Which is better, a directory 301 redirect or each page in the directory?
-
A customer of mine has a site with lots of articles and they are all quite spammy. They have not been affected by penguin yet so they asked what to do. I suggested losing the articles directory and 301 redirect to either the home page or another important page.
Would a 301 redirect on the entire directory to a single page be the way to go or add redirects from each page within the directory and spread out redirects to various pages in website?
Or do you have a better suggestion?
-
Hi Anthony,
First of all, it is always better to redirect URLs to individual pages than perform sitewide 301 directs. But in this case, if the individual pages aren't getting much traffic, it may not make much difference.
If the articles are truly low quality, and you are worried about a future penalty, you may want to simply remove them without a redirect at all. Serve a 410 HTTP response (gone) instead, and carefully watch your traffic/rankings to make sure nothing drops.
It's most likely Google is simply ignoring these pages. The best defense is to build up an offense of quality material so the bad doesn't outweigh the good.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.
-
No, I would only do this for articles that have a good "inbound" link profile. 301 redirects can slow down the servers, so having too many isn't good either.
-
Thanks MargaritaS, good point on the spammy links and redirecting with them. To clarify, it is the article content that is not well written and just about keyword stuffed, but not terribly. The articles look like someone use a boiler template and just replaced keywords and a sentence here and there and called it a new article.
I was thinking the best thing to do would be to bury the evidence (haha!!) and apply redirects to valued pages. Then I would have them start writing good original content in a blog.
So should I apply 40+ individual redirects? or just redirect whole directory to a single page?
Thanks again for your feedback.
-
Anthony,
This sounds tricky. When you say "spammy" are you talking about their inbound links, or are you referring to the content within those articles? I think there is an important difference there. If you do indeed have articles that look spammy because of the content itself (ex: keyword stuffing) but actually happen to have decent inbound links from reliable sources, then I would say to individually 301 redirect those. If you mean spammy as in the case that the inbound links pointing to these individual articles, then I would say lose them because you don't want to pass those bad links onto this "other" important page on your client's site.
Hope this helps!
MS
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
-
What would you do about this Pillar Page conundrum?
I am re-organizing site structure for an e-commerce site. Here's the problem I have: The product (shipping container) is available to BUY and HIRE in four sizes, for example a 20ft container is one of them. Now, should I have a 20ft container product page for buying -- and also a 20ft container for hiring? I want the container sales and seperate container hire page to be pillar pages, if I don't have any cluster pages for the different container sizes below them it I'm worried it'll just be floating out there in the ocean while the sales page gets all the cluster love. At the same time I don't want to have something that looks like duplicate content with 20ft hire and 20ft sale page. Any ideas please?
On-Page Optimization | | scjames0 -
Sold Products appear as duplicate pages 'Page Not Found' ???
Hi there, I'm down to just 6 duplicate page warnings but I'm not sure how to deal with this one: Information Page Not Found! http://www.vintageheirloom.com/index.php?route=information/information&information_id=6 My Ecommerce shopping site products are unique, 1 of a kind. So once one product has sold and been delivered we take the product off our website, hence the Information Page Not Found! As I understand when search engines re-index these warnings will drop off but new sold products would replace them. So redirecting seems like hard work and never ending. Is it ok to ignore these warnings? Thanks Mozzers..
On-Page Optimization | | well-its-1-louder0 -
How much juice do you lose in a 301 redirect?
Our site has a number of, shall we say, unoptimized URLs. I would like to change the URLs to be more relevant; if a page is about red widgets, the URL should be www.domain.com/red-widgets.html, right? I'm getting resistance on this, however, based on the belief that you lose something significant when you 301 an old URL to a new one. Now, I know that if you have a long chain of redirects, the spiders will stop following at some point, and that is a huge problem. That wouldn't apply if there's only one step in the chain, however. I've also heard that you lose some link juice in a 301, but I'm unsure how serious that problem actually is. Is it small enough that we'd win out in the long run with better-optimized URLs?
On-Page Optimization | | CMC-SD0 -
Jquery in top of page vs text on bottom page
Is it the best way to use jquery sliders on the top of your page to still get all your text above the fold and score in search engines? for example: http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-conte... is much better to score high ranks in search engines than http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-conte... ?? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | HMK-NL0 -
Better page optimization for specific locations
I have a client that gets great ranking in a certain city mainly because that is their main corporate office and the address and city name is all over the place in their content. I am about to embark on getting them higher ranking in other cities as well and am looking for the best approach to make that possible. My thoughts... 1- create seperate content for the other locations, but the body information would probably end up looking duplicate, but I could be more specific with title, description and content realting to that specific city. 2- add the additional cities to the current content??? Need some expert advice. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | brantwadz0 -
Pages not cached
Sorry for all the questions. I have dozens of article pages that are not cached by google. How can I get them cached?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0 -
Should I include a "|" for better page title SEO results?
I have seen many sites that include the "|" in page titles and was wondering if there is some SEO value in the practice. Example: Product Name | Company Name Instead of: Product Name by Company Name I have not seen any value in it myself other than a good way to avoid stop words. I wanted to make sure. Currently I have the "by" included in the page titles.
On-Page Optimization | | JedHenning0 -
Too many on-page links
I manualy counted the links on my website http://www.commensus.com which came to around 50, but SEO moz says I have over 100 and google isn't seeing them all.
On-Page Optimization | | jawl44630