousands of URL's that need to be 301'd over. I know this can be a major issue and could lead to tons of errors. What is everyone's thought of doing such a huge Migration, Should I do it all in phases? or should I do them all at once so they can all be indexed together? What would you suggest to be the best way to go about doing such a massive migration?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
New site started ranking, lost ground after 301...?
Hi everyone. So we decided to re-brand a website starting with a fresh domain and fresh website (new everything). The first 4 weeks the site was performing really well and started bringing organic traffic for several targeted keywords (small amounts, but something). Around 5 weeks later, we decided to perform a 301 Redirect from an older site we had that really hadn't changed since 2007. As soon as we performed the 301, we started loosing ground on the keywords that were starting to perform. I may help to mention that we were targeting different keywords on the new site, versus the keywords/industry that were targeted on the older site... because we were focusing on another but similar industry. Now, 10 weeks later we are still not showing up for the keywords that we were starting to make headway on in the first four weeks of starting.... any ideas why? suggestions? The 301's were performed properly. We verified them, and we check Google WMT for any additional ones that may still be out there, but try to fix them as soon as possible. We have grown the site from just a few pages to over 60+ pages in the last 2 months with unique and fresh content targetting those keywords... Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
Should /node/ URLs be 301 redirect to Clean URLs
Hi All! We are in the process of migrating to Drupal and I know that I want to block any instance of /node/ URLs with my robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing them. My question is, should we set 301 redirects on the /node/ versions of the URLs to redirect to their corresponding "clean" URL, or should the robots.txt blocking and canonical link element be enough? My gut tells me to ask for the 301 redirects, but I just want to hear additional opinions. Thank you! MS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
301 Redirection problems
A couple of days ago we did a restructure of our e-commerce site (wordpress + woocomerce) where some product categories needed to change names. I used Yoast SEO plugin to do 301 redirects in the .htaccess file.Today I noticed that we had two hits in the SERP on the phrase "dildos med vibrator". See the attached screenshot (first two results).One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibrator/ which is the right URL. One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildosdildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ which is a corrupt URL that has never been in use. The old one we did a redirect from was /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/The command in the .htaccess file was: Redirect 301 /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibratorWhat has happened here? Why does the 301 create entirely new URL:s in the SERP?Tz0TULT.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
Filter after 301 and linked with high PR
Hi, I'd like to ask you what should I do in my situation. I've shorted my URLs from something like this: domain.com/module/action/type/id/keyword to this: domain.com/keyword After 301 SERP refreshed and position stayed the same (yea, lucky me :). After 2 days I got some hight PR links (4 and 5). After 8 days my new URL disapprear to one keyword. Now this take 6 days... I've removed these links and still no results. So the question is - what should I do? Remove new url and replace it with old one, get new links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sui0