Question on 301s
-
Hi Everyone,
I have a questions on 301 redirects, i hope someone can give me some help on this.
There was some 301 redirects made on some of the URLs at the beginning of the year, however we are now re-structuring the whole website, which means the URLs which had been given a 301 redirect are now getting another 301.
The question is, should i delete the first 301 redirect from the htaccess file?
Kind Regards
-
Ryan your analogy is fantastic. I totally understand this now and it really makes sense to do it this way.
Thanks for being patient with me
Again thanks all for your feedback on this.
Kind Regards
-
Every URL which is no longer active would require a 301 redirect to the proper page. In the situation you describe:
/a should redirect to /abc
/ab should redirect to /abc
I recognize this seems confusing so forget it's a website for a moment. Think of it as mail after you move.
You lived at 100 Main Street. That is where you received your mail. Now you move to 200 Elm Street. You put in a forward order with the post office (a real world equivalent to a 301 redirect). Now any mail addressed to 100 Main Street will be received at 200 Elm Street.
Now you move again to 300 Wall Street. You would put in another forwarding order so your mail from 200 Elm Street gets delivered to your new address. This solution is fine BUT, your mail from 100 Main Street would be delayed. First it would get forwarded to the 200 Elm Street post office, who would then have to forward it to 300 Wall Street. This process is inefficient (in seo terms, you lose link juice).
You want to change your 100 Main Street forward order to direct your mail to the 300 Wall Street address. Now all of your mail is taken to the proper location in a single hop.
I hope this analogy helps!
-
What happens to the URL
If there are external backlinks going to the URL, are these not going to get lost?
Because as we have mentioned on these 301s, there has been 3 URLs in question.
Hope that makes sense.
-
In the simplest terms, the old page should always be directed to the new page. Think of it as a non-stop flight.
-
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your feedback, however I am getting a little lost
So what your are saying if I understand is, the 301 should be this:
example.com/a is redirected to example.com/abc
Kind Regards
-
The only thing that concerns me is what CafePress had said "Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so."
You can offer 100 links on a page. All the links can be to "seomoz.org" and they will all be crawled even though the real URL is "www.seomoz.org" and all 100 links will get redirected.
What CafePress referred to is redirects for a single URL.
www.example.com/a redirects to /ab which redirects to /abc and so forth. A crawler will only follow a single URL so far through a chain of redirects before the PR is completely gone and it stops.
Therefore the preferred solution is to redirect any old or broken URLs to their new URL in a single redirect. I'll share an example based on your site:
Very old URL: example.com/a. It is redirected to example.com/ab
Old URL: example.com/ab. It is redirected to example.com/abc
You could leave these two redirects in place, as-is, and they will work, but it is not recommended. The reason is any traffic to /a will have a double re-direct. First the traffic will go to /ab then to the final destination of /abc. This double redirect is an unnecessary delay, it adds extra points of vulnerability and is a waste of SEO link juice. The preferred solution would be to modify the /a redirect to point to the /abc page directly.
I hope that makes sense.
-
Also, if a page is indexed, which is highly likely (due to XML sitemaps, Google Analytics, Google Toolbar etc), then just removing the 301 redirect (links or no links) means that when this page disappears due to the site changes then you will have an indexed page resulting in a 404 error.
I maintain that you should have single hop 301 redirects on all of the pages that will not be there or will have been moved due to the site updated.
I also agree with what Ryan Kent says about links - you may have some links that have been discovered but not yet recognized pr picked up. If there is a chance that the content has been indexed then it should have an appropriate redirect.
-
Hi Ryan,
The only thing that concerns me is what CafePress had said "Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so."
I have another issue regarding the 301 re-directs:
We have:
/abcd http://www.example.com/abcde this is actually a 301 on a product page, however we have the same product in a shop page /shop/abcd which we have decided to do away with the shop directory, is it best practice to also do a 301 from the /shop/abcd to /abcde?
Hope that makes sense.
Kind Regards
-
I don't agree with the recommendation to simply delete the 301 due to no visible links. There are two reasons why:
1. It is more work for you to go and research the links to each page
2. There can always be links you are not aware of such as bookmarks, e-mail links, links which don't show up for various reasons, etc.
Just simply modify the 301 to point to the correct URL and you are all set.
-
Thanks for the fantastic feedback.
An example of what has happened on the .htaccess:
/abc http://www.example.com/abcd - This is the 301 that was made in March this year.
/abcd http://www.example.com/abcde - This is the new 301
If i notice that there are no links going to /abc using Open Site Explorer should i just delete this 301?
Kind Regards
-
I would change the original 301 redirect to the new location.
I would then add an additional 301 redirect to the secondary page (the old redirect) to the new location.
So you will have your original URL and the older redirected URL both 301 redirected to where the content now resides. This way you only have one hop on the 301 redirects and you have both old URLs pointing to the new one.
-
should i delete the first 301 redirect from the htaccess file?
The best results would be achieved if each URL had a single 301 redirect to the target page. To that end, yes, you should delete the old 301 redirect and create a new one.
-
+1
Totally forgot about mentioning the inbound links part. Thanks for picking it up, Rick!
-
Hey Gary,
I partially agree with Cafe. However, I wouldn't remove any redirects for URLs which may have backlinks. Maybe it would be a good idea to figure out if any of the redirects which you are removing are from URLs that have earned links? An Open Site Explorer link export would help you figure out if any of those URLs still have value.
-
Hi Gary,
Yes, it is always a good idea to cut down the number of 301 redirects (or any redirects in general) because if I remember correctly, Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so. You also lose another 10% link juice for each additional redirect.
Lastly, don't forget to 301 redirect the URLs from the beginning of the year to the new re-structured website.
Hope that helps!
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 actively filter very similar questions (but not worded identically) and answers for my Q/A Website?
We're setting up a medical Q/A on our website. I anticipate a lot of questions being asked, which we have already answered before through other questions in the Q/A. For example "How do I plan my pregnancy if I am Diabetic?" , "I have been Diabetic for the past 5 years, and am planning to start a family. What should be my approach regarding this? Should I: Write two different answers for each question, but which will eventually have the same meaning. Some answers could end up looking almost identical. Redirect new questions to the old question by posting a link of the answer. Merging the two questions, or deleting on of the two. What is the best solution for maximising SEO Benefits, and minimizing the chances of a penalty?
Technical SEO | | Fmann0 -
Google My Business Service Area Question
Hello Moz Friends I just wanted to make sure I'm doing things correctly. On google my business your given the option to list your service area. I serve the entire state of Colorado with my internet marketing services. So I listed Colorado as my service area. but Moz Friends, is this the wrong idea? Like should I list the major cities and call it good? So instead of service area Colorado, I should put Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo etc Thank you for your friendly help Chris
Technical SEO | | asbchris0 -
Pageing page and seo meta tag questions
Hi if i am using paging in my website there is lots of product in my website now in paging total paging is 1000 pages now what title tag i need to add for every paging page or is there any good way we can tell search engine all page or same ?
Technical SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Rel canonical question
Hi, I have an e-commerce site hosted on Volusion currently the rel canonical link for the homepage points to www.store.com/default.asp. I spoke with the Volusion support people and they told me that whether the canonical link points to store.com/default.asp or store.com does not really matter as long as there is a canonical version. I thought this sounded odd, so looked at other websites hosted on volusion and some sites canonicalize to default.asp and others .com. (volusion.com canonicalizes to .com fwiw). The question is...I have a majority of my external links going to www.store.com , and since that page has default.asp as it canonical version, am I losing link juice from those incoming links? If so, should I change the canonical link? If I do what are the potential issues/penalties? Hopefully this question makes sense and thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | IOSC0 -
Google Change of Address with Questionable Backlink Profile
We have a .com domain where we are 301-ing the .co.uk site into it before shutting it down - the client no longer has an office in the UK and wants to focus on the .com. The .com is a nice domain with good trust indicators. I've just redesigned the site, added a wad of healthy structured markup, had the duplicate content mostly rewritten - still finishing off this job but I think we got most of it with Copyscape. The site has not so many backlinks, but we're working on this too and the ones it does have are natural, varied and from trustworthy sites. We also have a little feature on the redesign coming up in .Net magazine early next year, so that will help. The .co.uk on the other hand has a fair few backlinks - 1489 showing in Open Site Explorer - and I spent a good amount of time matching the .co.uk pages to similar content on the .com so that the redirects would hopefully pass some pagerank. However, approximately a year later, we are struggling to grow organic traffic to the .com site. It feels like we are driving with the handbrake on. I went and did some research into the backlink profile of the .co.uk, and it is mostly made up of article submissions, a few on 'quality' (not in my opinion) article sites such as ezine, and the majority on godawful and broken spammy article sites and old blogs bought for seo purposes. So my question is, in light of the fact that the SEO company that 'built' these shoddy links will not reply to my questions as to whether they received a penalty notification or noticed a Penguin penalty, and the fact that they have also deleted the Google Analytics profiles for the site, how should I proceed? **To my mind I have 3 options. ** 1. Ignore the bad majority in the .co.uk backlink profile, keep up the change of address and 301's, and hope that we can just drown out the shoddy links by building new quality ones - to the .com. Hopefully the crufty links will fade into insignificance over time.. I'm not too keen on this course of action. 2. Use the disavow tool for every suspect link pointing to the .co.uk site (no way I will be able to get the links removed manually) - and the advice I've seen also suggests submitting a reinclusion request afterwards- but this seems pointless considering we are just 301-ing to the new (.com) site. 3. Disassociate ourselves completely from the .co.uk site - forget about the few quality links to it and cut our losses. Remove the change of address request in GWT and possibly remove the site altogether and return 410 headers for it just to force the issue. Clean slate in the post. What say you mozzers? Please help, working myself blue in the face to fix the organic traffic issues for this client and not getting very far as yet.
Technical SEO | | LukeHardiman0 -
Question for experts - a website is ranking defying all google rules
Hi all Today I saw a strange result in google's search page. When I typed a keyword: Rezeptfrei bestellen, it gave me results like number 1- http://www.rezeptfreibestellen.com/ If I check this site in opensiteexplorer, this is nothing but a new site with no backlinks, or any other offpage work. Onpage work is simply keyword stuffing and domain name is also same as keyword. Now why google ranked this website above others? Where are google EMD and Penguin, Panda? Amit
Technical SEO | | expertvillagemedia1 -
Schema Address Question
I have a local business with a contact page that I want to add schema markup to. However, I was wondering if having the address with schema info on the contact page instead of the home page has any adverse effects on the rich snippet showing up in search. There's no logical place to add schema for a local business on the home page, so having it on the contact page—not in the footer or sidebar—is the only option.
Technical SEO | | DLaw0 -
Video question
If another company hosts our videos, but they are only found embedded on our site, do we get all of the SEO benefits from the video, or would we have to host it for that to happen?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0