Redoing a site - 404 redirect or 301 redirect
-
I'm redoing a website, should i 404 the old pages, or 301 redirect to the main page? what is better? (around 100 pages)
-
Hi Felix,
If there is going to be a relevant, equivalent page on the new site, by all means a 301 redirect is best. If the old content is really not going to have a parallel page on the new site, then a 404 would be fine. Just keep in mind that 404s can frustrate users who are trying to access your site. It would be best to create a friendly, customized and humanized 404 error page if you intend on allowing old pages to 404. Even if 404s arent in the plan, you're bound to have some eventually so I'd strongly suggest creating a custom 404 page anyway.
I agree with cardiganMedia's comment about using 301 redirects for any pages that have built up any page rank or inbound links. Check them in OSE and make sure you preserve the authority the old site had by making sure to 301 redirect high authority pages to their equivalents on the new site.
Good luck! I hope these are helpful suggestions.
Dana
-
If the site ranks well and there's any way to preserve the present URL structure, that would be your best bet. If that's not possible, 301 the old URLs to the new applicable pages.
You can do this via .htaccess like this:
301 redirect /old-permalink-here http://new-full-url-goes-here
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
-
Rel canonical tag on a single page site?
I have a wordpress theme site which essentially is all in 1 page. Do I need to use rel-canonical tag? It would just loop?
On-Page Optimization | | graftene0 -
How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect
Hi all I hope that someone can help.... How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect The url in question is: How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/search/Category/luxury_hotels_venues_uk_wedding_venues/exclusive_use_venues/letter/c http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/location/uk-england/bedfordshire-weddings/franklin-park http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/deal/location/uk-england/chorley-weddings/curtis-bay etc, going to http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business the above is just a few examples, google webmaster is showing over 8.000 404 page not found errors. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Taiger0 -
Redirection
Hi all I have these domains active:
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr
www.piensapiensa.es
http://piensapiensa.es which redirects to www.piensapiensa.es via webmastertools
http://piensapiensa.com
www.piensapiensa.com which redirects to http://piensapiensa.com via webmastertools.
I want the last three items to redirect to www.piensapiensa.es Here is part of the code of the htaccess file that I have until now:
Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.piensapiensa.es [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.piensapiensa.es/$1 [R=301,L] Thanks in advanced.0 -
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 -
"irrelevant pages of a site"
Hi there! Some pages of my site like "contact" or "registration": Should they have a title and a description tag? They are pages that I don't want them to be shown in the SERPs....Could I be penalized by google If I don't do so? The SEOMOZ crawling tool warms me about this issue (to short titles, no meta-description tags....) Many thanks
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Pages that show in Open Site Explorer that show as 404's in search
When I use Site Explorer to find our Top Pages there are a whole series of pages like this: http://www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/mybestbets/mybestbets-culture.html which I think were created when we had a Bulletin Board on the site. Although they are showing in the Top Pages results when you visit the page you get the following error message: HTTP Error 404.0 - Not Found The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. What implications result from these pages still showing in results and what action should we take without messing up our search rankings? Any advice would be gratefully received.
On-Page Optimization | | NileCruises0 -
Duplicate content on area specific sites
I have created some websites for my company Dor-2-Dor and there is a main website where all of the information across the board is on (www.dor2dor.com) but I also have area specific sites which are for our franchisees who run certain areas around the country (www.swansea.dor2dor.com or www.oxford.dor2dor.com) The problem is that the content that is on a lot of the pages is the same on all of them for instance our faq's page, special offers etc. What is the best way to get these pages to rank well and not have the duplicate content issues and be ranked down by search engines? Any help will be greatly received.
On-Page Optimization | | D2DWeb0 -
Question regarding two versions of a page (redirect)
At one point in my SEO journey I had noticed some duplicate issues going on in Google webmaster tools (I could have been reading it wrong.) It looked like WMT was saying I had 2 versions of some of pages...it looked like pages that ended in a '/' ranking differently than pages that have no slash at the end. So I downloaded the redirect plugin and redirected many non / pages to the page that end with the "/". This was probably a mistake. but I'm trying to clean all of that up. (I'm also noticing that SEOMoz tools tells me my site has many, many redirected url's. I'm not sure why. I was looking at http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/pages?site=noahsdad.com%2F this morning at my top pages and it shows 2 versions (one being redirected) of the page about my son who was born with Down syndrome. (Noahsdad.com/story and Noahsdad.com/story/) I don't know if I've built rankings for those pages separately and it would now hurt me if I did away with the redirect. I'm not sure why I did the redirects (I must have read something online somewhere.) I'm wondering if someone wouldn't mind looking at the report and letting me know what the best way to 'clean' this stuff up...Should I go into the redirect software and delete all of the redirects where the non / page is being redirected to the / page? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | NoahsDad0