Are 301s advisable for low-traffic URL's?
-
We are using some branded terms in URLs that we have been recently told we need to stop using. If the pages in question get little traffic, so we're not concerned about losing traffic from broken URLs, should we still do 301 redirects for those pages after they are renamed?
In other words, are there other serious considerations besides any loss in traffic from direct clicks on those broken URLs that need to be considered?
This comes up because we don't have anyone in-house that can do the redirects, so we need to pay our outside web development company. Is it worth it?
-
If those pages are indexed by Google and Google returns them in SERPs then yes, they will 404. That is why you need to test the page first and do a header redirect 301 to either the category page or the home page.
Hope that was the This Answered My Question : )
-
Great feedback! I still just have 1 remaining question, though, which I've posted below Richard's comments. Thanks!
-
The trademark issue is with the names of the subfolders, not the domain name.
-
So can you just change the links to look at the new URL? Still best to redirect them though.
Curious about why you have to change them now though as I just assumed you were using a competitors trademark in a domain before
-
Thanks for that tool! I was not familiar with it.
-
This almost fully answers my question. Those pages don't have inbound links from other sites. We have over 10,000 pages on the site, so we can't have links to them all. So, they aren't worth keeping for traffic or links.
But you say, "I would hope that you capture your 404 errors and 301 redirect all the time anyway." So, my last remaining question is: Am I necessarily creating 404 errors by not redirecting?
Thanks, everyone!
-
Yes, these are just pages on our main site. They will be renamed, and we will be keeping the content on the site.
-
If I'm reading this right though, it is only the URLs they've got to stop using, not the content. Therefore a 404 provide alternate content suggestions isn't necessary in this case; I agree that a 301 redirect is best solution - it passes the human traffic and the link juice to the correct location.
As to whether it is worth the cost, then of course it is the famous answer of "it depends". However, I'd imagine that the cost of redirects should be pretty minimal and if the old URLs drive just a couple of conversions (whatever that may be) then it should have been worthwhile, even ignoring the link juice.
-
As Ryan was stating; if those pages have inbound links, test those links for strength and if they are worth keeping, then 301.
Either way, I would hope that you capture your 404 errors and 301 redirect all the time anyway.
-
Sites put up and take down pages all the time. Broken links are of no consequence to the overall site quality.
This is a different discussion altogether, but broken URL situations actually offer an opportunity for a 404 page that offers users alternate content.
-
Are you linking out to these sites you have to get rid of?
In fact are they even sites or just other pages on your main site? I have maybe misunderstood
EDIT - I'll go ahead and assume I've just got the wrong end of the stick and it's pages on your site that you need to get rid of.
In that case if you can't redirect them can you change the links to point to different pages or even just remove them?
-
Thanks for this reply, and for the others!
OK, so the fact that your site has broken URLs doesn't bring your site in general down in the search engine rankings? Broken URLs aren't necessarily an indicator of a poor quality site that would result in some sort of penalty?
-
Redirecting them won't help the main domain rank for these brand terms, but it will capture the type in traffic and pass most of the link juice coming into these other sites.
Ultimately it shouldn't take your web development company long (unless you have hundreds) and indeed you could maybe even do it at the registrar easily (if not efficiently), so don't pay through the nose for it.
On the other hand, unless you rely on links from those other sites it won't harm your main site in any way by letting them die.
-
There are two things I would look closely at in such a situation...
Traffic: First, you want to know if these pages are generating any traffic. If they are, you should keep them. If they aren't (which it sounds like they aren't), move on to checking links...
Links: Before you scrap pages generating little inbound traffic, you should check to see if said pages have any inbound links. If they do, you would want to evaluate the quality of those links and determine if that is greater or lessor than the cost of keeping the pages and setting up redirects. If you determine these pages have valuable links, definitely 301 redirect them to a good substitute page.
When I speak of the cost associted with setting up the redirects I'm talking about the time taken to set up the redirects (likely your time or ITs time).
We use Open Site Explorer to help us audit inbound links to pages.
-
The link doesn't need to be broken. 301 redirect the existing link to the new one and anyone that is linking or typing or clicking into the old URL will be forwarded to the new one and they wont know it. Make sense? Yes, do it!
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
-
My Website's Home Page is Missing on Google SERP
Hi All, I have a WordPress website which has about 10-12 pages in total. When I search for the brand name on Google Search, the home page URL isn't appearing on the result pages while the rest of the pages are appearing. There're no issues with the canonicalization or meta titles/descriptions as such. What could possibly the reason behind this aberration? Looking forward to your advice! Cheers
Technical SEO | | ugorayan0 -
Moving wordpress to it's own server
Our company wants to remove wordpress from our current windows OS server at provider 1 and move it to a new server at provider 2. Godaddy handles our DNS. I would like to have it on the same domain without masking. I would like to make a DNS entry on godaddy so that our current server and our new server can use the same URL (ie sellstuff.com). But I only want the DNS to direct traffic to our current server. The goal here is to have the new server using the same URL as the old server so nothing needs to be masked once traffic is redirected with a 301 rule in the htaccess file. But no traffic outside of the 301 rule will end up going to the new server. I would then like to edit the htaccess file on our current server to redirect to the new servers IP address when someone goes to sellstuff.com/blog. Does this make since and is it possible?
Technical SEO | | larsonElectronics0 -
Sitelinks only show when the URL is searched- Why don't they show when our company name is searched?
Why is is that when I search "protonmail.ch", sitelinks show for our company. However when you search for "ProtonMail", no sitelinks show, even though our homepage is now on the top result. We've been trying different things to improve the navigational structure of the homepage, such as using the <nav>tag. If you have any thoughts on why sitelinks might not be showing up, we'd really appreciate it! Thank you </nav>
Technical SEO | | kevinzh0 -
Sitemap issue? 404's & 500's are regenerating?
I am using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to generate a sitemap on http://www.atozqualityfencing.com. Last month, I had an associate create redirects for over 200 404 errors. She did this via the .htaccess file. Today, there are the same amount of 404s along with a number of 503 errors. This new Wordpress website was constructed on a subdirectory and made live by simply entering some code into the .htaccess file in order to direct browsers to the content we wanted live. In other words, the content actually resides in a subdirectory titled "newsite" but is shown live on the main url. Can you tell me why we are having these 404 & 503 errors? I have no idea where to begin looking.
Technical SEO | | JanetJ0 -
Should I make a new URL just so it can include a target keyword, then 301 redirect the old URL?
This is for an ecommerce site, and the company I'm working with has started selling a new line of products they want to promote.Should I make a new URL just so it can include a target keyword, then 301 redirect the old URL? One of my concerns is losing a little bit of link value from redirecting. Thank you for reading!
Technical SEO | | DA20130 -
Friendly URLs
Hi, I have an important news site and I am trying to implement user friendly URLs. Now, when you click a news in the homepage, it goes to a redirect.php page and then goes to a friendly url. the question is, It is better to have the friendly URL in the first link or it is the same for the robot having this in the finally url? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
How can I best find out which URLs from large sitemaps aren't indexed?
I have about a dozen sitemaps with a total of just over 300,000 urls in them. These have been carefully created to only select the content that I feel is above a certain threshold. However, Google says they have only indexed 230,000 of these urls. Now I'm wondering, how can I best go about working out which URLs they haven't indexed? No errors are showing in WMT related to these pages. I can obviously manually start hitting it, but surely there's a better way?
Technical SEO | | rango0 -
Can someone break down 'page level link metrics' for me?
Sorry for the, again, basic question - can someone define page level link metrics for me?
Technical SEO | | Benj250