What is the longest you would go back to ressurrect links that should have been 301's?
-
I have never thought of anything beyond a site that was possibly developed a month or two ago, but an interesting possible client has come along and begs a question.
They had their site "redesigned" in April 2014 and it appears whomever did the work did not realize what a 301 was for. Using ahrefs or MajesticSEO, they have gone from roughly 15,000 referring pages to 500 and the time line perfectly intersects the redesign. Sooooo, just wondering if any of you geniuses has ever gone back that far to try and pull off a 301.... I am actually just thinking of a link building / content marketing plan but thought it was an interesting question.
Thanks for the help,
Robert
-
This link is about using a compass
-
The link in this reply is to a website about "cheap goalkeeper gloves"
-
...a man can dream,....
My favorite is taking the time to explain followed by silence...not awkward at all!
-
Think about it... They did a poor UI/UX site, none or few redirects from a fairly well ranked and high DA/PA site... do you really think they would even consider a custom 404 page? I think we spend more time trying to explain to clients that not everyone gets good design, SEO, etc. No matter what the name of their company says.
Best -
LInda,
I think the point about it being anecdotal really is what I was looking for. There is no clear direction from the search engines on this so that is one of the things that makes Moz so strong. Good SEO's sharing anecdotal and other evidence/ideas.
Thanks so much,Robert
-
Very good point Ash, very good. I have seen it continue to crawl for a year or more as well. Checking for the 404s as a comparison and redirecting to fix the 404's is a good explanation. Well done.
-
Tom,
Great points. I am not as concerned with content relevance as we are fairly careful with that. The issue was it was a new site but used old content and they did not do redirects. I am going to give it a try with what I find to be the most relevant pages from the old, but not with all as I do not want to "overdo" it.
Thanks
-
Great story.
That reminds me of one... I know of a small adsense site that went offline and the owner didn't realize. A few months went by before they realized that the hosting was not responding. The site was brought back online, popped back into the SERPs and resumed making money.
-
When I first started my current job, I found out that in the past there had been a separate, small website for one of the products, which had been abandoned a couple of years before that. (The site, not the product.)
The site still seemed to have some good links pointing to it, so for the heck of it I 301'd it to the main page on the current site for that product. That page quickly grew to be one of the strongest pages on the current site.
This is just one anecdotal data point but based on my experience if it's not a huge amount of work, I'd try redirecting, at least for the pages with the best links.
-
Really hope that they had a custom 404 page at least!
-
What? You callin me a fruit picker???
There are worse things
-
I've been in a similar situation. My recommendation is to look in Google Webmaster Tools in 'Crawl > Crawl Errors' and if it is reporting them as 404 pages, what's the harm in redirecting them?
Google can crawl old URLs which 404 or provide another error for years (as in my case - it was an old website redesign from A LONG time ago).
-
Hi Robert,
I would do an archive.org take a look at the site structure the best you can that way. Then I would figure out if there are any links that are valuable to the site and relevant to the pages that exist.
It is still very risky I have a friend who changed his domain and redirected 35,000 URLs to a site of half 1 million URLs however the links from the old domain that were very high page rank still did not benefit the site very much at all.
I would export from Ahrefs upload to Deep Crawl see the similarities between the old URL's content in the new URLs
considering that they have already been checked and confirmed that the links are not bad.
ttp://moz.com/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools
http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/check-server-headers-tool/
I hope this is of some help,
Tom
-
I don't know the answer to your original question.... but I would be jumping to redirect anything from April 2014.
Nobody really "knows" the answer to this... but I think there is a good chance that google will continue to crawl these connections. Even if some of them are still good.
-
What? You callin me a fruit picker???
Actually I am pondering it quite a bit. Really a shame these people did this to them. And...bad job on the site as we must rebuild.
Thanks Andy.
-
Hi Robert,
I have never gone back that far myself (30-40 days max), but I can see no reason why this isn't worth a shot. There could still be a lot of potential hanging around out there for the grabbing. Grab any low hanging fruit with both hands
-Andy
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
-
Which links to map across in site redesign
Hi there, I'm currently doing a fairly major website redesign for a client. They are moving to my hosting so I am creating the site on my cloud account and have edited my host files to work on it. The site structure will stay largely the same as it is quite a straightforward services site. However I'm moving them onto Wordpress from a different set up and I'm not sure how many of the links that they have, that aren't straight forward pages, I need to create redirects for. I have used Screaming Frog to get a list of all their URLs, of which there are 82. However alongside text/ html links I have: image/jpeg text/css
Web Design | | Frog-Marketing
application/javascript Do I need to create redirects for all of these link types? Or just any of the pages I'm not using? Many thanks, Sarah.0 -
Need suggestion: What is the best internal linking structure for our website to gain in SEO & UX too?
Hi all, We have 3 different editions of our product we are selling with 20 features. 1st edition & 2nd edition comes with 15 features in which 10 are common in each edition. 3rd edition comes with all 20 features. Now what's the best way to interlink and show the navigational menu to highlight 3 editions and features as well? Much appreciated if some one refer me a website with such structure. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Community Discussion - How do you sync your marketing with your customers' experience?
Hi everyone! This week's Community Discussion comes from Tuesday's Moz Blog post by Mackenzie Fogelson, "Why Content Strategy Isn't Enough." Mackenzie says: "What you stand for as a company and a brand drives your products, your actions as a company, and also your marketing. More importantly, it will be the spark that ignites a connection with the people in your community. When it comes down to it, people will continue to have access to more: more content, more products, and more choice. The need to build meaningful relationships with your customers is not an optional approach, but a requirement. Identifying and communicating your purpose as a brand is just one part of making this happen. The rest is delivering a seamless, authentic experience." It's becoming more and more important to be aware of all aspects of your brand and your customers' experience. When you think of your content strategy, does it include all the potential customer touchpoints in their journey? Is this something you've already been doing, or is it a new idea to you? What's your strategy for making sure your online marketing efforts sync up with a visitor's or customer's experience?
Web Design | | MattRoney5 -
Internal Linking: What is the best practice for pages not included in Nav bar?
I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more. I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so.... What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor. Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Question #1: Does Google index https:// pages? I thought they didn't because....
generally the difference between https:// and http:// is that the s (stands for secure I think) is usually reserved for payment pages, and other similar types of pages that search engines aren't supposed to index. (like any page where private data is stored) My site that all of my questions are revolving around is built with Volusion (i'm used to wordpress) and I keep finding problems like this one. The site was hardcoded to have all MENU internal links (which was 90% of our internal links) lead to **https://**www.example.com/example-page/ instead of **http://**www.example.com/example-page/ To double check that this was causing a loss in Link Juice. I jumped over to OSE. Sure enough, the internal links were not being indexed, only the links that were manually created and set to NOT include the httpS:// were being indexed. So if OSE wasn't counting the links, and based on the general ideology behind secure http access, that would infer that no link juice is being passed... Right?? Thanks for your time. Screens are available if necessary, but the OSE has already been updated since then and the new internal links ARE STILL NOT being indexed. The problem is.. is this a volusion problem? Should I switch to Wordpress? here's the site URL (please excuse the design, it's pretty ugly considering how basic volusion is compared to wordpress) http://www.uncommonthread.com/
Web Design | | TylerAbernethy0 -
What's the best way to structure original vs aggregated content
We're working on a news site that has a mix of news wires such as Reuters and original opinion articles. Currently the site is setup with /world /sports etc categories with the news wire content. Now we want to add the original opinion content. Would it be better to start a new top /Opinion category and then have sub-categories for each Opinion/world, Opinion/sports subject? Or would it be better to simply add an opinion sub-category under the existing news categories, ie /world/opinion? I know Google requests that original content be in a separate directory to be considered for inclusion in Google news. Which would be better for that? Regarding link building, if the opinion sub-categories were under the top news categories, would the link juice be passed more directly than if we had a separate Opinion top category?
Web Design | | ScottDavis0 -
Best Place for Back Linking
Does anyone have a good list or know where I can find one to show me the best sites to create some organic back links to mine, preferably without paying for them? Thanks to those who help, Craig Fenton IT
Web Design | | craigyboy0 -
Can't figure out what's going on with these strange 403's
The last crawl found a good number of 404's and I can't figure out what's going on. I don't even recognize these links. What's really strange is a few of them high a fairly decent page authority. For instance this one has a PA of 55: http://noahsdad.com/?path=http%3A%2F%2Feurosystems.it%2Fconf_commerciale%2Fimages%2Fdd.gif%3F%3F There are several more like this one also, it seems most of these new ones have "Feurosystems" in the link...I have no idea what that is. Just curious what you guys think is going on, why these are 404'ing, and how to fix it. Thanks. Edit: I took out the "%" from the links and I get this: http://noahsdad.com/?path=http3A2F2Feurosystems.it2Fconf_commerciale2Fimages2Fdd.gif3F3F which takes me to a page on my site. I have no idea what's going on, or what that link is. Hoping someone can chime in because this is strange. Another edit: I just checked out the Google Webmaster's and it looks like these errors are 403's and all started around March 21st. I have no idea what happend on March 21st to start causing all of these errors, but I'd sure like to get it fixed. 🙂
Web Design | | NoahsDad0