Will I lose traffic from Google for re-directing a page?
-
I’m currently planning to a retire a discontinued product and put a 301 redirect to a related product (although not identical). The thing is, I’m still getting significant traffic from people searching for the old product by name. Would Google send this traffic to the new pages via the re-direct? Is Google likely to display the new page in place of the old page for similar queries or will it serve other content? I’d like to answer this question so that I can decide between the two following approaches:
1) Retiring the old page immediately and putting a 301 redirect to the new related pages. This will have the advantage of transferring the value of any link signals / referring traffic. Traffic will also land on the new pages directly without having to click through from another page. We would have a dynamic message telling users that the old product had been retired depending on whether they had visited out site before.
2) Keep the old product pages temporarily so that we don’t lose the traffic from the search engines. We would then change the old pages to advise users that the old product was now retired, but that we have other products that might solve their problems. When this organic traffic decreases over time, then we will proceed with the re-direct as above. I am worried though that the old product pages might outrank the new product pages.
I’d really appreciate some advice with this. I’ve been reading lots of articles, but it seems like there are different opinions on this. I understand that I will lose between 10% - 15% of page rank as per the Matt Cutts video.
-
Thanks both - it's interesting that there is no 'standard' method, but it makes sense that this would very much depend on the situation.
-
Its a question of relevancy and user experience. If i do a search for "blue widgets" and see your blue widget link in the SERP but get taken to orange doodads instead... well, I'll be disappointed and bounce. That page will eventually stop ranking for "blue widget". So when doing a 301 you should make it as relevant as possible. If your blue widget link redirects to red widgets... well, that's closer. I might still bounce but there's a chance I'll stay to look at the widget. If the blue widget page redirected to "Blue Widget 2.0" then that's about as relevant a 301 as you can have. It will likely continue ranking (though the old link in the SERPs will likely swap out for the new one eventually).
Instead of doing redirects, there's always the option to keep the page up with a discontinued message and offer links to similar products on the page. If you don't want people bouncing because they were redirected to something they weren't expecting but really want to enhance the link equity and rankings of a specific page, you could keep "blue widgets" up with a discontinued message to "blue widget 2.0" and add a rel=canonical tag from blue widget to blue widget 2.0 to pass equity. Eventually the new page will swap for the old one in rankings, it will likely lower bounces caused by being shunted to a page you didn't expect, it gives people time to switch any direct links to the new page, and then after a few months you 301 the old page to the new page.
-
Redirecting the old URL with a 301 redirect will send the users to the new URL. All the link juice from links pointing towards the old URL will also be pointed towards your new URL.
Google will keep the old URL in the index for a while, but it will disappear from the search results in a matter of weeks.
One thing to not though, make sure that users searching for the old product end up on a page that is useful for them. If i'm looking for a blue bicycle and i get redirected to a red bicycle page than it might be a related product, but it's not what i'm searching for.
This harms the user experience and will give users a negative association to your brand.
For each product that you retire you should make a decision between- Redirecting the page to a different URL
- Giving them a custom 404 page
By customizing a 404 page you can help users in a tremendous way if done right. Depending on the situation either of these two choices can be the best one.
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
-
Pages excluded from Google's index due to "different canonicalization than user"
Hi MOZ community, A few weeks ago we noticed a complete collapse in traffic on some of our pages (7 out of around 150 blog posts in question). We were able to confirm that those pages disappeared for good from Google's index at the end of January '18, they were still findable via all other major search engines. Using Google's Search Console (previously Webmastertools) we found the unindexed URLs in the list of pages being excluded because "Google chose different canonical than user". Content-wise, the page that Google falsely determines as canonical instead has little to no similarity to the pages it thereby excludes from the index. False canonicalization About our setup: We are a SPA, delivering our pages pre-rendered, each with an (empty) rel=canonical tag in the HTTP header that's then dynamically filled with a self-referential link to the pages own URL via Javascript. This seemed and seems to work fine for 99% of our pages but happens to fail for one of our top performing ones (which is why the hassle 😉 ). What we tried so far: going through every step of this handy guide: https://moz.com/blog/panic-stations-how-to-handle-an-important-page-disappearing-from-google-case-study --> inconclusive (healthy pages, no penalties etc.) manually requesting re-indexation via Search Console --> immediately brought back some pages, others shortly re-appeared in the index then got kicked again for the aforementioned reasons checking other search engines --> pages are only gone from Google, can still be found via Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines Questions to you: How does the Googlebot operate with Javascript and does anybody know if their setup has changed in that respect around the end of January? Could you think of any other reason to cause the behavior described above? Eternally thankful for any help! ldWB9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SvenRi1 -
Major Landing page removed from Google SERP and replace homepage URL.How do I fix it?
Hi Major Landing page removed from Google SERP and replace homepage URL.How do I fix it? In an SPA website (angularJS), Why it happens?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
Google update this wknd or page title issue?
Hi, I've seen a big ranking drop for many major terms, for a particular site, just on Google. This happened Fri 20th or Sat 21st just gone. I don't see any news on an algorithm update over the weekend.I had changed many of the sites major page title protocols 2 weeks ago but a) I would have expected any negative effect before now and not all at once b) the protocols were carefully crafted to avoid traffic drops for major terms and c) i'm seeing traffic drops for keywords that still start at the beginning of the page title d) im seeing drops for some pages which are still using the OLD page titles. I had even tested the protocol on a number of pages in advance to ensure it wouldn't cause problems. As a bit of background - the title protocols were changed to make them more user friendly and less keyword heavy. CTR from search improved so was hoping for better not worse rankings! Ideas, gratefully appreciated.Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
Now that Google will be indexing Twitter, are Twitter backlinks likely to effect website rank in the SERPs?
About a year (or 2) ago, Matt Cutts said that Twitter and FB have no effect on website rank, in part because Google can't get to the content. Now that Google will be indexing Twitter (again), do we expect that links in twitter posts will be useful backlinks for improving SERP rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Thriveworks-Counseling1 -
What referrer is shown in http request when google crawler visit a page?
Is it legit to show different content to http request having different referrer? case a: user view one page of the site with plenty of information about one brand, and click on a link on that page to see a product detail page of that brand, here I don't want to repeat information about the brand itself case b: a user view directly the product detail page clicking on a SERP result, in this case I would like to show him few paragraph about the brand Is it bad? Anyone have experience in doing it? My main concern is google crawler. Should not be considered cloaking because I am not differentiating on user-agent bot-no-bot. But when google is crawling the site which referrer will use? I have no idea, does anyone know? When going from one link to another on the website, is google crawler leaving the referrer empty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | max.favilli0 -
Investigating Google's treatment of different pages on our site - canonicals, addresses, and more.
Hey all - I hesitate to ask this question, but have spent weeks trying to figure it out to no avail. We are a real estate company and many of our building pages do not show up for a given address. I first thought maybe google did not like us, but we show up well for certain keywords 3rd for Houston office space and dallas office space, etc. We have decent DA and inbound links, but for some reason we do not show up for addresses. An example, 44 Wall St or 44 Wall St office space, we are no where to be found. Our title and description should allow us to easily picked up, but after scrolling through 15 pages (with a ton of non relevant results), we do not show up. This happens quite a bit. I have checked we are being crawled by looking at 44 Wall St TheSquareFoot and checking the cause. We have individual listing pages (with the same titles and descriptions) inside the buildings, but use canonical tags to let google know that these are related and want the building pages to be dominant. I have worked though quite a few tests and can not come up with a reason. If we were just page 7 and never moved it would be one thing, but since we do not show up at all, it almost seems like google is punishing us. My hope is there is one thing that we are doing wrong that is easily fixed. I realize in an ideal world we would have shorter URLs and other nits and nats, but this feels like something that would help us go from page 3 to page 1, not prevent us from ranking at all. Any thoughts or helpful comments would be greatly appreciated. http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10005/lower-manhattan/44-wall-st/44-wall-street We do show up one page 1 for this building - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10036/midtown/1501-broadway, but is the exception. I have tried investigating any differences, but am quite baffled.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AtticusBerg10 -
What can you do when Google can't decide which of two pages is the better search result
On one of our primary keywords Google is swapping out (about every other week) returning our home page, which is more transactional, with a deeper more information based page. So if you look at the Analysis in Moz you get an almost double helix like graph of those pages repeatedly swapping places. So there seems to be a bit of cannibalizing happening that I don't know how to correct. I think part of the problem is the deeper page would ideally be "longer" tail searches that contain the one word keyword that is having this bouncing problem as a part of the longer phrase. What can be done to try prevent this from happening? Can internal links help? I tried adding a link on that term to the deeper page to our homepage, and in a knee jerk reaction was asked to pull that link before I think there was really any evidence to suggest that that one new link made a positive or negative effect. There are some crazy theories floating around at the moment, but I am curious what others think both about if adding a link from a informational to a transactional page could in fact have a negative effect, and what else could be done/tried to help clarify the difference between the two pages for the search engines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plumvoice0 -
Does Google crawl and spider for other links in rel=canonical pages?
When you add rel=canonical to the page, will Google still crawl your page for content and discover new links in that page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReferralCandy0