Do I need to do 301s in this situation?
-
We have an e-commerce site built on Magento 2. We launched a few months ago, and had about 2K categories. The categories got indexed in Google for the most part. Shortly after launch, we decided to go with SLI for search and navigation because the native search/navigation was too slow given our database.
The navigation pages are now hosted navigation pages; meaning, the URLs have changed and they are now hosted by SLI.
I have done 301s for the most popular categories, but I didn't do 301s for all categories as we have to go through each category one-by-one and map it to the correct navigation page. Our new category sitemap only lists the new SLI category URLs.
Will the fact that we have not 301'd all of our former categories hurt us as far as SEO? Do I have to do 301 redirects for all former category pages?
-
Nigel,
Thanks for the feedback.
The product pages do not have the categories in the breadcrumbs. It is just home > product.
The thing is, the category pages that were indexed are already deindexed. And, we didn't build any links to the category pages as it was a new e-commerce site. I will try to see if there is a faster way of mapping the native categories to the hosted navigation pages.
Although it is much faster and more user friendly, I do regret using hosted navigation on the site now. Also, I may not use the hosted navigation service at the end of the year. I am wondering if I should hold off on the 301s, as will have to reverse the 301s if we cancel the service. What are your thoughts?
-
Hi Kevin
In short yes you do.
The thing is that if the categories are indexed in Google and someone clicks on one it will 404 which is not a great user experience. Also if those URLs are listed anywhere else in directories, blogs or any other site then visits from those sources will also 404. It's just very bad practice. Can't you just scrape all of the URLs, put them in a csv, add the new URLs and copy to .htaccess as a quick way of doing it?
By the way having navigation pages hosted externally on non-company URLs sounds like an SEO disaster to me. Your site's natural hierarchy from home>cat>product has the cat part on an external server. I can't see how this can possibly be good for SEO. Do your product URLs contain the category?
Regards Nigel
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
-
Do I need to add the actual language for meta tags and description for different languages? cited for duplicate content for different language
Hi, I am fairly new to SEO and this community so pardon my questions. We recently launched on our drupal site mandarin language version for the entire site. And when i do the crawl site, i get duplicate content for the pages that are in mandarin. Is this a problem or can i ignore this? Should i make different page titles for the different languages? Also, for the metatag and descriptions, would it better in the native language for google to search for? thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lynetteboss0 -
Do I need to do a 301, as well as adding re-write rules on Apache
I'm sure this has probably been asked somewhere before... We're implementing a URL re-write rule to convert non dub pages to the www. subdomain and also removing all trailing slashes as part of a basic canonicalisation exercise. The question is, as well as doing the URL rewrites within htaccess, should I also 301 those duplicate pages or does the URL rewrite do the job on it's own? Thanks mozzers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ultramod0 -
Need to know if this could be dangerous
We have recently launched an store, and we had created 301 redirects from the old product pages to the new ones. But we found that the new website performance was a quite slow, and that it would improve a lot if you add a number at the end of the product page url. But that implies to change the 301 redirect and to add a new one for the pages that has already been updated by the search engine. I mean. www.store.com/oscommerce/catalog/productpage.html has been now 301 redirected to www.store.com/sectionname/productpage this was 48 hours ago. But now, (I know it, we should check this before...) we need to change the url to www.store.com/sectionname/productpage/5487 this way the performance improves a lot. But we are afraid of doing two 301 in just 48 hours. any advice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
Shoud we find another way of solving the performance issue? Thanks0 -
Need help on SEO for my site. Can't figure out what is wrong.
My site, findyogi.com, isn't ranking well in google SERPs. For some good content and matching keyword, my pages are ranking 200+ whereas other sites that have similar or lower authority are ranking in top 10. I must be doing something fundamentally wrong but can't seem to figure out what. I am not looking at ranking 1 on google right now but my pages don't appear even on page 2-4. Sample Keyword- "Samsung galaxy s4 price in india" . Matching page - www.findyogi.com/mobiles/samsung/samsung-galaxy-s4-b94a37/price Please help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | namansr0 -
Need to know best practices of Search Engine Optimization 2013
I want to know best practices of Search Engine Optimization 2013 and also need best possible sources. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GM0070 -
How much great targeted conent do we need to add?
Hi, I'm adding content to a client's website through textbroker. It's ecommerce and it's tough to find backlinks. We have decided to write 100 articles of at least 500 words so that we can say in our backlink campaign email that we have 100 helpful articles. We're thinking that people would like that. Also, we think that 100 good helpful articles will give us traffic and natural backlinks. How do we know if 100 is enough? Do we need 200? 500? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Canonical tag vs 301 in this Panda situation - trying to wrap my brain around this!
Here's the situation. Let's say you have a development site that was created on a subdomain such as examplesite.webdesign.com. When the new site, examplesite.com launches, the developer forgot to remove examplesite.webdesign.com from the index. As such, two copies of the site exist. Because the development site existed first, examplesite.com ends up being affected by Panda and drops out of the search results. As a result only the development site is visible on Google searches. I've been trying to wrap my head around whether using canonical tags or 301 redirects would be best. On one hand you could insert a canonical tag on each page of the subdomain to tell Google that the correct version to index is examplesite.com. On the other hand you could do a 301 redirect from every page of the development site to to examplesite.com. Now, here's where it gets complicated. Because the new site has been flagged as a Panda site, in either case will it need to see a Panda refresh in order to be included in the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Need some urgent Panda advice. Open discussion about recovering from the Panda algorithm.
I have a site that has been affected by Panda, and I think I have finally found the problem. When I created this site in the year 2006, I bought content without checking it. Recently, when I went through the site I found out that this content had many duplicates around the web. Not 100% exact, but close to. The first thing I did is ask my best writer to rewrite these topics, as they are a must on my site. This is a very experienced writer, and she will make the categories and subpages outstanding. Second thing I did was putting a NOINDEX, FOLLOW robots meta in place for the pages I determined being bad. They haven't been de-indexed yet. Another thing I recently did is separate other languages and move these over to other domains (with 301's redirecting the old locations to the new.) This means that the site now has a /en/ directory in the URL which is no longer used. With this in mind I was thinking to relocate the NEW content, and 301 the old (to preserve the juice for a while.) For example: http://www.mysite.com/en/this-is-a-pandalized-page/ 301 to http://www.mysite.com/this-is-the-rewritten-page/ The benefits of doing this are: decreasing the amounts of directories in the URL getting rid of pages that are possibly causing trouble getting fresh pages added to the site Now, the advice I am looking for is basically this: Do you agree with the above? Or don't you agree? If you don't, please be so kind to include a reason with your answer. If you do, and have any additional information, or would like to discuss, please go ahead 🙂 Thanks, Giorgio PS: Is it proven that Panda is now a running update? Or is it still periodically executed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VisualSense1