301 redirects / clean urls
-
hello everyone, we moved our site to a new platform that has url rewrite feature. we are building out a spreadsheet of the old aspx urls and the corresponding page on the new site. my dev tells me that its not important to redirect the old page to the new "clean url" page which sounds a bit odd to me ..example below. okay. so he says its the same difference to 301 redirect this url: http://72.3.181.97/catalog/DesignerDogBeds.aspx to this urls: https://www.k9electronics.com/product.php?productid=3474 instead of this clean url: http://www.k9electronics.com/designer-dog-beds/ can anyone give me any feedback on this? thanks!
-
First, your dev is wrong. The url your dev has first is a dynamic url and you do not want that. You can spot dynamic url's by virtue of the ?, &, .cgi-bin etc. The problem is more in conversions than in a lack of indexing, etc.
You do want to redirect url to url and most believe you will get 90 to 99% of the juice. (My experience is that it is over 90%). The preference from what you provided would be the http://www.k9electronics.com/designer-dog-beds/
Lastly, since you are going down this road, I suggest you read this post by Dr. Pete. It gives good advice on eCommerce. I think based on your question you would find it very helpful.
Best
-
Basically, you are asking 2 questions. Is it important to redirect, and what do we redirect to?
1. It is important to redirect old URL's, but only if those URL's are indexed. You see, people may still click on them, as they will still be in the search engines for a while. Of course, if the URL's are not indexed, you don't have to redirect anything. You are correct to use 301 redirects, and you will lose some link juice but it's better than nothing!
2. The best URL is an URL with relevant keywords. Relevant, so 'catalog' does not need to be in the URL. Your example of http://www.k9electronics.com/designer-dog-beds/ is the best URL. It's good because people will understand what your page is about, and search engines like that.
Good luck!
-
with 301 you will lose some of the link juice, but some will be transferred.
I don't remember where I have read regarding this issue, but if I remember well the number was something like 85% transferred? (Correct me If I am wrong)
Cheers,
Istvan
-
Hi k9byron,
First of all, the three links provided are three very different ones:
1. http://72.3.181.97/catalog/DesignerDogBeds.aspx - no result
2. https://www.k9electronics.com/product.php?productid=3474 - PetSafe PAC19-12069 Spray Refill - Citronella
3. http://www.k9electronics.com/designer-dog-beds/ - designer-dog-beds category
But IF I have understood the question well... Then you are asking which form to use for the redirect.
I would go to redirect the old page to the "clean url". The cleaner the url is, the easier is to optimize for. So go for that version if possible.
I hope it hepled,
Istvan
-
Hello!
To not lose link juice from the old URL's , the best method is to redirect old URL's to new URL's. It's a hard and consuming time work, but you will give relevance to all your new URL's.
Another method is to redirect only old categories into new ones, but it is very possible to lose link juice.
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
-
How to redirect subdomain to new blog directory
I have moved my wordpress blog from a subdomain to a subdirectory /blog/ on my site. What is the best way to setup a redirect from the subdomain to the new /blog/ directory? Or should I just delete the subdomain blog and wait for google to index it on /blog/. I need to do one or the other so as not to run into duplicate content issues.
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Wordpress category url problem.
I have set up wordpress categories but the permalinks are showing as www.mydomain.com/?cat=12 as opposed to the category name. The child categories though work fine and show as www.mydomain.com/category/chidcatgegory I've obviously got my permalink settings wrong somewhere. How do I fix this?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
301 redirected Duplicate Content, still showing up as duplicate after new crawl.
We launched a site where key landing pages were not showing up in google. After running the seomoz crawl it returned a lot of duplicate pages which may expalin this. The actual url of the page is /design and it was telling me the following were dupes: /design/family-garden-design
On-Page Optimization | | iterate
/design/small-garden-design
/design/large-rural-garden-design
/Design All of these URL's were in fact pointing to the /design landing page. I 301 redirected all of the pages so they all now resolve to /design After running another crawl the day after doing this it's still showing up as duplicate content on seomoz. Does seomoz evaluate the new changes right away?0 -
One or two keywords/pages
Hi, I have a question about good keyword practice. I have a page: http://www.holdnyt.dk/skader-karantaener/fodbold/england-premier-league It lists all injuries ("skader" in danish) and suspensions ("karantaener" in danish) for the english premier league in football/soccer. On the page one can choose to show only injuries OR suspensions, which have their own URLs: http://www.holdnyt.dk/skader-karantaener/fodbold/england-premier-league/skader http://www.holdnyt.dk/skader-karantaener/fodbold/england-premier-league/karantaener My question is - what is best. To optimize the first URL (the more general one) to fit both of the following keywords:
On-Page Optimization | | rasmusbang
"skader premier league" and "karantaener premier league" OR should i focus on optimizing the two latter URLs, the more specfiic to target the two keywords. Regards, Rasmus0 -
Site structure suggestions/feedback
I asked this on Reddit and got some some decent answers. I'm curious to see what the pro's of SEOmoz think. I've got a lead generation site for forklift parts--liftxparts.com. You can think of it similar to car parts, where we have sections for specific brands (e.x. Toyota forklift parts) and sections for specific categories (e.x. forklift filters). Right now, the site is structured in two main levels: the top level is a dozen or so brands (separate pages for Toyota forklift parts, Clark forklift parts, etc), and then the second level is the categories (separate pages for a dozen or so different categories like forklift filters, forklift engine parts, etc.).If you check out one of the pages, like Clark forklift parts for example (our top landing page)--liftxparts.com/clark-forklift-parts.html, you'll see that on the brand pages (they're all structured the same), we list all the different categories (with links to the same second level category pages) and "search" buttons. All pages point to the same lead capture form.This has been working pretty well--about 90% of visitors end up on our lead capture form, and a high percentage of those convert. We're working on increasing organic traffic now and I'm thinking our structure could use some improvement.Looking at the analytics, there are a lot more impressions for keywords like "clark forklift" than "clark forklift parts". One gap I've uncovered is while our average position, and by extension CTR and traffic, for phrases like "clark forklift parts" is quite good, it's not so good for broader and higher searched terms like "clark forklift". Should we add another level of hierarchy targeted to just general brands? So now we have content for clark forklift parts, but should we add a page for terms like "clark forklift"? Or should we just add some broader content to the existing brand pages? The pages are quite long already, I'm afraid adding more content to the bottom of the page isn't very functional. Our thinking is that we can increase average position for higher searched terms by adding content targeted to those terms. The question is how exactly to go about it and how to work it into our current site structure? Any feedback related to our site structure or even just related ideas about other ways to approach our goal of increasing organic traffic would be very much appreciated! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | wisamabdulla0 -
Long url > 115
Hi, in my web code I have link to my images that are resize online and the link is very long. like this src="http://img.espectador.com/mediadelivery/?fn=&i_enc=1&i_a=L2hvbWUvZXNwZWN0YWRvci93d3cvaW1hZ2VuZXMvMjUwMTY2XzEzNDk5NTQ0NjFfY29uc3RydWNjaW9uLmpwZw==&i_cl=1&i_tr=100&i_q=70&i_rt=0&i_w=250&i_h=188&i_wtmrk=" alt="Paro parcial de Sunca" border="0"/> I have a lot of warning in my reports with this and I would like to omit this warnings How can I do that? noindex? nofollow? Thanks The original page that contain that code is this http://www.espectador.com/noticias/250166/paro-parcial-de-sunca Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | informatica8100 -
Question about URLs
Hello! I have a client that wants to upload an URL like this: www.example.com/keyword/page-name.html The main problem is that www.example.com/keyword/ doesn't exist and gives a 404 error so I'd prefer not doing that...... What do you think about this? And if the client wants to go ahead, is there any solution? A 301 to the final page would help? Thank you in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | Juandbbam0 -
Is it worth changing urls with underscores?
A few pages on one of my sites have underscores linking keywords rather than hyphens (keywords_and_keyword rather than keyword-and-keyword). Possibly from a time before I knew hyphens were preferred... One of the pages ranks well, and drives a good amount of traffic. The others do not do so well, but are still within the top 10 landing pages for the site. Is it worth me changing the underscores to hyphens (setting up 301 redirects first of course) or doesn't it make that much difference?
On-Page Optimization | | Jingo010