I have altered a url as it was too long. Do I need to do a 301 redirect for the old url?
-
Crawl diagnostics has shown a url that is too long on one of our sites. I have altered it to make it shorter.
Do I now need to do a 301 redirect from the old url?
I have altered a url previously and the old url now goes to the home page - can't understand why.
Anyone know what is best practice here?
Thanks
-
Good stuff Steve, hope it all goes well. Just give me a shout if you have any problems.
-
Thanks for the swift response Tom - much appreciated.
Will add the 301 now
Cheers
-
Probably would be a good idea to 301 redirect the old URL for a few reasons.
If you've yet to update your sitemap, the old URL might still be being crawled by Google, resulting in a jump in 404 errors. Not the end of the world, but a bit messy.
Second, users might have the page bookmarked away - adding a 301 will ensure they're taken to the relevant page and also do not hit a 404 (which could effect the user journey, or even halt it).
And finally, you may external links to the old URL. Google will also report this as well in WMT, but the links on external sites could be very important. Rather than changing the URL on those domains, add the 301 to ensure that any strength from the link is still being passed on, and also if any user (particularly new users) comes across the link, they're not taken to a 404 page, which is enough to put any potential client off.
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 Domain Redirect from old domain with HTTPS
My domain was indexed with HTTPS://WWW. now that we redirected it the certificate has been removed and if you try to visit the old site with https it throws an obvious error that this sites not secure and the 301 does not happen. My question is will googles bot have this issue. Right now the domain has been in redirection status to the new domain for a couple months and the old site is still indexed, while the new one is not ranking well for half its terms. If that is not causing the problem can anyone tell me why would the 301 take such a long time. Ive double and quadruple checked the 301's and all settings to ensure its being redirected properly. Yet it still hasn't fully redirected. Something is wrong and my clients ready to ditch the old domain we worked on for a good amount of time. backgorund:About 30 days ago we found some redirect loops .. well not loop but it was redirecting from old domain to the new domain several times without error. I removed the plugins causing the multi redirects and now we have just one redirect from any page on the old domain to the new https version. Any suggestions? This is really frustrating me and I just can't figure it out. My only answer at this point is wait it out because others have had this issue where it takes up to 2 months to redirect the domain. My only issue is that this is the first domain redirect out of many that have ever taken more than a week or three.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Old url is still indexed
A couple of months ago we requested a change of address in Search console. The new, correct url is already indexed. Yet when we search the old url (with site:www.) we find that the old url is still indexed. in Google Webmaster Tools the amount of indexed pages is reduced to 1. Is there another way to remove old urls?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Max Number of 301 Redirections?
Hi, We currently made a re-design of a website and we changed all our urls to make them shorter. I made more than 300 permanent redirections but plenty more are needed since WMT is showing some more 404s from old urls that I hadn't seen because they were dynamic. The question is, please, is there a limit? I think we have more than 600 already. We don't want to create a php commando to redirect all the old ones to our home, we are redirecting them to their correspondent url. By the way, Im doing them with the 301 method in .htaccess. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Need 301 Advice with a Recovered URL from a Domain Typosquatter
I am new to a SMB and someone bought the plural version of our domain back in 2005 and has yet to let it expire. The domain was just renewed for another year so we finally decided to contact a lawyer and go through the domain name dispute process. This seems like a pretty cut an dry case and the lawyer is very confident that we'll have the domain within 30-40 days. Currently the plural version domain 303s to spammy web pages, shows shady ads and is just a malicious looking page in general. I am not savvy enough to know the exact complexities of what's happening on the backend but it's spammy. Knowing the history of the plural version domain, how would you treat it after we acquire it? Obviously, I wouldn't want to put our site in jeopardy by 301ing the plural version of our URL to our current healthy site but at the same time many customers might go to that domain by accident so eventually I'd like to 301 it. If it's any help, the plural version has a robots.txt that prevent G from crawling it..thank you in advance for your guidance!
Technical SEO | | ssimarketing0 -
Importance of 301 Redirects
Hello, I have been brought in at the last minute to consult for an e-commerce client who is about to relaunch their website. The site currently receives 8000 visits a month, 3100 of which are from organic search. They have a few thousand product pages. The web development firm they are using is changing all of the old product page urls and using 'search engine friendly' urls for the new site, which is expected to launch in a few weeks. However, they did not/are not planning on including 301 redirects from the old URLs. Other than simply stating 'this will be bad for your SEO', what would be a correct way of explaining to the client how much of a problem it will be if their new site launches without 301s. For example, is this a big enough issue to delay the launch of the site / get in a contract dispute with the web developer?
Technical SEO | | stageagent0 -
Do I need Redirects?
I've recently changed my old static website to a WordPress one. I'd like to know what do do (if anything) about my old links. For example a page on my old site was: www.iainmoran.com/corporate-magician.html - now I'm using WordPress, the url is:
Technical SEO | | iainmoran
www.iainmoran.com/corporate-magician/ My question is, do I need to set up redirects on these old pages (which no longer exist or will Google eventually re-crawl my site and update the links themselves? I'm using the Yoast SEO Plugin for WP and it creates a sitemap, which of course will have my new pages on. But don't want Google to penalise me for having broken links, etc. Many thanks, Iain.0 -
301 Redirects
Hi, I ran the seomox link report and see that I have an entry for our home page (http://www.trophycentral.com/) and http://www.trophycentral.com/index.html. The index is shown with a 301 redirect. Does this mean that a redirect is already in place to http://www.trophycentral.com/? I want to ensure our traffic is not being split between the two urls, but not sure how to confirm this. Thanks! <colgroup><col width="294"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="81"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="80"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="77"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="214"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards
| URL | HTTP Status | Total Links | Page Authority | Number of Linking Root Domains |
| http://www.trophycentral.com/ | 200 | 5746 | 53 | 244 |
| http://www.trophycentral.com/index.html | 301 | 5123 | 42 | 4 |1 -
How do 301 redirects affect rankings?
Scenario: example.com/red-shoes gets 301 redirected to example.com/brown-boots because we have stopped selling red shoes and now only sell brown boots (which is a fairly new page with no authority). the red-shoes page ranked well for "red shoes" and "footwear". Will Google still index and show the red-shoes url in the SERPs? Will the "red shoes" and "footwear" keywords still rank well? Or does the redirected/new boots page need to properly support these keywords? The boots page has inherited the juice from the shoes page, but how does it help the boots page rank well? Only for keywords that both pages targeted, like a general "footwear" type keyword? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | akim260