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
-
For URLs that require login, should our redirect be 301 or 302?
We have a login required section of our website that is being crawled and reporting as potential issues in Webmaster Tools. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is - is it to make URLs requiring a login noindex/nocrawl? Right now, we have them 302 redirecting to the login page, since it's a temporary redirect, it seems like it isn't the right solution. Is a 301 better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alecfwilson0 -
Keep Pages with Old Dates?
We have a tourism related site. We list annual events. Right now the URL extension includes the year. I assume it is better to keep the same page and update the dates, thereby keeping any links, ranking trust and authority we built. Is that the best strategy by updating the event info with the new dates? I would assume with a new page for the new year we would be starting over again and would have too much similar content and link diffusion. And in the future are we better off not including the year in the URL extension?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ebtec0 -
Redirecting Pages from site A to site B
Hi, I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B). To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B. What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A? What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
301 canonical'd pages?
I have an ecommerce site with many different URLs with the same product. Let's say the product is a hat. It's in: a a) mysite.com/products/hat b) mysite.com/collections/head-ware/hat c) mysite.com/collections/stuff-to-wear-on-your-head/hat Right now, A is the canonical page for B and C. I want to clean up my site, so that every product only has ONE unique URL, which is linked to from all the collections. So B and C URL will be broken. Is it necessary that I 301 them if they were already canonical'd? Based on the number of products I have, I would have to 301 1000+ URLs. I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do to avoid getting penalized. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0 -
Is it a problem to have too many 301 redirects within your site
my website is translated into 10+ languages, but our news articles are often only published in 1-2 languages. Currently, URLs are created in the unpublished news languages that then 301 redirect the user to main news page since the content doesnt exist in that language. Is this implementation okay or is there a preferred method we should be using so that we don't have a large number of pages on the site with redirects? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
How to 301 redirect all URLs with /? in?
I want to redirect all URLs that have /? in it. Indexed in Google is a bunch of urls lik: mysite.com/?674764 mysite.com/?rtf8y78 I want all these URLs to be redirected to my home page. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
301 Redirect how to get those juices flowing
HI Guys Following on from my previous posts i have still not got my rankings back, http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking i am beginning to think that i do have a underlying issue in the site which is restricting me My old site www.economyleasinguk.co.uk was moved to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk, as mentioned the 301 seemed to go really well and all pages updated within 48 hours, however over 5 months on and the juice from the old site is still not pushed over and i hardly rank at all for anything. here are a list of things i have tried 1:Swapped the original 301 which was PHP for an Htaccess 2: added canonical tag to all pages 3: Turned on internal links as per this post by Everett Sizemore http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well number 3 was only done 5 days ago and initially bot traffic was immense, and may need a bit more time to see any results. I still think i have another underlying issue due to the below reasons 1: Page rank on home page is one but inner pages mixture of 1, 2 and 3 sporadically 2: If I copy text from home page no results 3: Open site explorer still has the old site at with a PA of 60 compared to 42 for the new site 4: Checked server logs and Google is visiting old site 5: Header responses are all correct for the canonicals and see no chaining of the 301’s 6: All pages are do follow and no robots restrictions 7: site:has only in the last few days removed the old site from the index naturally it could be that its just a matter of time however 5 months for a 301 is a very long time and 80% traffic loss is immense I would really appreciate it if someone can give the site a once over and see if i have missed anything obvious. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kellymandingo0