Should I redirect 404s or should I eliminate them?
-
Hello!
I am now checking a website that has been migrated months ago from osCommerce to Prestashop.
While I was checking crawl errors in search console I found a lot of 404s coming from the last website.The urls are mainly 4 types:
- popup_image.php?pID=125&osCsid=507c27261ba5ca2568f06ce5bad2ebc9
- product-friendly-url-pr-125%3FosCsid....
- product-friendly-url-p-125%3FosCsid.....
- products_new.php?page=228
I've have realized that the parameter pId, and the number that comes after pr- and p- is the product Id in the new website, so I think our team will be able to create an script to redirect those.
My question is: Is it ok to send several urls to the same url?. I mean, the popup_image.php was not the product page, as its name says it's more like a popup page. We don't have now a pop up page for images, so I was thinking to send that url to the product page.
the one with the pr- was product review page
the one with the p- was the product page
I was thinking on redirecting the 3 of them to the product page? Should I? Or should I just redirect the last one (p-) and eliminate the others from the index?
And... the ones with
- products_new.php?page=228
I was thinking to redirect all to the page 1 of new products.
Is it ok?
thank you!
-
Yes you can redirect the 3 URLs to the new product page and everything would be alright.
The question to consider though, would be if you had tens of thousands of product pages and so then would need tens of thousands of redirects. If the old pages did not get much or any traffic, or just the popup URL was hardly ever visited, it might not make sense to implement the redirects. Those redirects could slow down portions of your server or site while processing those redirects.
Essentially if you had a bunch of old pages that were just never useful, let them 404. If they were useful and linked to or in the index, then 301 redirect to the new page.
Hope that helps?
-
Hi,
I think you are right. So to redirect them all to 1 page is good. I just had the same migration to a new site and redirected all traffic to one page on wich i explained to migration and offered them a quick menu for continuing further in the "new" shop.
Regards,
Tymen
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
-
Redirect inbound links to youtube?
I have a website that's been going for 10 years or so, doesn't get huge traffic but it's fairly consistent. About 5 years ago I put the same content on youtube- instructional how to videos. The website offers slightly better content because there are images to accompany the step by step text below the videos. The text is more or less the same on youtube and my website. Recently, youtube has started to vastly out-perform my website. For every page/video on my website, there is a youtube page. They're basically competing against each other. Over the years I have accrued a fair number of links to my website. My question is, should I redirect my inbound links to the relevant youtube pages and sacrifice my website? Thanks! Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | madegood0 -
Incomplete Redirect for Domain Migration?
One year ago we migrated domain "X" to domain "Y". We did the proper redirects and used Google Search Console. Everything was done by the book. Now when we enter "Site: X" in Google about 650 results listing the old domain still come up. When clicked these redirect to the new domain. My SEO says that the old domain should not be indexed by Google, that these pages with the old domain should not appear. Is this in fact an incomplete domain migration? Our search traffic dropped considerably when we migrated the domain a year ago. My SEO thinks this may explain the drop. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
301 redirect impact on ranking
If Website A is ranking 19th position in Google for a specific keyword, and Website B is ranking 30th position for the same keyword, What would be impact after 301 redirect? Will Website A drop to 30th position because of 301 or existing position would improve because of link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
301 redirects for a redesign.
About to completely redo a client's site and I want to make sure I don't loose our link juice. The current site is a old template site from another provider. They host it and we do not have access at all to the site itself, so there will be no transferring of the site from server to server because they feel the site is their property. Basically the site is a monthly service not a product. So this will be a completely new website, including new URL structure. So my question is how do keep the link juice flowing to the new site? I know I need to use 301 redirects, but do I rebuild those old URLs on my site and redirect them to their new counterpart or what? The link profile is not that impressive, maybe 15 back links (all mainly going to the homepage). But they all are local and coming from pretty good domain authority. But its keeping us ahead of our competition. Back story: This is one of my local search clients, we now have them ranking #1 across the board in the local packs. After analyzing the traffic, they are losing 75% of all traffic because of the sites design. So a new site is a must. I build a lot of websites, but have never worried about the back link profile before now. Thanks for all your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masonrj0 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect
Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
Regular Expression / Wildcard Redirect Situation
I am dealing with an interesting situation. Here's what's going on: Current URLs Example1:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NakulGoyal
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1-1.html Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-4567.html Current URLs Example2:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1-1.html Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789.html I want to make sure all variations of the above URL redirect to the new url. What wildcard 301 redirect / regular expression can I use to tackle these ?0 -
What is the Proper Use of 301 redirects for SEO purposes?
I heard and read from different sources that 301 redirects from aged domains with healthy link profiles is great to boost a sites rank as oppose to building a site around the page and linking it to the domain you want to rank. Whats is the best practice for this strategy? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars0