Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site?
-
A client site has thousands of pages with unoptimized urls. I want to change the url structure to make them a little more search friendly.
Many of the pages I want to update have backlinks to them and good PR so I don't want to delete them entirely. If I change the urls on thousands of pages, that means a lot of 301 redirects. Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site?
Thanks,
Dino
-
I've never had a problem on creating a large number of redirects on a site before. It's something that happens quite a bit, for instance if a site is moving to a a site to a new domain or a new CMS, where it can often be very difficult to exactly recreate the same URL structure.
There's no limit to the number of redirects, just the number of hops. If the site had existing redirects in place, you might want to update those existing redirects as well, to point to the new final destination.
-
I'm doing the same thing with a site I'm rebuilding. The page structure is changing to make it more logical to users and hopefully google. I've changed the urls on my site a couple of times over the years and I haven't noticed much change in the short-term and a considerable boost in the long term.
The site I'm building has hundreds of pages with tons of 301 redirects as well.
-
There is some loss in PR with 301 but it's about linking in the future too. Is it easier for someone to link to example.com/red-apples or example.com/?page_id=53.
I personally don't think it's a waste of time and it certainly helps with UX.
-
I do not know how much an optimized url is worth. I also do not know how much link juice would be lost by redirecting. I wasn't aware that any would be lost. If so, then I need to consider if leaving them alone is the best option at this point. Definitely do not want to do more harm than good.
-
You hope to get a tiny bump out of changing the URL ?
But, you are going to waste some linkjuice in redirecting....
and create thousands of htaccess lines that must be processed...
and you are worried that tons of redirects are going to cause a problem....
How much do you think an optmized URL is worth in the search engines?
I don't think that it's worth a whole lot.
-
There won't be any issue. But you need to check with system admin if your server could be able to handle thousands of redirects. Most of the time, reducing duplicates from the current site and using regular expression for 301 redirects will reduce the number of 301 redirects considerably.
-
Simple answer is no, but.....
Make sure that your 301s are not more than 3 redirects from the original post. For example, if you have a page called pageid=44 and it's about red apples, then make sure that the 301 goes to /red-apples (meaning the exact page you want it to go to)
Matt Cutts has a great video on this on WMT.
This should really answer all your questions but if you have any more then please feel free to ask.
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
-
301 Redirects for Multiple Language Sites in htaccess File
Hi everyone, I have a site on a subdomain that has multiple languages set up at the domain level: https://mysite.site.com, https://mysite.site.fr , https://mysite.site.es , https://mysite.site.de , etc. We are migrating to a new subdomain and I am trying to create 301 redirects within the htaccess file, but I am a bit lost on how to do this as it seems you have to go from a relative url to an absolute - which would be fine if I was only doing this for the english site, but I'm not. It doesn't seem like I can go from absolute url to an absolute url - but I could be wrong. I am new to editing the htaccess file - so I could definitely use some advice here. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amberprata0 -
Site structure for location + services pages
We are in the process of restructuring our site and are trying to figure out Google's preference for location pages and services. Let's say we are an auto repair company with lots of locations and each one of them offer some unique services, while other services are offered by all or most other locations. Should we have a global page for each service live with a link to the location page for each shop that offers that service? OR Should we built a unique page about each service for every location as a subfolder of each location (essentially creating a LOT of sub pages because each location has 15-20 services. Which will rank better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
Is it ok to 301 redirect this previously algorithmicly penalised site?
Hi All, Is it OK to 301 redirect site A to site B? Site A: http://goo.gl/P9Zp2y Site B: http://goo.gl/ySDCzb The story - in 2013 site a seemed to be penalised with some kind of anchor text algorithm penalty - SEO couldnt fix, so created site B and turned site A into a holding page with a no follow link to new site. SEO company worked on disavow file etc, implemented in late 2013 301 redirect site A to B in late 2013 - SEO advised to stop 301 about 8 weeks later... This was my fault i didnt realise the implications of a redirect... Stopped the redirect, but too late, as site B dropped in rankings in early 2014 - new disavow files uploaded to both sites, but damage seems done now. No longer have a SEO company, and i would ideally like to 301 redirect site A to B, as it looks messy having a holding page - but wanted to check if SEO would still strongly advise against that? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried: Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links Removed any internal Duplicate Content Removed any broken links Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality No-Followed all outbound links Added any missing title tags changed hosting Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Can Googlebots read canonical tags on pages with javascript redirects?
Hi Moz! We have old locations pages that we can't redirect to the new ones because they have AJAX. To preserve pagerank, we are putting canonical tags on the old location pages. Will Googlebots still read these canonical tags if the pages have a javascript redirect? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
How can I see all the pages google has indexed for my site?
Hi mozers, In WMT google says total indexed pages = 5080. If I do a site:domain.com commard it says 6080 results. But I've only got 2000 pages in my site that should be indexed. So I would like to see all the pages they have indexed so I can consider noindexing them or 404ing them. Many thanks, Julian.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julianhearn0 -
Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled
Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition. In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused. The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!) Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors. Not good, right? So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time. So, with that, I have two questions Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it? Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is? Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K.Walters0 -
Best possible linking on site with 100K indexed pages
Hello All, First of all I would like to thank everybody here for sharing such great knowledge with such amazing and heartfelt passion.It really is good to see. Thank you. My story / question: I recently sold a site with more than 100k pages indexed in Google. I was allowed to keep links on the site.These links being actual anchor text links on both the home page as well on the 100k news articles. On top of that, my site syndicates its rss feed (Just links and titles, no content) to this page. However, the new owner made a mess, and now the site could possibly be seen as bad linking to my site. Google tells me within webmasters that this particular site gives me more than 400K backlinks. I have NEVER received one single notice from Google that I have bad links. That first. But, I was worried that this page could have been the reason why MY site tanked as bad as it did. It's the only source linking so massive to me. Just a few days ago, I got in contact with the new site owner. And he has taken my offer to help him 'better' his site. Although getting the site up to date for him is my main purpose, since I am there, I will also put effort in to optimizing the links back to my site. My question: What would be the best to do for my 'most SEO gain' out of this? The site is a news paper type of site, catering for news within the exact niche my site is trying to rank. Difference being, his is a news site, mine is not. It is commercial. Once I fix his site, there will be regular news updates all within the niche we both are in. Regularly as in several times per day. It's news. In the niche. Should I leave my rss feed in the side bars of all the content? Should I leave an achor text link on the sidebar (on all news etc.) If so: there can be just one keyword... 407K pages linking with just 1 kw?? Should I keep it to just one link on the home page? I would love to hear what you guys think. (My domain is from 2001. Like a quality wine. However, still tanked like a submarine.) ALL SEO reports I got here are now Grade A. The site is finally fully optimized. Truly nice to have that confirmation. Now I hope someone will be able to tell me what is best to do, in order to get the most SEO gain out of this for my site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | richardo24hr0