Can new content be added to a url which has a 301 redirect?
-
I am working on a site which is currently being redesigned. The home page currently ranks highly for relevant search terms, although on the new site the content on this page will be removed.
The solution I was considering, to preserve rankings, was to move the content on the home page to a new url, and use a 301 redirect to help preserve rankings for that particular page.
The question I have therefore, is am I able to add new content to the home page, and have this page freshly indexed accordingly?
Any thoughts or suggestions would be most welcome.
Thanks,
Matt.
-
If mywebsite.com is 301'ed to some other page, then mywebsite.com will no longer be reached buy requests, so the content will never be read.
The content when talking about a 301is irrelevant, all a 301 does is redirect the request. when google follows a link to your old page it is redirected to the new page and the link juice will now fall on the new page. The content on the new page is read instead,
-
Hope I am not missing something obvious but if you are 301ing mywebsite.com then your visitors are not going to see the new homepage let alone the bots.... right?
If the phrases you are ranking for now are still relevant to the site then I would try to find a way to incorporate at least some of that content on the new homepage and then link to the full old homepage content (or a modified version of it if more suitable) from the new homepage - this new page is in effect becoming a landing page for these specific keywords (assuming that the new homepage does not manage to keep the rankings itself).
-
If you are considering 301'ing the existing homepage to a new url, I would not recommend it. In most sites, the longstanding homepage is the most authoritative page. 301ing it will not pass all of that authority to the new page.
If you like the content on the old homepage, then just put it on a different url and at some point Google will figure that out. If it doesn't or takes a while, you are no worse off. Remember, the content on the existing homepage will not perform as well on a new url. But, it sounds like you've already made the choice to make the homepage content different, so that is water under the bridge.
-
Moving the content over and 301ing the old URL will do that. You'll see a dip in ranking, then a recovery period (usually weeks as opposed to months). That's your best bet when you are forced to make a move like that. Ideally, you'd find a way to keep the content where it is, but if that's not possible, then the 301 will do.
-
Thanks for your response William.
It was more the second scenario I was referring to, but to clarify.
Content from mywebsite.com would be moved to mywebsite.com/new-url, with 301 redirect added to mywebsite.com
New content would be added to mywebsite.com
Thanks for your clarification that bots would henceforth ignore mywebsite.com; naturally this is really not what I want.
So, really just wondering if there is an effective alternative I can use. As mentioned, the current home page is ranking well, but the redesign necessarily involves removing the current content.
Essentially I'm looking for a way to preserve rankings...
Thanks, Matt.
-
If you are referring to adding new content to the new homepage after the old home page is redirected, than yes. You can add additional content to pages that have 301s redirecting to them and they will update in the index.
If you are referring to adding content on the old homepage that is 301'd and have it update on the new page, that will not work. Browsers and bots read the .htaccess and move on. Bots won't crawl that old URL anymore.
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
-
Can I 301 Re-Direct within the same site?
I have a magento site and would like to do a 301 redirect from page A to page B. Page B was created after Page A but contains the same products. I want page A to be replaced in the search engines with page B while carrying the link juice from page A. Is this possible? Am I better off just blocking page A through the robots .txt file? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Can You 301 Unwanted Links to Another Site?
I am trying to clean up my link profile, and have noticed that a I have a lot of crappy inbound links linking to some of my old pages. And those old pages have since been 301'ed to current pages. My question is, is it worth trying to 301 those old pages, and thus those crappy links, to another website? Would this do anything to clean up my link profile?
Technical SEO | | red6marketing0 -
301 on certain url string
I have a few thousand old urls with the string /content/ in them and are looking for a way to 301 batch redirect them. So for all the urls that contain the word 'content' I would like to redirect to 1 specific page. I have tried the methods below without success. Regular 301's are working fine but this particular method is not working for me. I am running a Joomla site but I don't imagine that would have any impact. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Redirect 301 ^content/.*$ http://www.mysite.com Redirect 301 ^content/ http://www.mysite.com
Technical SEO | | omega0 -
Htaccess redirects how many can i have and does it slow site down
I have had to redesign my site this year www.in2town.co.uk because my hosting company made a huge mistake while trying to update the joomla on my site which resulted in me losing thousands of pages and links. What i would like to know is, i have put some of the old urls in my htaccess file but i would like to know how many old urls i can have in my htaccess file as i am unsure how to use it properly. my idea was, to have some of the lost url links to my site and put them in my htaccess file and have them pointing to similar pages. not sure if this is a good idea or not. i think i have lost a few hundred good links but i would like to know if these urls in the htaccess file would slow down my joomla site any advice would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Does it really matter to maintain 301 redirect after de-indexing of old URLs?
Today, I was reading latest blog post on SEOmoz blog about. Uncrawled 301s - A Quick Fix for When Relaunches Go Too Well This is very interesting study about 301 & How it useful to maintain traffic. I'm working on eCommerce website and I have done similar stuff on my website. I have big confusion to manage 301 redirect. My website generates new URLs due to following actions. Re-write dynamic URLs. Re-launch entire website on different eCommerce platform. [osCommerce to Magento Commerce] Re-name category. Trasfer one product from one category to another category. I'm managing my 301 redirect with old practice. Excel sheet data from Google webmaster tools and set specific new URLs for redirect. Hoooo... Now, I have 8.5K redirect in htaccess... And, I'm thinking it's too much. Can we remove old 301 redirect from htaccess or not? This is big question for me. Because, all pages are not hyperlink on external website. Google have just de-indexed old URLs and indexed new URLs. So, Is it require to maintain 301 redirect after Google process?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
301 redirect
What is a proper way to redirect any url containing a give word (anywhere in the url) to another sepcified url? Is it like this? RedirectMatch 301 ^thisword$ http://domain.com/newlocation
Technical SEO | | sesertin1 -
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