301 redirects from old to new pages whit a lot of changes
-
Hello all,
We are going to restyle and change CMS so all the urls will change. We are also updating content, adding much more content to the old pages trying to be more user and SEO friendly.
My doubt is about doing 301 redirects from old to new pages when the content has changed a lot. Does it will mantain the ranking of the page or will crawlers thought that is a total diferent page.
For example: one page new page will change from the old one the url, title, headers, meta description, content text and images.
Should i maintain old content and do the CMS change with the 301 redirects and later change the content, that means a lot of work, or do it all at once?
Thanks in advance
Tomas
-
The best way to think about this is - what happens if you don't do the 301 redirect from the old pages?
- Any links to those pages will be worthless (as the spiders will end up at a 404 error page, so the search engine will eventually drop the page from the search results)
- Any traffic which comes into those pages will get the same 404 page - so any referral traffic which follows those links in will be lost
- You're forcing the spiders to start from scratch again with your site - to spider and index all the content from the home page
What approach you take depends on your timescales, and how quickly you're going to create the new content. I'm also assuming that maintaining the existing URLs either isn't feasible or there's more value in creating new URLs (e.g. old ones were www.domain.com/index.php?id=3483844 and ones are www.domain.com/category/title-title-title.)
I would be tempted to try and do both at once - just doing the redirect will get people going to the correct URL, but the content will still be regarded as "old" by the search engines. Substantially changed content going onto new URLs will get the benefit of the 301 from the old URL (for referral links etc.), plus a "look again" from the spiders as it will be considered 'fresh'.
There is a very good recent discussion from a couple of weeks ago about new vs. old content http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-links-old-pages-whiteboard-friday and one from November at http://justinbriggs.org/methods-for-evaluating-freshness
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
-
Redirecting Pages During Site Migration
Hi everyone, We are changing a website's domain name. The site architecture will stay the same, but we are renaming some pages. How do we treat redirects? I read this on Search Engine Land: The ideal way to set up your redirects is with a regex expression in the .htaccess file of your old site. The regex expression should simply swap out your domain name, or swap out HTTP for HTTPS if you are doing an SSL migration. For any pages where this isn’t possible, you will need to set up an individual redirect. Make sure this doesn’t create any conflicts with your regex and that it doesn’t produce any redirect chains. Does the above mean we are able to set up a domain redirect on the regex for pages that we are not renaming and then have individual 1:1 redirects for renamed pages in the same .htaccess file? So have both? This will not conflict with the regex rule?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez0 -
301 Redirect to Home Page or Sub-Page?
What do you think about 301 redirect of good expired domain to a sub-page instead of the home page? I'm doing this so I don't hurt my brand name. Let me know your thoughts please. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JuanWork0 -
Redirects & Authority when Updating Product Pages
Hi Quick question on SEO & product pages. We're changing suppliers, so discontinuing their range, adding new - but the products will be very similar - almost identical in some cases. I don't want to lose authority built up from current product pages, the only way to reuse these pages is to reuse SKUs - which we can't do. If I am redirecting these pages to new products which are similar, I know page authority will be passed - so is this the best option? Our links on the website will actually point to the final URL, rather than going through a redirect - if this is the case will it still pass authority? Thank you Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Possible issues with 301 redirecting to a new domain name
Ive got a current domain and after a bit of a rebrand Im considering 301 rediecting the current site to a newly purchased domain. Id redirect each age to idential pages. Am I likely to see any issues. I know this is the recomended way from Google but just wondering how smoothly it works and whether Im likely to see any ranking drops or other problems?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulfoz16090 -
301 redirect with DNS?
Quick question. Is it possible to 301 redirect a non-www to www. (properly in terms of SEO) with DNS (C Name, A name, or other) ..have searched around and found conflicting information. Would like to know a definite answer. I usually implement all 301 redirects with htaccess. However have a client situation where we only have access to the CMS, but which does have DNS settings. thanks in advance, Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregDixson0 -
301 Redirect To Another 301 Redirect
Hi, We have a client with an old domain that they want to redirect to their primary domain. They also have a few older domains pointing to the old domain. Do you recommend leaving them as redirects that point to the old domain? This will create a redirect to a redirect situation. Or, is it better to go ahead and redirect those older domains to the primary one's, removing one layer of redirect? Thank you! Jessie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessieT0 -
301 doesn't redirect a page that ends in %20, and others being appended with ?q=
I have a product page that ends /product-name**%20** that I'm trying to redirect in this way: Redirect 301 /products/product-name%20 http://www.site.com/products/product-name And it doesn't redirect at all. The others, those with %20, are being redirected to a url hybrid of old and new: http://www.site.com/products/product-name**?q=old-url** I'm using Drupal CMS, and it may be creating rules that counter my entries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Redirects 301
Hello guys, I have a doubt. If I reedirect a url with a pagerank of 2 to a new URL, will I loose the PR? My problem is that I have a long url in one page wich is not effective to target a keyword that Im persuing. Im climbing in Google, however I want to 1º place and I dont think that with this long URL I will make it. Advices? Cheers! Pedro M Pereira
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0