Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
-
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue.
I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place.
Thank you.
-
Personally I'd start with a link analysis to answer the question, "Are they stronger than you?" You'll want to look at their sheer volume as well as the quality and when they were built to get a feel for their current activities. After that I'd obviously look at your content. Does your content comply with current SEO best practices in it's type and formatting and down to the technological questions such as "Do you have clean and fast code?" and "Are you formatting properly?"
If you're looking for assistance in the process Moz actually offers a list of their recommended SEOs. It's a good list.
You'll find it at https://moz.com/community/recommended.
-
If I were you sister...
A. what exactly would you recommend to do an "immeidate" round of competitor analysis as well as analysis our sit?
B. Or Whom to assist us.
So we can make an informed decision on how best to spend our time and what valuable funds we have left. ( If you feel more comfortable with your answer off line, I am open to that too.)
Thank you!
-
_When is the right time to just start over with a new domain name? _ Hindsight being the 20/20 that it is it's very hard to know until it's too late. I always suggest to try to work with your current site as it's generally easier to repair that to replace (generally ... not always).
The variable at play now is that after two years your site may have recovered BUT not be ranking as the competition may well have upped their game or other algorithmic factors may be at play. I've seen that a number of times where sites don't bounce back not because they didn't do the right thing but because while they were busy repairing their issues, their competition was busy moving their sites forward.
To know what to do I'd start with a round of competitor analysis. Don't compare your rankings with where they were but rather compare what your site's strength is relative to the people ranking today. And of course, try not to think of your content or links as better simply because you like it - try to look at it all as a bot would.
-
Regarding ..."Of course, with a Penguin penalty you might go bankrupt before they get around to rewarding you for good behavior)"
_When is the right time to just start over with a new domain name? _
Google does not care how many internet businesses it has destroyed.
(After 2 years of hard work and not recovering from Panda, we are seroiusly thinking of just cutting over to a new domain name and giving up on a domain we have owned since 2000 just so we can stop spending money on trying to be Google approved again and stop the financial bleeding to loss of orders.)
-
I would suggest doing a bit of a crawl error report in GSC to establish how many error links are being pointed at your site. I would suggest it is not too late to get them in place.... remember you will possibly have lots of external links that are incorrect and need to resolve to a viable page.
Search Engine Roundtable just released a very timely article - Click to read in full
Google's John Mueller said in the Google+ Hangout from last Friday that he'd recommend you keep your 301 redirects live and in place for at least a year after you set them up. He said "I'd aim for at least a year," when it comes to keeping your 301 redirects in place.
He said it can take 6-months to a year for Google to fully recognize a site has moved. Plus you may have people finding old links and if those no longer have redirects, they may lead to a 404 page or a parked domain, which would result in a bad user experience.
-
Short answer: No its never too late.
People rescue lost links in this way all the time. The old pages may not have been de-indexed yet especially if there are being linked to from another website.
Ideal solution: Locate all the links pointing to old pages and get them updated to point to the new page. Put the 301 in place anyway to save any you miss.
Nearly ideal solution: Slap a 301 redirect on it - BUT make sure that the 301 is to a direct replacement / relevant page.
There is no negative implications for doing the 301's this late... (as long as the pages are relevant). But not doing them... well as you have seen... rankings will suffer.
Ive seen links that are months to years old get rescued this way, so get them redirects on!
-
They will recrawl it but equally important is that traffic following links to your site will get where they're supposed to go. A good rule of thumb with search engines as well as humans ... it's never too late to do the right thing.
(Of course, with a Penguin penalty you might go bankrupt before they get around to rewarding you for good behavior)
Hope that helps !
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
-
Few pages without SSL
Hi, A website is not fully secured with a SSL certificate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
Approx 97% of the pages on the website are secured. A few pages are unfortunately not secured with a SSL certificate, because otherwise some functions on those pages do not work. It's a website where you can play online games. These games do not work with an SSL connection. Is there anything we have to consider or optimize?
Because, for example when we click on the secure lock icon in the browser, the following notice.
Your connection to this site is not fully secured Can this harm the Google ranking? Regards,
Tom1 -
Redirecting homepage to internal page (2nd Tier page)
We are planning to experiment redirecting our homepage to one of the 2nd tier page. I mean....example.com to example.com/page. We need this page to rank well, but it doesn't have much internal links or external back-links, so we opt for this redirect. Advantage with this page is, it has "keyword" we want to rank for in URL. "page" in example.com/page. Will this help or hurt us in SEO? I think we are missing keyword in our root domain, so interested to highlight this page. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Several 301 Redirects to Same Page
Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,0 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
Too many 301 redirects?
Hey, My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website. These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic. I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website? If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content? For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site: 1099softwarepro.com 1099softwarepro.info 1099softwarepro.net 1099softwarepro.biz 1099softwareprofessionals.com 1099softwareprofessionals.info ...you get the point
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
New Site: Use Aged Domain Name or Buy New Domain Name?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterwhitewebdesign
I have the opportunity to build a new website and use a domain name that is older than 5 years or buy a new domain name. The aged domain name is a .net and includes a keyword.
The new domain would include the same keyword as well as the U.S. state abbreviation. Which one would you use and why? Thanks for your help!0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
301 Redirects After Company Acquisition
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt1