Time sensitive: HELP! We are having a problem doing a 301 redirect.....what can we do instead?
-
Our website has dynamic URLs and we are moving to another server/platform. 301 redirects is looking like a highly unlikely solution. A 3rd party company is handling the back-end of the website which they say works more like a "search engine" than a traditional website. Maybe that explains why they're having a hard time with the 301 redirects.
Worst case scenario: we can't use the 301 redirect.
What else can we do? We are considering "Indicate your canonical (preferred) URLs by including them in a Sitemap" as Google describes here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066#2. I'm wondering if this method only applies to duplicate content........and what would happen once the old website results in a 404 page......
HELP! We need to cross over to the new platform as soon as possible.
-
We definitely have a comprehensive link list in hand!
-
Of course, if anyone else out there in the SEOMoz community want to chime in, I'm open to any thoughts, suggestions, and help.
-
We're accepting private questions until next Friday, and will answer all that we get. It may take a couple to a few days for a response, since everyone is trying to get in their last private question, but it's probably the best option for your right now.
-
Awesome - thanks! I was hesitant if I should do a private question since it's being shut down soon. But thanks for the "go" signal. I'll send it right away.
-
This might be a bit of a tough one to answer without details about the site. You may want to consider asking this in private Q&A where you can give URLs and more details without the public seeing.
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
-
Can anyone help me diagnose an indexing/sitemap issue on a large e-commerce site?
Hey guys. Wondering if someone can help diagnose a problem for me. Here's our site: https://www.flagandbanner.com/ We have a fairly large e-commerce site--roughly 23,000 urls according to crawls using both Moz and Screaming Frog. I have created an XML sitemap (using SF) and uploading to Webmaster Tools. WMT is only showing about 2,500 urls indexed. Further, WMT is showing that Google is indexing only about 1/2 (approx. 11,000) of the urls. Finally (to add even more confusion), when doing a site search on Google (site:) it's only showing about 5,400 urls found. The numbers are all over the place! Here's the robots.txt file: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webrocket
Allow: /
Disallow: /aspnet_client/
Disallow: /httperrors/
Disallow: /HTTPErrors/
Disallow: /temp/
Disallow: /test/ Disallow: /i_i_email_friend_request
Disallow: /i_i_narrow_your_search
Disallow: /shopping_cart
Disallow: /add_product_to_favorites
Disallow: /email_friend_request
Disallow: /searchformaction
Disallow: /search_keyword
Disallow: /page=
Disallow: /hid=
Disallow: /fab/* Sitemap: https://www.flagandbanner.com/images/sitemap.xml Anyone have any thoughts as to what our problems are?? Mike0 -
Moving to https with a bunch of redirects my programmer can't handle
Hi Mozzers, I referred a client of mine (last time) to a programmer that can transition their site from http to https. They use a wordpress website and currently use EPS Redirects as a plugin that 301 redirects about 400 pages. Currently, the way EPS redirects is setup (as shown in the attachment) is simple: On the left side you enter your old url, and on the the right side is the newly 301'd url. But here's the issue, since my client made the transition to https, the whole wordpress backend is setup that way as well. What this means is, if my client finds another old http url that he wants to redirect, this plugin only allows them to redirect https to https. As of now, all old http to https redirects STILL work even though the left side of the plugin switched all url's to a default HTTPS. But my client is worried the next plugin update he will lose all http to https redirects. While asking our programmer to add all 400 redirects to .htaccess, he states that's too many redirects and could slow down the website. Well, we don't want to lose all 400 301's and jeopardize our SEO. Question: what does everyone suggest as an alternative solution/plugin to redirect old http urls to https and future https to https urls? Thank you all! Ol8km
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Soft 404 error for a big, longstanding 301-redirected page
Hi everyone, Years ago, we acquired a website that had essentially 2 prominent homepages - one was like example.com and the other like example.com/htm... They served the same purpose basically, and were both very powerful, like PR7 and often had double listings for important search phrases in Google. Both pages had amassed considerable powerful links to them. About 4 years ago, we decided to 301 redirect the example.com/htm page to our homepage to clean up the user experience on our site and also, we hoped, to make one even stronger page in serps, rather than two less strong pages. Suddenly, in the past couple weeks, this example.com/htm 301-ed page started appearing in our Google Search Console as a soft 404 error. We've never had a soft 404 error before now. I tried marking this as resolved, to see if the error would return or if it was just some kind of temporary blip. The error did return. So my questions are:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R
1. Why would this be happening after all this time?
2. Is this soft 404 error a signal from Google that we are no longer getting any benefit from link juice funneled to our existing homepage through the example.com/htm 301 redirect? The example.com/htm page still has considerable (albeit old) links pointing to it across the web. We're trying to make sense of this soft 404 observation and any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Eric0 -
Order and multiple match when 301 redirect ?
Hi, I'm migrating a single domain to a multiple domain for each language, using apache redirections: Redirect 301 /partners http://www.itris-automation.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2MSens
Redirect 301 /partner-si http://www.itris-automation.com/system-integrators-partners
Redirect 301 /partner-institute http://www.itris-automation.com/institutional-partners
Redirect 301 /fr/ http://www.itris-automation.fr/
Redirect 301 /fr/support http://www.itris-automation.fr/support
Redirect 301 /privacy?lang=fr http://www.itris-automation.fr/politique-de-confidentialite Redirect 301 /de/plc-converter http://www.itris-automation.de/plc-converter
Redirect 301 /de/services http://www.itris-automation.de/
Redirect 301 /de/plc-quality http://www.itris-automation.de/sps-qualitat .... However it doesn't work properly: For example automationsquare.com/privacy?lang=fr redirect to http://www.itris-automation.com/privacy instead of http://www.itris-automation.fr/politique-de-confidentialite Does the order of the redirect has an influence? Am I missing something? I've seen that the command [L] can be useful to avoid mismatch? Thanks, Best, Benoit.0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
Effect Of Restoring Old Website After Implementing 301 Redirects
After redesigning my old Drupal website and launching a new "improved" Wordpress version the new version is performing badly. Ranking is poor and conversions don't occur. I realize that my new design is bad (no call to action, poor structure, text heavy). New business inquiries have ceased. The site contains 450 pages. After spending $25,000 and a year of my life I see the new version is not an improvement! What would be the effect of reinstating the old version of the site and doing 301 redirects back to it? Would the old rankings be restored? I need to decide whether I should revert or focus on fixing flaws in the improved design. Any thoughts?? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
I can't help but think something is wrong with my SEO
So we re-launched our site about a month ago, and ever since we've seen a dramatic drop in search results (probably due to some errors that were made) when changing servers and permalink structure. But, I can't help but think something else is at play here. When we write something, I can check 24 hours later, and if I copy the Title verbatim, but we don't always show up in SERPs. In fact, I looked at a post today, and the meta description showing is not the same, but when I check the source code, it's right. What shows up in Google: http://d.pr/i/jGJg What's actually in the source code: http://d.pr/i/p4s8 Why is this happening? Website is The Tech Block
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0 -
301 redirect for duplicate content
Hey, I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc. The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:- http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino I know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:- redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed. Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls? Any help would be most gratefully received. Thanks. Ade.0