Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    6
    11
    7907
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Visually
      Visually last edited by

      For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys.

      In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL.

      This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • RobertFisher
        RobertFisher @KeriMorgret last edited by

        Keri,

        You never cease to be able to recall the good stuff. Funny, its been a busy week so am just getting to some of this. Great post here, thanks.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Visually
          Visually @RobertFisher last edited by

          Thanks guys. For the record these pages do not have back links so I am going to be using the 301 redirect.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • RobertFisher
            RobertFisher @RobertFisher last edited by

            Very well put. (As usual) Thanks so much,

            David, hopefully you will see EGOL's reply. Best of luck.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • EGOL
              EGOL @RobertFisher last edited by

              Thanks Robert,

              I think that this is a question of weighing an improvement in optimization against a loss of external authority (backlinks from other websites).

              If these are brand new pages with no accumulated external authority then there is very little loss in redirecting and a gain in optimization.  That means DO IT NOW - before any valuable external authority accumulates.

              However, if there are a lot of external links into these pages then a percentage of that accumulated authority will evaporate through the redirect.   The more powerful these pages, the greater the loss.  In this case the decision to redirect becomes more difficult.  Only google could calculate the value of the improvement in URL optimization compared to the loss of external authority.  If it was my site I would value the external authority much more than changing a url from /toys/ to /chew-toys/

              So, I would give two different answers to this question based upon the characteristics of the website webpages involved.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • RobertFisher
                RobertFisher @EGOL last edited by

                EGOL,

                You make a great point. My question is this: David says above that: None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.

                I think his assumption is that by changing the url's to something (that appears to be from his example) more query oriented and optimized he will be able to impact this. Given that and given that a 301 will transfer 90% plus of the link juice, do you think he is served in making the change?

                Curious as I respect your opinions.

                EGOL RobertFisher Visually 3 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • KeriMorgret
                  KeriMorgret last edited by

                  David,

                  Have you read Dr. Pete's post about Should I Change my URLs for SEO? He talks about this very topic.

                  RobertFisher 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • EGOL
                    EGOL last edited by

                    How much ranking power do you think that an optimized URL delivers to a page?  Consider that title tag is enormous, links are enormous..... URL is probably tiny tiny tiny.

                    Now consider that the authority that these pages carry will pass through your site.

                    So, if this was my site I would be asking... How much of my external linkjuice is hitting these 20 pages.  If none then I would not expect to lose very much by redirecting the pages.  But if these pages had lots of offsite assets pointing to them the URLs would have to be really fugly before I redirected them.

                    RobertFisher 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • RobertFisher
                      RobertFisher last edited by

                      David,
                      First, as to your last sentence, I am assuming you are redirecting 20 urls that are "not optimal" to 20 new urls that are optimized. Such that your example above is one and another would be http://www.dog.com/food to http://www.dog.com/organic-raw-dog-food, etc. for approximately 20 urls.

                      If these follow the best practices (301's url to url in the .htaccess file) you should have no issue with the change. Understand that if the "poor" url /toys is ranking number 8 on page 1 of Google, and you do the redirect, it does not mean that you will rank for /chew-toys in the same place. For a short while you will likely continue to rank and then likely will fall off quickly.

                      Your new page will gain the link juice but not the ranking of the old.

                      We do a lot of site redesigns to bring them to SEO and CRO standards and therefore use a lot of 301's to maintain PA and grow it. We typically see the juice move over two to three months or more in a gradual fashion. An example is a site that we transferred every url for in late Aug. had about 170 links to its home page. Two months later, when looking at the old url there were only a couple showing and the links were showing on the new. So, it will change but not overnight.

                      Hope this helps

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • CaseyKluver
                        CaseyKluver last edited by

                        Hi David,

                        From what you describe, you will have no negative effects from using 301 redirects to a new URL structure. Thats what 301's are for 🙂

                        Rankings may dip for maybe 3-7 days (depending on which pages are ranking, etc)  if at all, but after that you should be good.

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                        • JoshPugh
                          JoshPugh last edited by

                          According to SEOMoz's article on redirection, 301 redirects DO pass on the page authority ("about 90-99%") however it will take time. This number varies depending on who you listen to, but there is evidence that it does eventually pass through Google.

                          Depending on how often your pages get crawled, this may take a while but if you're not going for rankings, this won't affect too much.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          Got a burning SEO question?

                          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                          Start my free trial


                          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.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • Jes-Extender-Australia

                            Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages

                            Hello Fellow Moz's, We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages. As an example we use: RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1 That works well. The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized. Anyone know of a workaround?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jes-Extender-Australia
                            0
                          • Chris8198

                            301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain

                            We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain.  We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris8198
                            0
                          • Sandicliffe

                            301 Redirect Showing Up as Thousands Of Backlinks?

                            Hi Everyone, I'm currently doing quite a large back link audit on my company's website and there's one thing that's bugging me. Our website used to be split into two domains for separate areas of the business but since we have merged them together into one domain and have 301 redirected the old domain the the main one. But now, both GWT and Majestic are telling me that I've got 12,000 backlinks from that domain?  This domain didn't even have 12,000 pages when it was live and I only did specific 301 redirects (ie. for specific URL's and not an overall domain level 301 redirect) for about 50 of the URL's with all the rest being redirected to the homepage. Therefore I'm quite confused about why its showing up as so many backlinks - Old redirects I've done don't usually show as a backlink at all. UPDATE: I've got some more info on the specific back links. But now my question is - is having this many backlinks/redirects from a single domain going to be viewed negatively in Google's eyes? I'm currently doing a reconsideration request and would look to try and fix this issue if having so many backlinks from a single domain would be against Google's guidelines. Does anybody have any ideas? Probably somthing very obvious. Thanks! Sam

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandicliffe
                            0
                          • Stew222

                            Too many 301 redirects?

                            Hey, My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website.  These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic. I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website?  If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content? For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site: 1099softwarepro.com 1099softwarepro.info 1099softwarepro.net 1099softwarepro.biz 1099softwareprofessionals.com 1099softwareprofessionals.info ...you get the point

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew222
                            0
                          • lara_dar

                            Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?

                            I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
                            ...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
                            0
                          • Travis-W

                            Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page

                            Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
                            SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
                            The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
                            Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
                            0
                          • Brocberry

                            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 | | Brocberry
                            0
                          • bizzer

                            Changing a parent category and 301 redirecting

                            I have a set of three pages that are subpages of a parent. The structure is as follows: mysite.com/directory/personal-widgets mysite.com/directory/commercial-widgets mysite.com/directory/widgets-services The partent page name "directory" really isn't working for where I want these pages to evolve. So I want to change it to "guides" In a world without worrying about google, I would simply change the parent page to guides, so they look like this, and be done with it: mysite.com/guides/personal-widgets But, the obvious problem is that I have external links to the page now. And the pages have a nice PR. And they also have Facebook page Likes and I don't know if I'll lose those. I know that if I should do this I should redirect the pages to the new pages of course. My question is: Will redirecting the old URL to the new URL with a 301 cause anything negative to happen that I might not be expecting?  Does Google dislike Redirects for any reason, or understand they are sometimes necessary?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter
                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.