Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice
-
I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to:
-
keep each page’s content exactly the same
-
keep the same domain name
-
301 redirect all of the pages to their new url
The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content.
The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls.
I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.”
Here’s my question:
1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic?
2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url?
3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months?
Thanks.
-
-
Hi,
I had and experience for moving not only the file structure, but also the whole domain (domain name change). We have created the 301 redirect from the old site to the new one (from every single old page to the new one). It's not the same as your case, but the general approach is exactly the same.
So it looked like
olddomainname.com/aaa > 301 >newdomainname.com/aaa
in your case it going to be as yourdomainname.com/aaaa >301> yourdomainname.com/site-collection/aaaa
Google reindexed all our new pages (about 1500 000 pages) within about 6-8 months, but we still (after more than 18 month) have old domain pages being indexed by Google (about 10 000 pages).
Once the domain name was changed, we had started to monitor all our backlinks to be sure they all are still alive, and we've been checking them every week. This part was the hardest to deal with, coz in spite of setting the 301 redirect, some links were lost. The problem was not connected to the re-direction from oldsite.com/aaa to newsite.com/aaa, but to the problem that end-pages were out-dated (products out of stock etc). When we discovered this problem (shame on us!!), we had started to monitor back links more heavily. Now we do it every week to be sure we are not losing traffic due to this stupid problem.
As far as I know, there are some free apps for Shopify, dealing with 301 redirects, e.g. https://apps.shopify.com/atomseo-404-error-broken-link-checker, https://apps.shopify.com/redirectify
good luck!
-
Great answer. A good tool to use for testing the 301s in bulk is Screaming Frog. Save a CSV list of your old URLs before you migrate. When you update sites, set Screaming Frog in list mode and it will show you where all the old URLs 301 to. Makes it really easy to test.
If you do have any sort of staging site to do this with, that would be optimal before you go live. If you do go live, I would make this the first thing you do to check those 301s. Screaming frog will quickly check a ton of them and give you some peace of mind.
Side note, the only way link juice is lost in a 301 is if you 301 to a page that does not have semantically related content to the original page. i.e. if you have a page on Red Widgets and you 301 it to a page on Blue Bangles, Google will not pass the juice as it sees you trying to manipulate the link juice. As you are using 301 redirect to a new URL with the exact same content, you should be fine, assuming the other points that Dirk mentions.
-
I have migrated several sites - including changes of urls (and even domains). If done well (meaning that all pages are properly redirected from the old to the new url) there should not a be an issue. In 80% of the migrations, you couldn't even notice that there had been a migration if you looked at the search engine traffic. In the 20% where traffic was lost, it wasn't related to link juice but to other issues:
- if you change the look & feel of your pages this can have an impact on your visitors (both positive and negative - check bounce rate, time on page, avg. pages/visit) - if it's negative you can quite easily loose positions in search (resulting in lower search traffic). If your pages stay exactly the same - this shouldn't be an issue.
-
Same goes with performance - if the performance of the new platform is worse than the old one - it could again have a negative impact on your users, and as a result on your position in the SERP's.
-
if you change your site structure - take care of you site depth. Sometimes changing you site can push important content deeper or cause less internal links to these pages, again having a negative impact on the site's performance in the SERP's.
Nobody will be able to give you a definitive answer on your question, but as far as I know, link juice doesn't get lost with 301's, but a lot of other factors can have a severe impact.
If you loose traffic, recovery can take a long time (up to 6 months) provided you find the root cause of the problem (and it won't be the link juice). If you don't - that traffic is gone.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
-
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
-
Backlink is good or bad? All of the website links were of the same type.
Backlink is good or bad? All of the website links were of the same type. Website niche - Animation and 3D Rendering Studios Backlink from - http://www.adamfrisby.com/create-home-design-and-interior-decor-in-2d-3d.html the anchor tag is image URL from one of the many images in that post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | varunrupal0 -
Relaunching website in two phases - 301 redirect approach
Hey Mozzers, Interested to know your thoughts on the following situation. I am relaunching a website with an updated URL structure in TWO phases. Phase one will be a much smaller version of the site, with 30% of the pages going live - the remaining 70% of page won't be available until Phase two. In Phase one, these 30% of pages will be 301 redirected from their like-for-like versions - old site to new site. The remaining 70%... because the like-for-like pages won't be available until Phase two, which is likely to be launched in 3 months time, should I do a temporary redirect on these pages (302) to the new homepage for the time being, until the new versions of the pages are live - and then implement the 301 from old url to new url. A bit of a messy situation, and not ideal for SEO, but my hands are tied as the organisation is pushing ahead with this phased approach. So, interested to hear your thoughts on an appropriate 301 migration plan.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWesley0 -
Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO
I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts? Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How to redirect an url in .htaccess when "redirect 301" doesnt work
I have an odd page url, generated by a link from an external website, it has: %5Cu0026size=27.4KB%5Cu0026p=dell%20printers%20uk%5Cu0026oid=333302b6be58eaa914fbc7de45b23926%5Cu0026ni=21%5Cu0026no=24%5Cu0026tab=organic%5Cu0026sigi=11p3eqh65%5Cu0026tt=Dell%205210n%20A4%20Mono%20Laser%20Printer%20from%20Printer%20Experts%5Cu0026u=fb ,after a .jpg image url, and I can't get it redirect using the redirect 301 in .htaccess to the properly image url as I use to do with the rest of not found urls eg: /15985.jpg%5Cu0026size=27.4KB%5Cu0026p=dell%20printers%20uk%5Cu0026oid=333302b6be58eaa914fbc7de45b23926%5Cu0026ni=21%5Cu0026no=24%5Cu0026tab=organic%5Cu0026sigi=11p3eqh65%5Cu0026tt=Dell%205210n%20A4%20Mono%20Laser%20Printer%20from%20Printer%20Experts%5Cu0026u=fb to just: /15985.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Status0 -
How to find affiliate sites linking to a competitor website?
Hello here, I am trying to understand the best way to find sites that are affiliate of a competitor, through link research. Typically our competitor's affiliates link to our competitor website via any of the following links: http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp?SID=[aff_id]&LID=[link_id] http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=[aff+id]&offerid=[off_id]&type=2&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musicnotes.com%2Fsheetmusic%2Fmtd.asp%3Fppn%3D[item_id] The first link looks much easier to find, so I have tried to find the first kind of links with Google by using the "link:" clause as follows: link:http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp Or, similarly, by using Open Site Explorer. But I always get 0 results! It is weird because I know there are thousands of affiliates out there with the same tracking code. How's that possible? Why does it look impossible to find the sites I am looking for? Would you suggest any different approach? Any ideas, suggestions and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Multiple domains expiring that have 301 redirects to my primary domain. Am I in trouble?
I recently took on the SEO of a large website with http://example.com. My predecessor bought 40 plus domains for specific cities like Jacksonvilleexample.com, Miamiexample.com, etc. ZERO of the additional domains linked to our main website. The domains that were bought basically had our exact same website in terms of content, links etc that mirrored our main http://example.com. I added 301 redirects to help problems that may be a result of this type of structure. Some of the additional domains were indexed and some were not but all have 301's and as far as traffic is concerned I'm not worried about loosing short term traffic. My question: All the domains are set to expire in June and I don't want to continue to have them 301 redirected to my main domain (example.com). I'm not trying to avoid the additional cost of all the domains but I don't see an advantage to having them so CAN letting all these domains expire hurt me from a long term SEO position if I don't renew them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ballanrk0 -
301 redirect for ip address in SERPs
Hi, I've recently had the misfortune of my site's ip address being crawled and indexed by Google, which is causing some duplicate content issues. Due to the nature of the site we're not able to implement a canonical tag to fix this at present. Would a 301 redirect do the trick, and if so, could someone point me to what I'd need to add to our .htaccess file? Many thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHillfd0 -
Are there any negatives to channeling my links through a 301 redirect?
I'm channeling 1000's of links through another url with a 301 redirect. I've thought this through and can't see any downside to doing this, but I want to get your opinion. Can you see any downside to doing this? With regards to passing anchor text, PR, PA, etc? Since this is done with sites all the time when they change urls, I can't see Google being able to penalize me for this....can you? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian-M0