301 Redirects on Large Real Estate Website
-
Hi guys,We are about to move over to a new website and need advice on handling the 301 redirects.We have a large real estate website with around 12,000 pages, a lot of these are properties (about 10,000)On our old website, the url structure for each property is as follows -domainname.com/property/view?property=14863on our new site, the url structure isdomainname.com/properties/view/6137The property ID number is always different from old site to new. The way we see it, we have two options. a.) a manual redirect of each and every property url. A very very long jobb.) a folder level redirect, so redirect the 'property' folder on the old site into the 'properties' folder on new. The con with this one is we are not sure if this is the best route to take, if it is how we would go about it?Some advice would be really appreciated guys. I know there are some hyper intelligent SEO's in here and we need to make sure we handle this right!Many thanks in advance.Mark
-
This is true, you can wait for google to deindex them, but that can take 6 months or more.
You could also wait for the 404s to show up and check the referrer and then manually set up the redirect, but if you miss seeing them, you may also risk the linking site removing the link.
Another thing you could do is pull reports from GWMT and Bing WMT and Majestic to discover who is linking to which pages, and then start with those redirects, then watch out for the 404s and pick them up as you discover them.
If you do want to push google along with removing the old pages, you can do it by requesting them in WMT. 12,000 isn't really many, and last time I tried it, you can ask for 1,000 per day, but you have to do them one at a time. That means either a slow manual process or do it with a macro. I think I've had 20,000 or more deleted that way.
-
Hi Mark,
Considering that the old property IDs and new property IDs don't match up and you'd have to configure 1-to-1 redirects (with what sounds like a lot of manual work to get it right and potentially a very large .htaccess file), I'm going to ask a dumb question: why do you need to redirect all of the properties?
In cases like this, I invariably pull some data in to prioritize URLs. Namely, inbound link and direct/referral traffic data.
If a page is not linked to from any external subdomains and gets little or no direct or referral traffic, it's usually best to simply let it return a 404 once you've updated the site - Google will hit the 404 and de-index the page in due time, while the new page will (provided the new site has sound architecture and some authority to justify a deep crawl budget) get picked up.
The only justifiable reason to do a 1-to-1 301 redirect across the board for this many URLs, in my opinion, is if there is enough link equity / traffic to justify the work. Otherwise, Google knows how to handle 404s and they'll crawl/index the new property URLs in due time.
Best,
Mike -
Hey Alan,
Thanks loads for the advice there. Makes a lot of sense.
Problem I have is we do not have any kind of access to the old site. Nor the client having a good relationship with the agency who made the previous site.
I have run multiple crawls of the old site with Screaming Frog and Moz and I just cant get all the properties spidered. Out of the total amount of properties I have about one third of them, which of course can be redirected.
We made a final change to the url structure so the property address is added. The urls now look like the following -
OLD - domainname.com/property/view?property=14863
NEW - domainname.com/property/street-name-postcode/propertyid
The main problem we have and why I think it is not possible using mod rewrite, is the property ids are different on both sites. There is really nothing in common between the two URLs at all aside from /property/ and page title.
Any further advice would be very much appreciated Alan as its clear you have done jobs like this before.
Thanks,
Mark
-
If you have unix and shell access it should be a snap.
but as you're asking this question, you probably don't even know what "grep" is
Get a list of title and URLs from each site
mix them together
sort by title
this will tell you if there are duplicates or if you missed any
if the domain names are different search and replace them so they are the same
Manipulate the list so it is in redirect format
12,000 is not a lot. I worked on sites with several million.
Don't do a folder level redirect.
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
-
Old Content after 301 Redirect Success
Hi, I want to ask what need I do to the old content after my 301 redirect to the new domain with the same content success? Do I need to remove that old content? Nothing bad happen right? Thanks
Technical SEO | | matthewparkman0 -
301 Redirect to add juice from Keyword A to Keyword B
Here's our situation: Our company sells Employee HANDBOOKS (the book that explains to employees how the company itself is run, more or less). That's the technically correct term for them. However, many people use this term interchangeably with Employee MANUALS. Employee MANUALS are actually slightly different. (they're more specific, usually a list of common office policies and procedures and how to do them) When doing Keyword research, we learned that many, many people search for Employee MANUALS when they actually are interested in an employee HANDBOOK. We've got our page optimized for the Keyword Employee HANDBOOKS, because in our copy we always refer to it as such. Here's my question: Would it be "cloacking" or some other blackhat nonsense if we did this: #1. Take a copy of the current page, and make a second page for it with a slightly different URL, but optimize the SEO-relevant parts for the phrase Employee MANUAL. #2. That page will also include a 301-redirect towards the original page, which is identical except the SEO bits are optimized for Employee HANDBOOKS. My understanding here is that we'd get the SEO juice from the phrase Employee Manual, without actually having to do the upkeep on two different pages. We also avoid having to have a random page SEO optimized for an improper term just because of the general confusion about what the product is called. Are we on the right track here? Or is this going to annoy Google, or not have the result I'm predicting? Any insight is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | CEDRSolutions0 -
CNAME vs 301 redirect
Hi all, Recently I created a website for a new client and my next job is trying to get them higher in Google. I added them in OSE and noticed some strange backlinks. To my surprise the client has about 20 domain names. All automatically poiting to (showing) the same new mainsite now. www.maindomain.nl www.maindomain.be
Technical SEO | | Houdoe
www.maindomain.eu
www.maindomain.com
www.otherdomain.nl
www.otherdomain.com
... Some of these domains have backlinks too (but not so much). I suggested to 301 redirect them all to the main site. Just to avoid duplicate content. But now the webhoster comes into play: "It's a problem, client has only 1 hosting account, blablabla...". They told me they could CNAME the 20 domains to the main domain. Or A-record them to an IP address. This is too technical stuff for me. So my concrete questions are: Is it smart to do anything at all or am I just harming my client? The main site is ranking pretty well now. And some backlinks are from their copy sites (probably because everywhere the logo links to the full mainsite url). Does the CNAME or A-record solution has the same effect as a 301 redirect, from SEO perspective? Many thanks,
Hans0 -
301 redirect chains
Hi everyone, I've had my site for a while now and have changed the structure a number of times. I'm confident my 301's work well and am not concerned about dead ends on my site. My question is, is there a way to find 301 redirect chains? i.e. can I export my link data from webmaster tools and run it through some software that tells me how many steps my 301's are taking to get to the final page? I don't know for sure that there are long 301 chains in my link structure, but I have a suspicion and it's very hard to check by going through them manually. Thanks in advance Will
Technical SEO | | madegood0 -
301 Redirect question www to root.com
I have a site that has been up for a few weeks now and is currently in a www format and i am considering changing it to just mydomain.com I also have quite a few directory listings (including google places/bing) for this site w/ the www. url. If i do this, change it in my google analytics, and update my wordpress internal page + htaccess file. Will i lose any of the link juice i had from my www pages? Would this be something that would be advised since i've registered for many sites, or is there a potential that this could end up hurting me? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
301 redirect Issues
my clients site is www.greenbayharvest.co.uk When you enter that URL it redirects to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop, dont ask why, thats the way they set it up and thats what im stuck with. So, how do i resolve the 301 issue here. we want all things to point to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk, in terms of SEO but does the fact that there is a redirect going to /shop make this an issue? we appear to have: www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop www.greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop all these URL's go to the same same page so what is the best way to correct this? thanks for any help on this Lee
Technical SEO | | IPIM0 -
How to safely reduce the number of 301 redirects / should we be adding so many?
Hi All, We lost a lot of good rankings over the weekend with no obvious cause. Our top keyword went from p3 to p12, for example. Site speed is pretty bad (slower than 92% of sites!) but it has always been pretty bad. I'm on to the dev team to try and crunch this (beyond image optimisation) but I know that something I can effect is the number of 301 redirects we have in place. We have hundreds of 301s because we've been, perhaps incorrectly, adding one every time we find a new crawl error in GWT and it isn't because of a broken link on our site or on an external site where we can't track down the webmaster to fix the link. Is this bad practice, and should we just ignore 404s caused by external broken URLs? If we wanted to reduce these numbers, should we think about removing ones that are only in place due to external broken URLs? Any other tips for safely reducing the number of 301s? Thanks, all! Chris
Technical SEO | | BaseKit0 -
Any issues with lots of pages issuing 301 redirects?
Hi all, I'm working on a site redesign and it is possible the new site could issue a lot of 301 redirects as we may migrate from one forum solution to another. Is there any issue with crawlers getting a lot of 301 redirects from a site? Thanks Nick
Technical SEO | | nickswan0