Help with redirects
-
Our travel company used to maintain a set of country destination guides on our site, under the www.oursite.com/destinations/country folder path. Because we offer tours all over the world, we used these pages as high-level guides to each country so a prospect could get a sense of the highlights of those destinations. These pages operated as landing pages too. Unfortunately the pages became stale and unfocused, and we decommissioned them. In order to bring them down, we put a 301 redirect on these URLs, pointing them to a faceted-search page that showed all of our tours to that country, with URLs: www.oursite.com/trips/country. These faceted-search pages were pulling double duty as both search pages and landing pages, which isn't ideal (from a users perspective).
We are now in the process of redoing our search function and we'll need to move the search URLs off /trips/ and onto /search/. Within this transition, we are going to re-launch destination guides, and I think the best place for them will be back on the old /destinations/ subfolder. So, a few moving parts here.
My question: Do you see problems with reversing the redirect path completely? Ie. where we currently redirect /destinations/country to /trips/country, we are now proposing to redirect /trips/country to /destinations/country. Our concern in this equation is that, over the last few years, we've built up significant link volumes and equity to the /trips/ pages, and we don't want to lose that.
-
I'll put the content/user considerations aside for a moment, since I can't comment on content I can't see, and focus on the technical SEO aspect. You could reverse the 301-redirect, and send it back to the old page, but I'll be honest - it's likely to take a while for Google to process it. They're likely to be confused by the reversal.
It's a tough call, but what I think I'd do in this case is the following. Let's say the original URL is (A), the "new" URL is (B). Currently, you're 301-redirecting (A) --> (B), and now you're going to put the content back on (A)...
STEP 1
Remove the 301-redirects
Rel-canonical (B) --> (A)
Rel-canonical (A) --> (A)Change the signals from a 301-redirect to rel-canonical may help nudge Google. It will also allow you to place a self-referencing canonical on (A), which could help offset the old 301-redirect.
STEP 2
Once the URLs are cleared, put a 301-redirect back in place from (B) --> (A)You could also just leave the canonicals, if they seem to be working. These situations often require some monitoring, to make sure Google is processing the new directives correctly. Give it time, though - don't panic and change things every week, or you could make the situation worse.
-
I agree with Frederico. By setting up 301's you'll lose just a little Pagerank, but not much.
If you are already moving the search pages to the /search/ directory, do you need to put the destination guides into a new directory or could you keep them in the /trips/ directory?
The things I'd be thinking about is...
- Is there a user experience component to this?
- Does the change need to be made for internal development reasons?
- Will the change help with search results?
- Is it worth the time and effort to make the change?
Keep in mind that exact match and partial match URLs don't help with search results anywhere near as much as they used to.
Hope that helps.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
The redirects will cause a small dilution of the pagerank on those pages, just the same amount as having a single link in the trips/country to destinations/country.
But forget about the pagerank, do you expect to get more search traffic from search if the URL says trips or destinations? It all comes down to what you want achieve. The URL you have now doesn't look bad at all, and you can probably keep it by tweaking the code a bit without redirecting all pages to the destination/country page, so again, study the pros/cons:
Pros:
- Keyword matching on search?
Cons:
- Pagerank dilution
- Shorter URLs (trips)
- Keyword matching on search?
- ...
I only suggest to implement redirects if they really offer a better option, but in this case, you will end up with the same result with less pagerank, and longer URLs...
Just my 2 cents
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
-
Index Page Redirect to Home Page? Best Practices...
Hi, I am wondering what the best practice is when a site has an index page and a home page? I have two pages, listed below, and want to know if I should 301 redirect my "index" page to my standard home page. The home page is where I would like all traffic to fall on for our website. Additionally, I used the rel=canonical tag years ago on the index page to indicate that the home page is the main content. Home Page - https://www.1099pro.com/ (PA 45) Home Page Canonical: rel="canonical" href="https://www.1099pro.com/"/> Index Page - https://www.1099pro.com/index.asp (PA - 33) Index Page Canonical: rel="canonical" href="https://www.1099pro.com/"/> It seems to me that there is some extra juice that could be passed to my home page (which is the page that ranks highly for our major keywords) by 301 redirecting the index page. Is there any reason why I should not do that? Really appreciate any help - especially with extra explanations - for the simple minded like me ;)! -Michael
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
Https Implementation - Weird Redirection After Putting 's' in http://
Hi Mozers, I have come across some websites with their https version going to a totally different website. For example, http://www.samplesite1.com will load fine but when the protocol is changed to https (https://www.samplesite1.com) it will go to a total different domain say, https://www.samplesite2.com How does this happen, in technical sense? In the warning from browser, it says the the security certificate is from the other website but I would like to understand how this happens and how it impacts SEO. I seem to be not able to understand the relationship of this error and SEO impact. Thanks in advance for your response. Malika
Web Design | | Malika10 -
How long should an old site redirecting to a new site remain activated on a server?
Once I switch a site to a new domain (with links to corresponding/relative pages), will I have to keep the old site live forever for those links to work, or how long should I wait before I inactivate the old site on our server?
Web Design | | jwanner0 -
How to Redirect Old Domain to a New Domain?
One of my clients has chosen a new domain for her website so we will redirect the old domain to the new. I understand that once redirected, most of the authority built up over the years for the old domain will pass through to the new domain. Is this correct? Can this be done through the Wordpress dashboard, say with a plugin perhaps? I have a plugin called 404 Redirected I was going to try to use for this purpose. Finally, the client has other domains (5 total) she has used for one reason or another. She wants to consolidate all of them and have everything redirected to her new domain. Do you see any downside to this in terms of crawling, Google trust and authority? I know there are some user experience issues to deal with, but we're addressing those. I just don't want to do anything that may cause Google not to trust the new domain. Thanks, Dino
Web Design | | Dino640 -
How to rewrite/redirect a folder name with .htaccess
I have a folder in my site that I want to rename. I don’t want to just rewrite the URL and keep my old folder name, I want to change the folder name and then do whatever is necessary with .hataccess to not lose search engine rankings. The folder name I want to change has a space in it and also is misspelled (whoops x2) Example. Mysite.com/old foldr/page.html Mysite.com/newfolder/page.html How would I go about doing this with .htaccess? Do I just switch the folder name on my server and then set up a redirect, or do I do a rewrite? Sorry now familiar with the terms or .htacces. Thanks all
Web Design | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
Help needed on URL structures
I am busy structuring URL's for a client and an issue i have come across is as follows: i have a URL that is a long one, we cant remove words in it so the question is which one is better structurally: root/courses/businessmanagementandadministration.aspx or root/courses/business-management-and-administration.aspx please help.
Web Design | | nick_pageone0 -
How to redirect special pages to new domain?
Hello. I have 2 websites in diffrent category and i want to move some of my visitor that arrived in specific page of doamin1 (url like this: http://example.com/pages/.........)to root of domain 2.
Web Design | | vahidafshari450 -
Footer Links for Design Shops - Do They Help or Hurt?
I work on SEO for a number of clients at our agency, including our in-house SEO for our own website. I use Open Site Explorer all the time to analyze my competition in the SERPs and try to gain links from this insight. However, I've noticed a number of agencies and design shops that place a link in the footer of websites they've designed and created. For example "Site design by ABC Agency (hyperlinked to the agency's home page). Or I've seen small logos or graphics that link to the designer's site and use the "alt tag" to get stronger anchor text. From a design perspective, I don't care for this, but as a SEO...I can see why. We've designed a number of websites and have more in the pipeline, but have not used this tactic before. It seems like an irrelevant link from a content/user standpoint, however, it seems to work for a lot of agencies and design shops. Any input from the SEOmoz community would be great. Is it a short-lived strategy? Does it help or hurt your link-building and "rapport" with Google, Bing, Yahoo? Thanks everyone.
Web Design | | PHDL0