Any downside to a whole bunch of 301s?
-
I'm working with a site that needs a whole bunch of old pages that were deleted 301'd to new pages.
My main goal is to capture any external links that right now go off to a 404 page and cleaning up the index. In dealing with this, I may end up 301ing pages that didn't have incoming links or may not have ever even really existed in the first place. These links are a mix of http and https.
Is there any potential downside to just 301ing a list of several hundred possible old urls that currently trigger the 404 page?
Thanks! Best... Mike
-
Hi Michael!
I recommend checking out this blog for more insight: http://searchengineland.com/how-many-301s-are-too-many-16960
The video on the blog linked above answers: Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site? How about how many redirects I can chain together?
Other things to watch out for with chained redirects:
- Avoid infinite loops.
- Browsers may also have redirect limits, and these limits can vary by browser, so multiple redirects may affect regular users in addition to Googlebot.
- Minimizing redirects can improve page speed
Hope this helps!
-
Thank you to everyone for chipping in their thoughts on this.
Logan, good article. It gave me a new idea and wanted to see what y'all thought.
If my main goal is to not have all these 404s from unpublished pages and to re-direct the incoming link value to pages that could benefit, what would you think of putting up a noindexed page that links to my top pages that I want to give greater authority to? Then, put in a request to de-index those old urls that have the noindexed (duplicate) content. That would mean not firing off a 404, just showing the same content on hundreds of noindexed/deindexed pages. Given your point about re-directs, chained re-directs and speed for mobile, would that do more for me than re-directing all of these old urls to new pages?
Compounding the problem a little, this particular site has a catalog that comes out twice a year where many product pages are constantly being unpublished. So, even if I re-directed the old unpublished pages to existing urls, some of those might be going away and need another re-direct to add to the chain shortly.
Any thoughts on this appreciated. Thanks! Best... Mike
-
301 redirects do have a significant impact on pagespeed on mobile devices since they are often connected to much less reliable networks. Varvy has a great article with more details: https://varvy.com/mobile/mobile-redirects.html
If Google has already reindexed all of your new URLs, then you don't need to worry about covering every single one of your old URLs - stick with the ones the had links pointing to them.
A good way to measure how many of your 301 redirects are being used is to append query parameters to the end of the resolving URL (ex. below) where you set the src parameter to the referring URL. This gives you some unique identifiers to apply filters to in your landing page report in Google Analytics.
/old-page >> /new-page?redir=301&src=/old-page
-
As I understand it, there is two aspects to 301 redirects.
- User experience
- Organic search
Matt Cutts says, there is no limit the number of 301 redirects, unless they are chained together. (ie. start_page > page1 > page2 > proper_page)
I don't expect it will impact on site speed much, nothing you couldn't regain with a bit of speed optimisation.
From a user perspective if you have moved an old page that has high traffic or some good quality links on it. It is very important to ensure that traffic N is back on the right page using a 301.
From organic search perspective (especially Google) again if you are using 301 is it will eventually update its own index to include the new page indicated.
There are two things you should be aware of: -
- By using a 301 from an old page, you could resurrect a bad back link
- A small amount of link authority is lost (only very small)
-
What happens when you have thousands? Is it sensible to remove 301's from say, two years ago?
-
I generally try to keep redirect lists for my clients under 100. You mentioned you had some links to 404 pages, I'd focus on those and add others as you see fit based on traffic volume to those old pages. I've never actually tested the threshold at which site speed starts to become a problem, I see some experimenting in my future!
-
Hi Logan,
Thanks for the insight. Would a few hundred re-directs be a site speed bummer for Shopify hosted site? I've worked on other sites that had decent speed and hundreds of re-directs. Firing off spitstorm of 404s on urls that used to be landing pages for links seems sub-optimal as well.
Best... Mike
-
Hi,
You should keep your 301s to a minimum. Every time a URL is requested, the server checks every single redirect you have to see if there's a match. The larger your redirect list gets, the more impact it'll have on site speed.
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
-
Are there any downsides to using a canonical tag temporarily?
I'm working on redesigning our website. One of the content types has a main archive page (/success-stories) containing all of the success stories (written by graduates of our program). Because we plan to have success stories for other people (non-graduates), I'm using category hierarchies (/success-stories/graduates and success-stories/nonprofits, for example). It will go one level deeper to organize graduates by graduation year (/success-stories/graduates/%year%). I think this will work out well. However, we won't have non-graduate success stories for a little while, probably at least a few weeks, which means that /success-stories and /.../graduates indices will contain the same content for a while. So my question is this: Will it hurt to use a canonical tag that points to /success-stories/graduates as the authority until the main archive page contains more than just graduates? Or would it be better to use a 302 redirect from /success-stories to /.../graduates until more diverse content is added?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bcaples0 -
URL Migration: Better to have .301s processed or 200s?
I'm migrating sub-domains to sub-folders, but this question is likely applicable for most URL migrations. For example: subdomain1.example.com to example.com/subdomain1 and any child pages. Bear with me as it may just be me but I'm having trouble understanding whether internal links (menu, contextual etc and potentially the sitemaps) should be kept as the pre-migration URL (with .301 in place to the new URL) to give Google a chance to process the redirects or if they should be updated straight away to the new URL to provide a 200 response as so many guides suggest. The reason I ask is unless Google specifically visits the old URL from their index (and therefore processes the .301), it's likely to be found by following internal links on the website or similar which if they're updated to reflect the new URL will return a 200. I would imagine that this would be treated as a new page, which is concerning as it would have a canonical pointing toward itself and the same content as the pre-migrated URL. Is this a problem? Do we need to allow proper processing of redirects for migrations or is Google smarter than this and can work it out if they visit the old URL at a later date and put two and two together? What happens in-between? I haven't seen any migration guides suggest leaving .301s in place but to amend links to 200 as soon as possible in all instances. One thought is I guess there's also the Fetch as Google tool within Search Console which could be used with the old URLs - could this be relied on? Apologies if this topic has been covered before but it's quite difficult to search for without returning generic topics around .301 redirects. Hope it makes sense - appreciate any responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyCatlow0 -
Old URLs that have 301s to 404s not being de-indexed.
We have a scenario on a domain that recently moved to enforcing SSL. If a page is requested over non-ssl (http) requests, the server automatically redirects to the SSL (https) URL using a good old fashioned 301. This is great except for any page that no longer exists, in which case you get a 301 going to a 404. Here's what I mean. Case 1 - Good page: http://domain.com/goodpage -> 301 -> https://domain.com/goodpage -> 200 Case 2 - Bad page that no longer exists: http://domain.com/badpage -> 301 -> https://domain.com/badpage -> 404 Google is correctly re-indexing all the "good" pages and just displaying search results going directly to the https version. Google is stubbornly hanging on to all the "bad" pages and serving up the original URL (http://domain.com/badpage) unless we submit a removal request. But there are hundreds of these pages and this is starting to suck. Note: the load balancer does the SSL enforcement, not the CMS. So we can't detect a 404 and serve it up first. The CMS does the 404'ing. Any ideas on the best way to approach this problem? Or any idea why Google is holding on to all the old "bad" pages that no longer exist, given that we've clearly indicated with 301s that no one is home at the old address?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxclever0 -
We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301s?
We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301 redirects or will search engines know to remove the old 404 pages from the SERPs? We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301s?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrandOptimizations0 -
Any solutions for implementing 301s instead of 302 redirects in SharePoint 2010?
We have an issue with Google indexing multiples of each page in our sitemap (www.upmc.com). We've tried using rel_canonical, but it appears that GoogleBot is not honoring our canonicals. Specifically, any of the pages Google indexes that end without a file extension, such as .aspx are 302 redirected to a .aspx page. Example - The following pages all respond as 302 redirects to http://www.upmc.com/services/pages/default.aspx http://www.upmc.com/services/ http://www.upmc.com/services http://www.upmc.com/Services/ http://www.upmc.com/Services Has anyone been able to correct this inherent issue with Sharepoint so that the redirects are at least 301s?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jessdyl0 -
Redirecting thin content city pages to the state page, 404s or 301s?
I have a large number of thin content city-level pages (possibly 20,000+) that I recently removed from a site. Currently, I have it set up to send a 404 header when any of these removed city-level pages are accessed. But I'm not sending the visitor (or search engine) to a site-wide 404 page. Instead, I'm using PHP to redirect the visitor to the corresponding state-level page for that removed city-level page. Something like: if (this city page should be removed) { header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rriot
header("Location:http://example.com/state-level-page")
exit();
} Is it problematic to send a 404 header and still redirect to a category-level page like this? By doing this, I'm sending any visitors to removed pages to the next most relevant page. Does it make more sense to 301 all the removed city-level pages to the state-level page? Also, these removed city-level pages collectively have very little to none inbound links from other sites. I suspect that any inbound links to these removed pages are from low quality scraper-type sites anyway. Thanks in advance!2 -
New Site Structure and 301s
We're moving towards a new site with new site structure. The old site has numerous backlinks to past events that won't be published on the new site. The new site will have about 60 future events that are currently active on the old site as well. I was wondering the best way to move forward with the 301 redirect plan. I was considering redirecting the old site structure to an "archive.ourdomain.co.uk" subdomain and redirecting the 60 or so active events to their equivalents on the new site. Would this be a sensible plan? Also for the active events, is there any difference between: _redirecting the old page to the archive page and then forwarding to the equivalent on the new page _ and redirecting the old page directly to the new page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chanm790 -
301s from previous site
Hi! Got quite a tricky problem regarding a client, http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/ and their previous site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/ Here's the background: We have approx 1500 'listing' pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/listing/view/1925/the-barre-des-ecrins-or-the-dome-des-ecrins-mountaineering-trip They bring in min 2k hits/month, and also add to the overall site authority I suspect. They will eventually all have a home on main domain. When they do, they will also each have been rewritten to be unique, so the value of them will increase (many are currently not). We also have landing pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/view/559/volunteering-holidays- which despite being hideous are ranked fairly well (page 1 for key terms). We cannot currently fulfil all these on main domain, but do not want to shut them down and lose positioning. Choices as I see it: Make a landing page e.g. muchbetteradventures.com/volunteering and a) redirect from old landing page, b) redirect all related 'listings' to this page. May help preserve rankings of main landing page (the most important), but not of any listings? Import all listings to have a home on main domain, (probably as children of a landing page, but not rewritten to be unique just yet). Make them not accessible from homepage, and change functionality of them so that new visitors from google are told we cannot currently help them with this trip. This is more work to complete so will take longer to do and is a distraction from our core focus so needs good justification! Stay running largely as we are, slowly redirecting 1 page at a time as we carry over more and more options to main domain. This will take over 12 months min.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0