Website Redesign 301 Question
-
Hey Moz gang,
I have a question that I believe I know how I'm going to handle, but just wanted some feedback from the Moz community on best practices.
At my company, we're going through a site redesign. At the moment, our site is deeper than it should be with many one-off feature pages. For example, we have a Features page that then links to individual pages for each specific feature.
One goal we have set for the redesign is a condensing of the pages in order to make the site more user-friendly, easy to manage and content rich.
My question is this. We have a lot of these individual pages that I want to essentially kill and merge into one page. It is okay (best practice) to 301 all of those individual feature specific pages to the single Features page since that is now where all of that content lives??
I want to retain the link juice that those pages have gained over time, but I don't want to get penalized for too many 301's to a single page.
Any advice or previous experience would be awesome
Thanks,
Lance
-
Hello Zach,
Thanks for responding to my question!
This is precisely the answer I was hoping to hear from the Moz community. We do plan to merge these feature specific pages into one all-inclusive page, so I was planning on 301'ing them as you stated. And I've been tracking our external links to these pages using OSE, so contacting those webmasters will be my first step once we launch the new site.
Thanks again Zach, you rock!
-
Hello Lance
In general, a 301 redirect tells google, "hey, this page moved and is now at this URL." With that being said, here are some best practices:
If you are literally just merging pages into one, within reason, then there is no problems with redirecting them to the new page.
If your just completely trashing the page because it serves no value, than have the redirect go to the next category up, or, have the individual features page go to the features page once you delete them. I would ask myself this question, "If I was a user following a link that links to the 301d page, where would the next-best pertinent page be?"
Be aware of the number of 301 redirects any specific link has. Ideally, there should only be one.
If your concerned with link juice, which you stated you are, what is stopping you from contacting the webmaster of the site that links to that page and ask them to change the URL on the link, stating that you redesigned the site and the URLs have changed. The worst they can say is no, or nothing at all, or they can take the few minutes out of their day and change it.
A great way to do this is use OSE to get the links to any given page on your site, and then run it through one of the numerous tools to find the whois contact info of that domain, or just use their "contact us" page.
Hope this helps,
Zach
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
-
Website Redesign & Ensuring Minimal Traffic/Rankings Lost
Hi there, We have undergone a website redesign (mycompany.com) and our site is ready to go live however the new website is built on a different platform so all of our blog pages will not be copied over - to avoid a large web developer expense. So our intention is to then leave all the blog pages as (on the old web design) but move it to the domain blog.mycompany.com with 301 redirects inserted on mycompany.com for each blog post pointing to the corresponding blog.mycompany.com. Is there anything else we should do to ensure minimal traffic/rankings are lost? Thank you so much for your help.
Web Design | | amitbroide0 -
Traffic Dropping To Website
Hi In Google Analytics:
Web Design | | SEOguy1
I have noticed up to 50% of traffic coming to the website drops off at the home page point,
and drops further from other pages on the site. I realise some may possibly say that this could be down to various factors such as server issues, poor web design, or the wrong traffic reaching the site I have did corrected the following: There was an issue with there being www.domain.com and www.domain.com/home, Screaming Frog and Moz showed that these both had duplicate meta tagging issues. Initially I had created a separate page called 'home' to include in the main nav bar under the slider, but yesterday I replaced this page with a request in the functions.php to place 'home' in the nav bar as a redirect back to the home www.domain.com page. This works great. So I now have the following 301 permanent redirects: non-www to www resolve in the htaccess file, plus 2 permanent 301 redirects in the nav bar. I wonder if this is acceptable protocol re the nav bar redirects, and I wonder if you could possibly advise if the actions that I have taken will have any negative impact on the web seo, link structure, crawlability or indexing. Thanks.0 -
What are the most common reasons for a website being slow to load
I've been advised that too many requests are being sent (presumably to the server?), how can I reduce these and were else should I look to increase speed?
Web Design | | FBS1 -
Question #2: All of my INTERNAL links in OSE are being indexed from http://www.e.com/default.asp, and all my EXTERNAL links are linked to http://www.e.com/ am I getting a fraction of the link juice because of that?????
Hey guys, sorry for the really long question, but it appears that I am losing between 50 and 75 % of my link juice to my internal pages. In OSE all main category links (left sidebar) are being indexed from the URL that includes default.asp, even though NONE of my external links include that: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uncommonthread.com%2FSulky-Thread-s%2F78.htm If you check the PA for http://www.uncommonthread.com/: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uncommonthread.com%2F You see that it is practically double the PA of http://www.uncommonthread.com/default.asp: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uncommonthread.com%2FDefault.asp **Also, non of my internal menu links are being indexed. ** Look at the menu on this page: http://www.uncommonthread.com/Sulky-Thread-s/78.htm and then look at the OSE information here for the "invisible thread" item from the menu on the page above^^^: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uncommonthread.com%2FSulky-monofilament-s%2F54.htm Thanks SOOO much! Pre-thumbs and thanks to anyone that can lend me a seconds worth of advice! Thanks again for your time, Tyler A.
Web Design | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Geo Tagging Your Website?
Is it worth it to do this to your site if it has a local focus? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Thanks! ~Ricky
Web Design | | RickyShockley0 -
Is there a limit for 301 redirection in htaccess file?
For the SEO perspective, there is a limit for the number of 301 redirection inside the htaccess file?
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
Could Website redesign be a cause of drop in rankings?
We had a complete redesign of our website and moved it over to wordpress several months ago. As url's changed, we had appropriate 301 redirects done. Rankings for our top keywords dropped, but others remained intact. Our SEO company told us rankings drop when a redesign is done, but I thought if we did all redirects properly (which they approved), it wouldn't be much of a problem. Additionally, we've been steadily adding good new content. Any advice?
Web Design | | rdreich490 -
How do you visualize website structure
How do you visualize a website structure in terms of (categories of) pages and interlinking. I use such visuals for discussing what you are actually doing now and what can be improved. I have made visuals I few times myself (basically making boxes representing categories of pages and lines representing internal links), but I found that I soon ran into a scheme of huge proportions and needed more paper and more time. Appreciate your thoughts!
Web Design | | NewBuilder2