301 Redirection of entire section to the homepage
-
Hi Guys,
So here's the deal.
Let's say I have a site at mysite.com/ which talks about tomatoes, and I also have a subsection that talks about potatoes at mysite.com/potatoes
I want to stop providing information about potatoes altogether so i'm thinking about doing a 301 redirection from all of the pages at mysite.com/potatoes(.*) to the home page.
The thing is, mysite.com/potatoes actually has a great page authority (3475 links from 145 domains) so I really don't wan to lose all that juice...
Here are my questions:
- Will the links be added to the ones i have for the homepage already?
- Since my home page and my /potatoes section ranked for 2 different subjects, how is this transfer going to affect my rankings for the homepage? will it now also rank for both tomatoes AND potatoes?
- How much time does it usually take for google to recognize the 301 and pass the link juice?
- Any other tips on optimizing this process?
Thank you for your time!
-francois
-
Hi Francois,
I'm looking at older questions that are still unanswered, and wondering if you're still looking for advice, or if you took some action here. Really interested to hear what happened with this site!
-
The thing is, mysite.com/potatoes actually has a great page authority (3475 links from 145 domains) so I really don't wan to lose all that juice...
Dude, are you sure that you want to dump these??... You are almost the King of Potatoes
If this was my site I would be hesitant about dumping these pages with tons of links. I would do analytics to see how much traffic they are bringing and also using adsense channels (or other channeling) determine how much money they are making. You might want to post once a month on this topic. You can always keep these pages and use lots of nice thumbnail images of tomatoes to lure visitors over to your tomato pages. And reduce the number of links on your site that lead visitors to the potato pages. That big collection of tomato links will also pump some of the linkjuice over to your tomato pages. Not as good as a redirect but still preserves the linkvalue that contributes to the authority of your domain.
-
Using your example, the problem is that the sites linking to your potato pages are clearly looking for pages about potatoes. If you stop offering information on that subject then everyone who clicks an existing link and finds themselves on your tomato page will be disappointed. You will suffer a high bounce rate which will send Google a signal something is wrong.
As users report back that the "potato" link is no longer valid or helpful, many of those sites will pull their links. Based on the numbers you are averaging about 25 links per site. Are many of these links from a footer that is site wide?
You are attempting to manipulate the system. Google is a multi-billion dollar company. It can't be too hard for them to figure out that a bunch of links for "potatoes" going to a page that doesn't use the word "potato" on it is an indicator that something is wrong.
If you have any related "potato" pages on your site, then redirecting users to that page is a win for everyone. If your site no longer has any helpful information, then a 404 page built for users interested in that topic would most helpful.
How much time does it usually take for google to recognize the 301 and pass the link juice?
It depends on your site's popularity and the traffic for the pages involved. Between a day and a month.
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
-
Should I set 301 Redirects or keep old permalinks?
I just built a new site for a client and the new site has pretty links like domain.com/about-us. The old site has been around for a VERY long time and had links like domain.com/aboutus. I want to do 301 redirects because from my understanding, it minimizes the negative SEO impact. But the client wants to keep the permalinks without the hyphens to match the old links. What is the best route, considering SEO? BTW, the site is still on the same domain. Thanks in advance for your help! Neik
Technical SEO | | glassh0use0 -
To avoid errors in our Moz crawl, we removed subdomains from our host. (First we tried 301 redirects, also listed as errors.) Now we have backlinks all over the web that are broken. How bad is this, from a pagerank standpoint?
Our MOZ crawl kept telling us we had duplicate page content even though our subdomains were redirected to our main site. (Pages from Wineracks.vigilantinc.com were 301 redirected to vigilantinc.com/wineracks.) Now, to solve that problem, we have removed the wineracks.vigilantinc.com subdomain. The error report is better, but now we have broken backlinks - thousands of them. Is this hurting us worse than the duplicate content problem?
Technical SEO | | KristyFord0 -
301 redirect new site design
Hi I'm just setting up some 301 redirects for a new site design about to go live. The old site structure had some 'overview' pages in the urls (without any content) that just 302'd to a sub page. Do i need 301 redirect these overview page urls or since they had no content theres no need and I probably shouldn't or should i ? Also for pages that have no direct equivalent replacement is it still best to 301 to nearest relevant page or just leave it. For example a thank you page that currently shows after user submits email form wont be on new site (since message shows on form page after submission rather than new page). Should i 301 to form page or just leave it ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Should I do a 301 redirect
Hi Everyone, Hope you can help me out here. I have .co.uk & .ie website with similar content. On a particular section of the .co.uk website it is updated daily (Q&As, Blog posts etc) .ie does have this section but to a lesser degree, no daily updates etc, I was wondering if we should simply do a 301 redirect when someone is on the .ie website to .co.uk, it means the user is getting a much better experience however not entirely the consequences from search engines on this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Paul781 -
301 Redirect for 3 Domains into 1 New Domain
So I wanted a quick sanity check on the htaccess syntax for migrating 3 domains into 1 new domain. For example, we're migrating 3 sites abc.com, def.com and ghi.com, all into 1 new site on ghi.com. Here's the htaccess we're placing on the root of ghi.com: redirect 301 http://www.abc.com/wines.html http://www.ghi.com/wines redirect 301 http://www.def.com/trade.html http://www.ghi.com/trade
Technical SEO | | cmaseattle
redirect 301 http://www.ghi.com/winery-tours.html http://www.ghi.com/visit/taste On the DNS side of things, we're parking abc.com and def.com on the ghi.com server. I'm not seeing examples of htaccess files for this scenario, and none that use any domain info on the "from" side of the redirect 301 syntax. Any suggestions before we pull the trigger? Thanks!0 -
301 Redirect on a PDF, DOCX files?
Hi, I have to rename many pdf and docx files. How can I implement 301 redirect on them as they are linked from 'n' number of places? Regards, Shailendra Sial
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner1 -
.EDU via a 301 Redirect?
I recently received a link to my website from an .edu. However, the way they configured it was they pointed the link to one of their internal pages and then made that page 301 to my website. Is there anyway to gain any link juice from that sort of link?
Technical SEO | | gundogs0 -
301 redirect or 302
A client of mine has an international company named www.taxglobalizers.com if you come from Holland they 302 redirect you to the www.taxglobalizers.com/en version of the site and if you come from Holland they redirect with a 302 to www.taxglobalizers.com/nl version. I think it is best to change this in a 301 redirect. Am i correct in this? Kind Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0