How important are automatic 301s?
-
Ocassionally the URL for a product on our website will change. The shopping cart does NOT automatically create a 301 for the old URL to the new one. So in WMT the old URL's will appear as Not Found errors (even though all links in the cart automatically update, so there are no broken links within the cart).
These issues always sort themselves out with some time, but still disconcerting. Is this a major issue? Thanks!
-
Thanks Ryan,
They are URL's that we would like to have indexed, so any visitor could find them. They don't change often, but if a SKU for example changes, the cart automatically changes the URL to match the new SKU, but does not generate a 301. I'll look into this, thanks for the tip.
-
Are these URLs that are only accessible while using the shopping cart or the URLs that any visitor would find, regardless of interaction with the shopping cart? If it's the latter, it is a bit of a concern and you should probably find a way to prevent or amend those changes. If it's the former, it's doubtful that you'd want the search engines even crawling that aspect of your site, thus you could disallow that portion.
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
-
A website with a spam score of 5 is back linking to me. How important is to get that link removed?
There is a website that OSE has identified with a spam score of 5, it back links to me with a very specific key word. How important is it to have them remove those links?
Link Building | | absoauto0 -
What link techniques work but more importantly are ethical
We understand that links are still required to your site in order for it to rank well, but what is the best method of now obtaining those?
Link Building | | benjaminrhys0 -
Consolidating many external blogs onto main website: canonicals or 301s
Hi Everyone, Presently I have many blogs across a range of domains, each one targeting the client/type of user interested in that product (or service in this case). I originally set up this strategy to use the content of each blog to create a "link juice farm" (our products are educational courses so have a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT target market depending on the course area), which in turn links to the related page/course on our main site. My plan is to move all the content from those external blogs into subcategories on my main website blog in order to increase its traffic, authority etc. Originally, I was going to cut and paste the content, then put in appropriate 301 redirects from the external blogs to the main site. However, I then thought about copying all the content to my main site, setting it as the canonical version, and leaving all the external blogs intact and running. The idea being, I still get the benefit of all those external links pointing back at my main website. Which would be the better strategy for me to pursue? Thanks in advance for your insights, I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out with this question.
Link Building | | love-seo-goodness0 -
Linking to a site in the US from a site in the UK - Good, bad or not important?
Would linking to a site in the US from the UK do harm or good if the site being linked to is industry related? i.e. a UK web design company linking to a US web design career site.
Link Building | | Tone_Agency0 -
How important are internal links as I have none according to a report
We used to rank well but not now I am looking at our reports and notice we have no internal links how important is this
Link Building | | Casefun0 -
How important are edu and gov backlinks?
I have heard that edu and gov backlinks are important but how so in a niche area like mine - real estate? Perhaps I am missing the point but I do not see how either type of site would ever backlink to a commercial real estate entity. If these are that important in theory, are they obtainable in practice?
Link Building | | casper4340 -
When looking at creating a backlink strategy which is more important to look at, Domain auhtority or page authority?
Trying to see which one has more relevance when looking at back linking, if it;s what more important, Domain or Page Authority?
Link Building | | rvillanueva0 -
How Important is Placement of Anchor Text
I'm working on a series of guest posts to help promote a site. These are competitive, high quality posts from a well-respected resource in the industry. I placed the author introduction at the front of the posts, with anchor text for the keywords we are targetting (e.g., "This is a guest post by John Doe, a [keyword] who ... and writes about [keyword]."). I understand that having the anchor text in a prominent location - such as near the front of the post - will probably be more authoritative than a sentence at the very end. My question: how significant is this difference? The blog that I am posting on wants to include author information at the end only and only have one link using the site name (which doesn't contain keywords). The post I sent had two deep links using keyword-rich anchor text, placed at the beginning. I am trying to decide whether to walk away and keep shopping the material around.
Link Building | | Falconberg1