Massive URL Migration with thousands of 301
-
Hey Everyone!
I'm currently working on a project that we have A Lot of product pages and we have thousands of URL's that need to be 301'd over. I know this can be a major issue and could lead to tons of errors. What is everyone's thought of doing such a huge Migration, Should I do it all in phases? or should I do them all at once so they can all be indexed together?
What would you suggest to be the best way to go about doing such a massive migration?
-
I have never done a migration of a website with so many URL's it is kind of overwhelming. I do have a 404 page with the catchall rule in place. See i'm coming from the business side of SEO i'm not really the developer getting in there and actually doing the migration ( I tip my hat to all you developers without you I am nothing but a voice). I'm guiding my developer to the safest route. Doing the migration all at once does make sense to prevent both sites being cached
-
Webmaster's Tools has been pretty good to me regarding telling me about 404s I may have missed after a migration, but using the tactic I described really limits missed URLs, assuming you have a good grasp on the subdirectories of your site.
Phasing is an option, but say, in the case of a redesign or domain migration, I like to do it all at once. That way Google isn't trying to index the website on two different URL structures or domains. Doing it in one shot makes it clear to Google what has happened, since everything is now moved, instead of just a fraction at a time. I'm sure this is a point of debate, and not necessarily the definitive way to do it.
-
Hey Thanks for the response!
I'm currently dealing with a site that has a large duplication problem and i'm Canon tagging them all to then 301 them all over. Why shouldn't I do a phase approach though? Wouldn't it be easier to see where errors happen if I come at this migration with a phased approach?
-
Assuming not all of your pages hold incredible value and don't get visited a lot, I don't think you'd need to do it in phases. You can save yourself some time by throwing in some regex to grab large chunks of URLs at a time and redirect them that way.
Your more valuable pages should be one-to-one redirected as to not confuse users and to retain the most juice to the right place, but for less important pages, grab a bunch at a time.
One way to do this is:
redirectmatch 301 ^/sub/directory/(.*)$ http://site.com/newdirectory
This would grab all pages under site.com/new/directory/ANYTHING to site.com/newdirectory/.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Why a certain URL ( a category URL ) disappears?
the page hasn't been spammed. - links are natural - onpage grader is perfect - there are useful high ranking articles linking to the page...pretty much everything is okay.....also all of my websites pages are okay and none of them has disappeared only this one ( the most important category of my site. )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mohamadalieskandariii0 -
URL structure for SEO
Hi Mozzers, I have a site which is a combination of product pages, and news and advice pages that relate to the products. How would you approach the URL structure for this, following SEO best practice? Approach 1 Product pages:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A_Q
www.website.com/product-category/product-page News and advice pages:
www.website.com/product-category/product-page/news-and-advice-story-1
www.website.com/product-category/product-page/news-and-advice-story-2
etc or Approach 2 Product pages:
www.website.com/product-category/product-page News and advice pages:
www.website.com/news/product-category/news-and advice-story-1 (with internal linking to relevant product page)
www.website.com/news/product-category/news-and advice-story-2 (with internal linking to relevant product page)
etc Or would a different approach be better?0 -
Multiple 301 redirects for a HTTPS URL. Good or bad?
I'm working on an ecommerce website that has a few snags and issues with it's coding. They're using https, and when you access the website through domain.com, theres a 301 redirect to http://www.domain.com and then this, in turn, redirected to https://www.domain.com. Would this have a deterimental effect or is that considered the best way to do it. Have the website redirect to http and then all http access is redirected to the https URL? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Where to put a page ID in a URL?
Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?0 -
Can Anybody Link to my URL to Hurt SEO? Weird URL pointing at my Domaine!
Our ranking has drop since a few weeks. I did not do any major change in my site. Surfing WebMaster Tool, I found lots of new URL linking at our site: url.org linkarena.com seoprofiler.com folkd.com digitalhome.ca bustingprice.com surepurchase.com lowpricetoday.com oyax.com couponfollow.com aspringcleaning.com pamabuy.com etzone.ca How do I find if those was done intentionelly to hurt SEO? Could it be possible? Thank you, BigBlaze
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Google News URL Structure
Hi there folks I am looking for some guidance on Google News URLs. We are restructuring the site. A main traffic driver will be the traffic we get from Google News. Most large publishers use: www.site.com/news/12345/this-is-the-title/ Others use www.example.com/news/celebrity/12345/this-is-the-title/ etc. www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ www.example.com/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ (Celebrity is a channel on Google News so should we try and follow that format?) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title/12345/ www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title-12345/ (unique ID no at the end and part of the title URL) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ Others include the date. So as you can see there are so many combinations and there doesnt seem to be any unity across news sites for this format. Have you any advice on how to structure these URLs? Particularly if we want to been seen as an authority on the following topics: fashion, hair, beauty, and celebrity news - in particular "celebrity name" So should the celebrity news section be www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ or what? This is for a completely new site build. Thanks Barry
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deepti_C0 -
Interesting site migration question.
Hi all. I'm looking for some thoughts on a migrations option we have. At the moment we have two E-Com sites ranking well for some of the same terms. An older site, and a nice new site. The older site is ranking very well for category and product terms, the new one is slowly coming up. Ideally we would like to have one site, the nice new one, and get rid of the old one. If I 301 the old site url's to the new sites will that bring the new site url's into the same position as the old ones? I'm just not sure how this effects sites that are already ranking well. Any ideas are welcomed but I'm really looking for a definitive answer. It's a big decision after all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PASSLtd0 -
How do I set up a 301 redirect if the default settings for our web servers create multiple URLs for the same page?
How do I set up a 301 redirect if the default settings for our web servers create multiple URLs for the same page but only views it as one page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ibex0