301 or 410 a Pop Up Window with a New URL
-
I asked our development team to 301 Pop Up window URLs back to their complimentary product page as we've changed URLs for all of our Pop Ups. We have 100,000s of products on our site, so the number of rewrites are becoming unmanageable and slows server response times (their words).
They want to kill these 301's after a prescribed amount of time.
Should they just become 410s, leave them as 404s (current state), or insist that we keep them as 301's?
-
Right on.
Yeah, I would just leave them as 404s and if they are indexed by Google, they will eventually be removed from the index.
Mike
-
Thank you both for the quick responses.
Mike G., your understanding is correct. It was referred to me from the dev team to redirect the old pop up url to the product page. Seemed a little off to me, but they were willing to do it until they realized how many redirects would be involved.
There isn't much linking to the pop ups to worry about.
Sounds like leaving them as a 404 is the best solution?
-
I am a little confused by your question, but let me see if I understand what you are saying:
You have a product page, then you have any accompanying pop-up for it, and you just changed all of the URLs for the pop-ups and the old pop-up URLs are redirecting to the product page?
Were you getting a lot of people linking to the pop-up URLs? That is really the only reason you'd need to 301 them (in my opinion). If not, then ONLY redirect the popular pop-up URLs. This would definitely help with load times.
And your dev team is probably correct. If you have 100,000 lines of redirects, that is going to slow things down. Depending on your environment, you could potentially set up rules that would redirect things; however, it may be difficult depending on your URL structure/pattern.
As far as 410 or 404, a 410 usually alerts Google to remove the URL from its index faster than a 404, but in the end they essentially work the same.
Hope this helps,
Mike
-
Are the pop-ups receiving any decent organic traffic or do they have good, viable links pointing at them?
If not, then remove any internal links pointing to the pop-up and 404 them.
If they do then I would say 301s are the preferred method.
A possible alternative might be placing canonical tags on those pages and giving visitors a link to the correct page.
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
-
Redirects, 301's & 404's
I have tons of links that I have had added a redirect to after creating my companies new website. Is it bad to have all these 301s? How do I permanently redirect those links? Also, on Google Search Console it's telling me I have 1,000+ excluded links. Is this bad? Will it negatively affect me? Is this something to do with my sitemap? Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | sammecooper0 -
301 redirecting a previously abused URL
A client previously had their most important landing page at domain.com/example.htm They carried out the sort of link building that was commonplace a few years back (exact match anchors, paid blog links etc) targeting this URL, but they also got a bunch of legitimate decent quality links here. I believe they may have had a number of issues when link quality algo updates were rolled out, so rather than try and get links removed and go through the disavow process they instead decided to abandon this URL, let it 404 and start afresh at domain.com/example.html - updating all internal navigation, XML sitemaps etc. So fast forward to today. What is the best practice for this URL these days do we think? Is it now possible to 301 domain.com/example.htm > domain.com/example.html and recover whatever value may be left here? The argument for not doing so may be that you could pass over the negative metrics associated with the old URL, but would this not be handled by the real-time penguin update and the poor links just devalued rather than actually harming? And could this just be tested - i.e. add in the 301, monitor the impact and if things don't go the way we'd want then just remove the 301 again? Would be keen to get a few opinions on this. TIA
Technical SEO | | Salience_Search_Marketing0 -
Which URL is better?
Hi everyone, Could you please help me with picking out the right URL for my company's website? We are MoonCreate and we make beautiful clothes. Unfortunately, the domain mooncreate.com is not available and I have to choose between mooncreatebrand.com or mooncreatewear.com Which one is better, in your opinion? Look forward to receive your suggestions! Thank you! 🙂
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Http urls on a new https website
Hi, If a site is quite new and setup as https from the beginning why would http variations exist? There are 301 redirects in place from the http to the https variation and also canonical tags pointing back to the http variation? This seems contradictory to me. I'm not sure why the http variations exist at all but they have gone to the trouble of redirecting these to the https variation indicating that it is the variation of choice but at the same time using a canonical tag that indicates the http variation is the original/main url? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MVIreland0 -
301 redirects - one overall redirect or an individual one for each page url
Hi I am working on a site that is to relaunch later on this year - is best practise for the old urls (of which there are thousands) to write a piece of code that will cover all of the urls and redirect them to the new home page or to individually redirect each url to its new counterpart on the new site. I am naturally concerned about user experience on this plus losing our Google love we currently have but am aware of the time it would take to do this individually. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Pday1 -
301 redirect new site design
Hi I'm just setting up some 301 redirects for a new site design about to go live. The old site structure had some 'overview' pages in the urls (without any content) that just 302'd to a sub page. Do i need 301 redirect these overview page urls or since they had no content theres no need and I probably shouldn't or should i ? Also for pages that have no direct equivalent replacement is it still best to 301 to nearest relevant page or just leave it. For example a thank you page that currently shows after user submits email form wont be on new site (since message shows on form page after submission rather than new page). Should i 301 to form page or just leave it ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How to find original URLS after Hosting Company added canonical URLs, URL rewrites and duplicate content.
We recently changed hosting companies for our ecommerce website. The hosting company added some functionality such that duplicate content and/or mirrored pages appear in the search engines. To fix this problem, the hosting company created both canonical URLs and URL rewrites. Now, we have page A (which is the original page with all the link juice) and page B (which is the new page with no link juice or SEO value). Both pages have the same content, with different URLs. I understand that a canonical URL is the way to tell the search engines which page is the preferred page in cases of duplicate content and mirrored pages. I also understand that canonical URLs tell the search engine that page B is a copy of page A, but page A is the preferred page to index. The problem we now face is that the hosting company made page A a copy of page B, rather than the other way around. But page A is the original page with the seo value and link juice, while page B is the new page with no value. As a result, the search engines are now prioritizing the newly created page over the original one. I believe the solution is to reverse this and make it so that page B (the new page) is a copy of page A (the original page). Now, I would simply need to put the original URL as the canonical URL for the duplicate pages. The problem is, with all the rewrites and changes in functionality, I no longer know which URLs have the backlinks that are creating this SEO value. I figure if I can find the back links to the original page, then I can find out the original web address of the original pages. My question is, how can I search for back links on the web in such a way that I can figure out the URL that all of these back links are pointing to in order to make that URL the canonical URL for all the new, duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | CABLES0 -
Blank Canonical URL
So my devs have the canonical URL loaded up on pages automatically, and in most cases this gets done correctly. However we ran across a bug that left some of these blank like so: Does anyone know what effect that would have? I am trying to provide a priority for this so I can say "FIX IT NOW" or "Fix it after the other 'FIX IT NOW' type of items". Let me know if you have any ideas. I just want to be sure I am not telling google that all of these pages are like the home page. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | SL_SEM0