Removing 301 Redirects
-
Is it safe to remove old 301 Redirects from an SEO standpoint and can 301s dramatically affect seo?
Prior to switching our old domain over to our new domain, we had (and currently still do) tons of 301 redirects, because of optimizing our file names and structure.
Then our old domain was redirected to our new domain in the same redirect file.
So that being said, now that our new domain has been up and running for about 3 months, would it be safe for me to get rid of the old 301 redirects and redirect anything that was on our old domain to our new domains home page? This would clean up our redirects tremendously and I hope would help with SEO.
-
This is what I would like to do, as we do not currently sell online. We were not getting a lot lot of traffic from them. So you think it is safe to do 1 redirect from the old domain?
-
Correct, but a mass 301 redirect from all URLs on the site to the homepage will still pass PR and the pages will not 401.
The only reason I would keep them there is if there is significant traffic to internal pages that are generating revenue. For instance, if you are getting a lot of traffic from a Nike sneaker page you would want that to redirect to your new Nike sneaker page, not a homepage where they would then have to search for Nike.
-
Definitely need to keep the 301 redirects in place if there are any backlinks going to your old URL structure. Depending on your website, there could be many websites linking to the OLD URL to this day. if you remove the 301's you will lose the juice and anyone who clicks those links would now get a 404 or just go the the top level of the new domain (depending on how you have it setup)
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
-
Remove a page after redirection
Hi, I had page eg. www.example.com/page1 and I redirect 302 it to > www.example.com/page2 After that I fatch this page (page2) with GSC and this page was index in serp. Can I remove this old redirect page > www.example.com/page1 now? Will this remove harm my page?
Technical SEO | | Tormar0 -
Pages with 301 redirects showing as 200 when crawled using RogerBot
Hi guys, I recently did an audit for a client and ran a crawl on the site using RogerBot. We quickly noticed that all but one page was showing as status code 200, but we knew that there were a lot of 301 redirects in place. When our developers checked it, they saw the pages as 301s, as did the Moz toolbar. If page A redirected to page B, our developers and the Moz toolbar saw page A as 301 and page B as 200. However the crawl showed both page A and page B as 200. Does anyone have any idea why the crawl may have been showing the status codes as 200? We've checked and the redirect is definitely in place for the user, but our worry is that there could be an issue with duplicate content if a crawler isn't picking up on the 301 redirect. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Welford-Media0 -
Why are my 301 redirects and duplicate pages (with canonicals) still showing up as duplicates in Webmaster Tools?
My guess is that in time Google will realize that my duplicate content is not actually duplicate content, but in the meantime I'd like to get your guys feedback. The reporting in Webmaster Tools looks something like this. Duplicates /url1.html /url2.html /url3.html /category/product/url.html /category2/product/url.html url3.html is the true canonical page in the list above._ url1.html,_ and url2.html are old URLs that 301 to url3.html. So, it seems my bases are covered there. _/category/product/url.html _and _/category2/product/url.html _ do not redirect. They are the same page as url3.html. Each of the category URLs has a canonical URL of url3.html in the header. So, it seems my bases are covered there as well. Can I expect Google to pick up on this? Why wouldn't it understand this already?
Technical SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Changing title tags, do we need 301 redirects
I found many duplicate title tags and I'm in the process of changing it Do I need 301 redirects in place when I switch it? I am only changing the title tag. Also, we are switching over to a new site very soon, I am worried that we might be using too many 301 redirect "hops" because we are doing a lot of optimization as well. (video from matt cutts describing 301 redirects and hops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA. Does anyone have any experience in doing too many redirect hops that it affected your rankings? Any good ideas to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
301 redirect of one site version to new domain
Hello all. I today have domain.com that has 10 language versions and the structure is by folders: domain.com/ru/
Technical SEO | | Gregos
domain.com/pl/ etc. Soon I plan redesign,new CMS and I plan to register 9 new ccTLDs. My question is: Can I 301 redirect domain.com/ru/ to domain.ru without having some bad effect on domain.com? I mean,the main domain,com is not going to be affected by permanent redirect of one url to completly new domain right?0 -
A script to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess?
I was wondering if anyone could help provide some resources on how to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess. Allow me to explain... I'm building a new website and the primary users are businesses. They have their own profile pages on the site. The URL is based off of their Company Name. In the event that they decided to change their name... reasons being, perhaps they mispelled it the first time, or they're removing LLC or adding Inc, I want to also change the URL and redirect the old URL to the new URL. Since the URL is based off of their Company Name, making a change to the company name would make a change to the URL. I know it doesn't have to work this way, but for our purpose this works best. In case the old URL had any links to it, I wanted to see if there was an way to automatically update an htaccess file with a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Could anyone point me in the right direction of how to do this? Perhaps a sample script. I've done a lot of searches on Google and can't seem to find anything. e.g. Original:
Technical SEO | | bimmer540
Name: XYZ Widgets
URL: website.com/xyz-widgets New - business changes their company name in their profile:
Name: XYZ Widgets, Inc.
URL: website.com/xyz-widgets-inc Upon the user saving the changes in their profile, I'd like to write a 301 redirect to an htaccess file:
Redirect 301 /xyz-widgets http://www.website.com/xyz-widgets-inc I know how to manually write redirects and I've got a pretty smart web developer. We've just never triggered a script to automatically write to an htaccess file before. Is this possible? Any resources are appreciated. Any security risks? Thanks!0 -
Worth Changing Redirect From 302 to 301?
Hi, I'm doing an audit on a site that had a redesign in Dec 2009. For some reason I looked to see what kind of redirects were used from the old pages to the current ones, and it looks like they used 302s, which obviously isn't ideal. Given that it's been so long and those pages have looong since been de-indexed, is it worth me suggesting that they change those old redirects to 301s? My thinking is that if those old pages were linked to externally then I should recommend it, but I can't find any link info on Linkscape/OSE, Majestic SEO or YSE. Any comments appreciated.
Technical SEO | | The_Heavies0 -
301 Redirect vs Domain Alias
We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?
Technical SEO | | briankb0