480,000 Redirects - Is this hurting my SEO? PLEASE HELP!
-
Hello everyone,
I have over 480,000 internal rewrites in my Magento site. The reason I have so many is because I have over 1,500 products on my site and I update inventory every day via Bulk Import Extension. For the first few months I didn't realize that the URL was changing by a single digit every time I imported the .xml with new inventory counts. This of course created thousands and thousands of 404s.
I figured out how to avoid the digit change and then I started redirecting the 404s via a Bulk Rewrite Extension. I managed to rewrite over over 50,000 404s but new ones still pop up every day and there is no end to them in sight.
My traffic is terrible. Only about 40 organics daily. It's been like that for months. I can't get it off the ground and I think it's because of this excessive rewrite and 404 issue.
My question is, does having so many internal rewrites and 404s hurt my SEO efforts?
Would it be better just to start from scratch with a new site, new domain, new everything?
Please help me. I'm going crazy with this. Thank you.
Nico.
-
Hello Nicolas,
You're welcome! I am glad you found the answer helpful. I direct the SEO strategy for seOverflow, and yes we do work with small businesses. Fill out our contact form and we'll be in touch. You can also look into other reputable SEO agencies and freelancers listed here on Moz.com.
Nice site.
-
Thank you Everett. You don't know how much this helps me. I was dreading having to start the site from scratch, so I will continue with the one I have and work on it for as along as it takes. This is the site by the way: http://devilswink.com/
Do you offer SEO consulting services for small businesses in the U.S. Everret?
-
Nico,
Great question. Technically speaking, a permanent 301 redirect should stay up indefinitely. However, I have heard more than one Google employee say publicly that they should stay up for "at least a year". At that point I think you can take them down and the destination page will retain the link juice from the old links since Google will have supposedly updated their link graph. However, I don't trust that most Google employees really know what's going on under the hood all the time, and recommend leaving any redirects from pages with external links in place for as long as you have control over it (e.g. you obviously couldn't leave them in place across domains if you sold the old domain).
If the page doesn't have any internal or external links pointing to it you can safely remove the 301 redirect at any time. A year would be plenty.
-
Hi Everett,
Thank you very much for your feedback.
This does put me at ease because I was ready to pull the plug and start a new site from scratch.
Quick question, do old Rewrites disappear after a while? In others words, do they keep getting crawled?
If so, can I deleted them after a few months for example, or after a year, or do search engines need them to exist permanently because other wise they would generate new 404s?
Thank you.
Nico.
-
Hello Nico.
I think I have some good news for you. Unless there is live link to those URLs (internal or external) there is no need to redirect them. In my experience more than 99% (an educated guess) of product pages do not have any external links. So assuming you have not cleaned up your internal linking (if you haven't, you should) there really is no need for the 301 and you can just let it resolve as a 404.
As long as the old URLs return a 404 status code they should be removed from the index within a matter of weeks. However, if they don't have any external or internal links - again, most of those pages probably do not - it may take months for Google to decide to recrawl an indexed page without any link paths to it. Googlebot couldn't just "crawl" its way there, but would have to retrieve the URL from a database just to check it, which would take longer. I have a tested and recommended solution to this issue, which can be found here on the Moz.com blog.
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks0 -
Help Center/Knowledgebase effects on SEO: Is it worth my time fixing technical issues on no-indexed subdomain pages?
We're a SaaS company and have a pretty extensive help center resource on a subdomain (help.domain.com). This has been set up and managed over a few years by someone with no knowledge of SEO, meaning technical things like 404 links, bad redirects and http/https mixes have not been paid attention to. Every page on this subdomain is set to NOT be indexed in search engines, but we do sometimes link to help pages from indexable posts on the main domain. After spending time fixing problems on our main website, our site audits now flag almost solely errors and issues on these non-indexable help center pages every week. So my question is: is it worth my time fixing technical issues on a help center subdomain that has all its pages non-indexable in search engines? I don't manage this section of the site, and so getting fixes done is a laborious process that requires going through someone else - something I'd rather only do if necessary.
Technical SEO | | mglover19880 -
Schema for Banks and SEO
I'm researching Schema opportunities for a bank, but besides the shema markup available today (like bankorcreditunion) and developments with FIBO, I can find no answer as to the effect of tagging interest rates and such in terms of SERP/CTR performance or visibility. Does anyone have a case study to share or some insight on the matter?
Technical SEO | | Netsociety0 -
301 redirect Question
Hi all, I have a client who has a domain lets say www.xyz.de which is redirected 301 to www.zyx.de. Now they're working on a relaunch and they want to use the www.xyz.de as their origibnal doman after that. So, at the end the www.zyx.de - which is indexed by Google - should be redirected to www.xyz.de. It vice versa. So the redirect becomes the original and the original becomes the redirect 😕 Is there anything we have to care off? Or will that run into the hell? Thanx. Seb.
Technical SEO | | TheHecksler0 -
.htaccess redirect question
Hi guys and girls Please forgive me for being an apache noob, but I've been trawling for a while now and i can't seem to find a definitive guide for my current scenario. I've walked into a but of a cluster$%*! of a job, to rescue a horribly set up site. One of many, many problems is that they have 132 302redirects set up. Some of these are identical pages but http-https, others are the same but https-http and some are redirects to different content pages with http-http. A uniform redirecting of http to https is not an option so I'm looking to find out the best practice for reconfiguring these 302s to 301s within .htaccess? Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | craig.gto0 -
301 redirects
At the moment it's possible to access the home page of my website via two different urls, with and without www. and you've told me that this can be resolved with Canonicalization and a 301 redirect. Do I do this with my web hosting package or in my html pages? If I can't do it with my web host (1&1) then is there an idiot's guide of how to do it yourself? I've also got both the domain vamospaella.co.uk and vamospaella.com. Is it better to have one of these redirecting to the other for UK traffic (at the moment .co.uk redirects to .com) Thanks
Technical SEO | | melissa10 -
What is SEO impact of redirecting from domain to https appspot domain ?
Our site is hosted on google and is fully https. But since google's limitation is that all https needs to be on the appspot domain, we are redirecting users from our website to the appspot domain. What is the impact of this on SEO?
Technical SEO | | incandescent0 -
301 redirect Issues
my clients site is www.greenbayharvest.co.uk When you enter that URL it redirects to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop, dont ask why, thats the way they set it up and thats what im stuck with. So, how do i resolve the 301 issue here. we want all things to point to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk, in terms of SEO but does the fact that there is a redirect going to /shop make this an issue? we appear to have: www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop www.greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop all these URL's go to the same same page so what is the best way to correct this? thanks for any help on this Lee
Technical SEO | | IPIM0