301s - A Year Late
-
A website I recently was asked to help with was redesigned last year, but no 301s were setup. Looking at the old URLs 95% of the ones from early 2013 are 404s. Their traffic dropped from 50,000 per month to 10,000 and I believe this is one of the reasons.
Now the question is: a year later, will it do any good to setup 301 redirects from those old urls. My current thought is that the old URLs have probably lost any link juice they had. But it should hurt anything to setup the 301s anyway.
Any thoughts on whether this is worth my time and effort?
-
Absolutely get those 301s into place as soon as possible Beth! Not only will you likely see some increased traffic from links that are out there to the old pages, but you'll also likely see a nice rankings boost. Right now, any links to the old pages are essentially "lost" to your site for ranking influence purposes. Getting the redirects in place will allow that ranking influence to again be credited to the client's new pages.
When you do start adding the redirects, make sure to add an Annotation to the related Google Analytics profile. Depending on the number and quality of the redirected pages, and on whether the site's 404 page currently has Analytics tracking, you're going to see a bit of a shift in engagement metrics. If there's no tracking on the 404 page, you'll see an increase in visits as visitors land on "real" pages instead of the 404. If there was 404 tracking before, you'll see a decrease in Bounce Rate and increase in pages/visit as far more visitors stick around the real pages instead of just bouncing from the 404 page. You'll want to be able to refer back to the date the redirecting started so you'll always be able to put stats changes into context around this process. (e.g. a year form now when the client is trying to figure out why there was a site improvement around this time)
[Hint - make sure you've got solid 404 page tracking in Analytics and keep checking it as you go along. It's an essential addition to just watching for what's showing up in Webmaster Tools, for example.]
Some more suggestions for the process:
- Use Analytics to track improvements in the metrics you expect to benefit from this process. This is how you'll demonstrate the benefit of the work, and get credit (and therefore reputation) for your efforts. You can even set up Goals around the expected improvements to make them easier to track.
- Use Screaming Frog, Xenu Link Sleuth or equivalent tool to run a check of all internal pages to ensure none of your own pages include broken internal links. Screaming Frog (paid version) can also be used to bulk-test your redirects immediately after implementation.
- Watch for any high-value incoming links to old pages that you think you might be able to get corrected at source (i.e. an external site you have any sort of relationship with). Since each redirect wastes a bit of "link juice" you're even better off getting the original link corrected to point to the right page, instead of having to go through the redirect. Only worth it for strong links.
- Watch for opportunities to use REGEX to combine several redirects into one rule. Fewer rules is better for site speed.
- If you don't have a copy of the original site to extract the URLs from, you can use the Wayback Machine to see a version of the site form before the migration.
- to create a list of the old URLs that are still indexed, use the site:mydomain.com search operator to find the majority of still-indexed URLs. You can then use the SERPSRedux bookmarklet to scrape all the results into a csv and use Excel filtering to find all the old URLs (tip - set your Google Search results to show 100 results per page to make the scraping faster)
- Set up an ongoing and regular process for checking for and dealing with such 404s. Any site should have this in place, but especially one that has been redeveloped.
Lastly, since you know you've got a lot of 404's coming in, make certain you have a really top-notch 404 error page that is designed to capture as many visitors and possible and help move them to real content without losing them. Again, important for any site, but well worth extra attention for any site that knows it has a 404 problem. (This is far better than "soft 404ing" to a home page, for example, for a number of technical and usability reasons.)
So bottom line on "whether this is worth my time and effort?" You better believe it is. probably one of the best things you could do for the site at this point. I have direct experience doing this for several sites and the improvements are significant and quite gratifying - both for you and the site owner.
Hope those are useful ideas?
Paul
-
Hiya, they may have lost link juice but then again there may be a blog giving you praise with a link that still "active". It's never too late to make a 301, remember though its best to 301 to the most relevant category or closest page. You can also set up a soft 404 page so even if you miss one the user can still navigate to a page like home page.
Moz has some great tips if you want a read or to refresh your mind.
-
Yes. It's better late than never. You might not get any rank but I consider 301s to be good policy beyond the SEO aspect. I hate going to a page where there's a link and I click it and I get a 404 or bounced to the front page. Perhaps I have a bookmark. Perhaps it's an old link. Whatever the case, do your visitors a courtesy and redirect them 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
-
301 Redirects a Year Later
I inherited the digital maintenance of a website that was relaunched a year ago. In looking at Google Analytics, organic search a year later is still down 33%. I fear they did not install 301 Redirects but can't really get a specific answer from them. Is it possible to install them a year later to help with Google indexing and get back some of the organic traffic?
Technical SEO | | stansamples0 -
Changing permalinks in new wordpress website using regex in 301s?
Hi there I am working on a website and we would like to change the permalinks from product-category (replacing with Shop) and product to buy. Currently there are nearly 400 products and multiple categories. Although the website has just been indexed wondering if we need to do 301's? if we did would like to use regex to manage so redirect would be as example: mydomain.com/sub-domain/product-category/ redirecting to to mydomain.com/sub-domain/shop/ (I know you do not need to put in the domain but as an example) - could anyone give me the regex for this? Same for products: mydomain.com/sub-domain/product/sample-product redirect to mydomain.com/sub-domain/buy/sample-product thanks in anticipation
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing0 -
My New Pages Are Really Slow to Index Lately - Are Yours Slow Too ?
New pages on my site usually shoot right into the index - often in under 24 hours. Lately they are taking weeks to get into the index. Are your new pages slow to index lately? Thanks for anything that you can report.
Technical SEO | | EGOL2 -
41.000 pages indexed two years after it was redirected to a new domain
Hi!Two years ago, we changed the domain elmundodportivo.es to mundodeportivo.com. Apparently, everything was OK, but more than two years later, there are still 41.000 pages indexed in Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aelmundodeportivo.es) even though all the domains have been redirected with a 301 redirect. I detected some problems with redirections that were 303 instead of 301, but we fixed that one month ago.A secondary problem is that the pagerank for elmundodportivo.es is 7 yet and mundodeportivo.com is 3.What I'm doing wrong?Thank you all,Oriol
Technical SEO | | MundoDeportivo0 -
Photography site still not ranking well after over year
I have a photography business In the Orlando Fl market. I have noticed my site: joeyvalyphotography.com Does not rank even In the top 50, for my strongest keyword: Orlando Wedding Photographer However, the keyword Orlando engagement Photography/photographer Ranks Very well, and has been rising I'm rank very rapidly over the last two weeks. I'm not sure why my main keyword is not going anywhere, and what my next move should be. I'm considering spending few fhousand dollars on a n seo company, however I though I could learn how to improve my keyword ranking on my own to no avail. Any and all tips, suggestions, advice, will be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | gaji0 -
Htaccess 301s to 3 different sites
Hi, I'm an htaccess newbie, and I have to redirect and split traffic to three new domains from site A. The original home page has most of the inbound links so I've set up a 301 that goes to site B, the new corporate domain. Options +FollowSymLinks
Technical SEO | | ellenru
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Brand websites C and D need 301s for their folders in site A but I have no idea how to write that in relationship to the first redirect, which really is about the home page, contact and only a few other pages. The urls are duplicates except for the new domain names. They're all on Linux..Site A is about 150 pages, should I write it by page, or can I do some kind of catch all (the first 301) plus the two folders? I'd really appreciate any insight you have and especially if you can show me how to write it. Thanks 🙂0 -
Are there any SEO implications if a page does two 301s and then a 304?
Curious to see if this is a positive or negative thing for SEO...or even perhaps, neutral. h9SZz
Technical SEO | | RodrigoStockebrand0 -
Are 301s advisable for low-traffic URL's?
We are using some branded terms in URLs that we have been recently told we need to stop using. If the pages in question get little traffic, so we're not concerned about losing traffic from broken URLs, should we still do 301 redirects for those pages after they are renamed? In other words, are there other serious considerations besides any loss in traffic from direct clicks on those broken URLs that need to be considered? This comes up because we don't have anyone in-house that can do the redirects, so we need to pay our outside web development company. Is it worth it?
Technical SEO | | PGRob0