Redirects
-
Hello,
My question is: how important is it to wait for the a redirect to get seen and cached before you take down the old page?
More in depth: my old platform has seriously limited my ability to add sitemaps and make edits to htacces. I just want to change nameservers (which will delete everything on there) and upload the htaccess is that alright?
Another way of saying it: when redirecting a page, is it necessary for google to see the old page before it is deleted?
Thanks
Tyler
-
Hi Tyler.
Both the links you offer are to Dr Pete's profile page. I am presuming this response was shared with you for your private Q&A?
As a follow up to you or Dr Pete I would ask the following questions:
Would you agree the best method of redirect would be at the server level?
If so, would you agree that once a redirect is implemented at the server level there is no reason to keep the old page on the server, and that even if the old page was kept it would never be seen or crawled as long as the server redirect was in place?
If the answer to both of the above questions is yes, then it is in perfect alignment with the information I shared. If the answer is "no", then I would have further questions based on the response.
What method are you using for the redirection?
The first response I shared specifically clarified it was for a server (htaccess) redirect. I use that example since it is the most common form in my experience, but there are other ways to do it.
Thank you for sharing the reply. So far it sounds like it affirms the response I offered.
-
by http://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/22897
It depends a bit on how the redirect is implemented. People sometimes rush to remove an old page from links, XML sitemaps, etc. and then run into a bit of irony - if Google doesn't recrawl the old page, they don't see the redirect and may not process it (or they'll have to find the new page by themselves and kill the old page, which can take a lot longer).
If your redirect is at the server level, like an Apache htaccess directive, you may not need the old page to actually exist. The redirect will happen without it. Typically, though, I'd leave a reference to the old page, like a line in the XML sitemap, at least for a few weeks.
Of course, if the old page is frequently crawled (it has a lot of outside links, etc.), you may be just fine. It's typically deeper pages that dont' get crawled often that run into trouble.
I'm not quite sure what you're saying about changing nameservers (or how that ties to htaccess) though. What method are you using for the redirection?
-
I'm thinking that google may go back to the actual old page in some way.
To the best of my knowledge, that is simply not possible.
Google can choose to ignore the robots.txt. Google can choose to ignore a meta tag. Google can choose to do just about anything it wants with respect to page rankings and SERPs. What Google cannot do is access a page on a web server to which it does not have access.
Google cannot tell the web server "hey, I know you are showing a 301 here but I don't want to be redirected. Show me the original page instead". At least, they can't based on my understanding of how the web works. If I am mistaken, I would love to learn about it so I can improve.
-
interesting. the source was very reliable and actually I am agreeing with what you are saying. I'm thinking that google may (during this discussion in early 2010) go back to the actual old page in some way. Otherwise what would be the point of leaving it up? There may be a caviat in the googel algo that likes it when you seem transparent. This is the old page and this is the new page. Showing that you still have control over the old page. I understand that the googlebot wont even get to the page if it sees a redirect in the htaccess. So this is the reason for the question. I asked a private and question and we'll see what comes back.
-
In a normal web page request, the requested page is provided by the host server with a 200 header code.
In a 301 situation, the new page is returned with a 301 header code. This would happen whether the old page is present or not. Even if the old page was present, the hosting web server would not look at nor offer the old page.
If there is no additional information or context, I would stand by my original statement. My question to the person who is the source of the statement would be, what exactly is Google supposed to see on the page before it is redirected? What has changed from the last time Google saw the page?
-
Ryan,
No I'm not referring to a link.
There's nothing wrong with that statement and it was not taken out of context.
There's no additional information that I am concealing.The 301 can go up immediately. The question is can the old url be deleted before it has been cached as a new url. After it gets cached it will show as the new url in the serps. Then it's safe to be taken down.
-
The fine people at bruce clay said it's important to let the page be seen before deleting it.
Do you have a specific link? Something is wrong with that statement and I feel it must be taken out of context.
Or possibly there is additional details you have not shared? Has the page changed in some way? Let's say your page is crawled by Google every 2 weeks. So it was crawled last week and you decide today you wish to 301 the page. You are suggesting to wait a week to let Google re-crawl the page before 301'ing it. My question is, what has changed on the page since the last crawl? What do you wish Google to see?
-
The fine people at bruce clay said it's important to let the page be seen before deleting it.
-
when redirecting a page, is it necessary for google to see the old page before it is deleted?
If you are performing the redirect via htaccess, then no. A 301 redirect is simply a header code. It lets Google know the page which is being displayed is not the page requested, but a different URL. Google then understands the need to replace the old URL with the new one.
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
-
Redirect By IP location
Hi All, I have a client who operates in multiple countries with the sub directory structure. In AU for their main brand name .com site still ranks in the first position but /au ranks for most of the other terms. Current we have a 301 redirect in place for .com for anyone accessing the site from AU to /au. This is only for home pages as other .com pages don't rank in Australia. Just wondering what implication this can have on our SEO campaign. Cheers
Technical SEO | | SSP21
Thank you for your expertise and insights in advance.1 -
Javascript redirects -- what are the SEO pitfalls?
Q: Is it dangerous (SEO fallout) to use javascript redirects? Tech team built a browser side tool for me to easily redirect old/broken links. This is essentially a glorified 400 page -- pops a quick message that the page requested no longer exists and that we're automatically sending you to a page that has the content you are looking. Tech team does not have the bandwidth to handle this via apache and this tool is what they came up with for me to deliver a better customer experience. Back story: very large site and I'm dealing with thousands of pages that could/should/need to be redirected. My issue is incredibly similar to what Rand mentioned way back in a post from 2009: Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO? We've also decided to let these pages 404 and monitor for anything that needs an apache redirect. Tool mentioned above was tech's idea to give me "the power" to manage redirects. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | FR1230 -
Is page rank lost through a 301 redirect?
Hi everyone. I'd really appreciate your help with this one 🙂 I've just watched Matt Cutt's video 'what percentage of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect?' and I am confused. I had taken this to mean that a re-direct would always lose you page rank, but watching it again I am not so sure. He says that the amount of page rank lost through a 301 redirect is the same as any other link. Does this mean that no page rank at all is lost during site migrations? Or is it the case that first page rank would be lost from the original link and then more page rank would be lost from any subsequent redirects? watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw
Technical SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Rebranding / Redirecting
Hi I have a client who wants to re-brand their shopify clothing store under new domain name. Whilst still a clothing store its going to have different department structure and product pages and will hence be a different store/site. Is there anyway to pass any of the history/authority of existing site to the new one such as 301 redirecting the top level pages of existing site to nearest equivalent pages of new site etc or best to just redirect the old site domain to the new ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Questions about Redirects
Hi, I am trying to make sure that I can determine if a site has a 301 redirect set up to redirect the site from domain.com to www.domain.com and am hoping that you can confirm the following for me, or let me know if I am off track: is http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ a reliable way to check if a 301 redirect is set up? is Screaming Frog SEO Spider a good tool to use to see if a redirect is in place? if I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com, I should only get results for the site being indexed, not for the site that has the 301 redirect set up, right? For example, if www.domain.com is set up to redirect to domain.com, then I should get no search results for site:www.domain.com and only show indexed pages for domain.com. If I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com and get results for both, then does this mean that the redirect is not set up? if a redirect is set up from www.domain.com to domain.com, should the crawl report should only show one page crawled on www.domain.com? if a crawl report shows same number of pages for www.domain.com as for domain.com, does that mean that redirect is not set up properly? Thanks in advance for your help! Carolina
Technical SEO | | csmm0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
Wordpress 301 redirects
I use wordpress as CMS on a few sites and I noticed that word press automattically places 301s if I change a url etc. I believe it does it by having the following in the .htaccess file: BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Should I use this? I feel like it limits my control over the 301s.
Technical SEO | | mmaes0 -
On Page 301 redirect for html pages
For php pages youve got Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Technical SEO | | shupester
Header( "Location: http://www.example.com" );
?> Is there anything for html pages? Other then Or is placing this code redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.php in the .htaccess the only way to properly 301 redirect html pages? Thanks!0