How do I clean up this 301 disaster?
-
I launched my site, InternetCE.com, and blog, www.continuingeducationjournal.com, a few years ago.
I then learned I should probably merge the content, and foolishly created a subdomain, http://blog.internetce.com, and 301 redirected the blog to it. As an aside, my site is on a microsoft server, thus cannot host my wordpress blog on it.
After a bit more study, I realized that my blog wasn't helping me nearly as much as it could be, so I 301'd it again to http://internetce.com/blog.
In just becoming a pro member (long overdue) I realize that my entire site needs to be 301'd to merge non-www and www versions.
I read somewhere that mr. cutts says not to 301 more than twice for fear of mistakenly being construed as something a bit to spammy.
So, here I sit..not sure what to do.
Does anyone have any advice on how to most efficiently correct this spaghetti bowl?
Many thanks!
-
I completely agree with what Ryan Kent said. As with a lot of things, and even though it is a bit messy, if you are doing things for genuine reasons you are probably OK. If all of the redirected sites are pointing to where the content should be and now resides that is going to be OK, just make sure that you leave the 301's up there for a good amount of time (6 months or more).
-
i agree with Ryan your problem is not so great, just replace all teh 301's to the new site in one hop, dont be lazy and 301 all to the home page, as Bing for one will dismiss them.
also if the pages have no links, then there is little to gain by 301ing them.
As for hosting word press on a Microsoft server, you certainly can. if you use the Web Platform Installer it will do it all for you.
-
Hi Aaron.
Your situation is a bit messy, but actually it's not so bad.
Step 1 - implement a site wide www to non-www redirect (or vice-versa) on your InternetCE.com site.
Step 2 - update your 301 from the original site, www.continuingeducationjournal.com, to ensure the redirect happens in 1 hop.
Step 3 - update your 301 redirect from the blog subdomain (http://blog.internetce.com) to ensure the redirect happens in 1 hop.
Whenever possible all redirects should be a single hop. If a user bounces from your old blog to your subdomain, to your main domain but as www then to your main domain's root that would be 3 hops and a lot of PR would be wasted in the process.
The most popular pages should update within search engines in a couple days, while the least popular pages may take a month.
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
-
301 Redirect keep html files on server?
Hello just one quick question which came up in the discussion here: http://moz.com/community/q/take-a-good-amount-of-existing-landing-pages-offline-because-of-low-traffic-cannibalism-and-thin-content When I do 301 redirects where I put together content from 2 pages, should I keep the page/html which redirects on the server? Or should I delete? Or does it make no difference at all?
Technical SEO | | _Heiko_0 -
260k 301 redirects
Hello, I just found that some of the urls on my site have both ugly characters and some other things I'd like to fix (such as ---- into a single - ) After some local tests i've seen that If i leave some imperfections there will be 48k different urls on the other hand if the renaming procedure is strict i'll have around 260k out of 2.3M urls to be renamed. If I'm going to do this I'll create new canonicals meta tag and redirect old urls with 301 headers to the new location. The content will not change. My big doubt is SEO wise, I know that I'll have better urls, but aren't those too much redirects on a single day? what would you do if you wish to have shipshape urls and know some of these are crap? thanks
Technical SEO | | mylittlepwny0 -
Switching from a .org to .io (301 domain redirect)
I'm considering switching my main site from a .org to .io address; the .org is an exact match domain which helped to kickstart it a few years ago and now has about 50% repeat visitors, but was thrown off the Apple affiliation program for trademark infringement. I've found and purchased a nice (non-infringing) .io domain, and I've read the advice here on how to properly 301 the old domain; but my question is - does it matter that it's .io? Is this going to significantly hurt my rankings, even when everything has been 301'd properly? Another thought I had is that I may actually come out better off in the long run, what with Google penalties being applied to exact match domains. Is this a ranking suicide? If so, I'm tempted to leave it as is; even without the affiliation, it's making a good amount every month in ad fees that I don't want to disrupt. Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | w0lfiesmithUK0 -
301 on certain url string
I have a few thousand old urls with the string /content/ in them and are looking for a way to 301 batch redirect them. So for all the urls that contain the word 'content' I would like to redirect to 1 specific page. I have tried the methods below without success. Regular 301's are working fine but this particular method is not working for me. I am running a Joomla site but I don't imagine that would have any impact. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Redirect 301 ^content/.*$ http://www.mysite.com Redirect 301 ^content/ http://www.mysite.com
Technical SEO | | omega0 -
301 Redirecting weird URLs with % in them
I've been working on redirecting links reported as 404 in Google webmaster tools. I've stumbled upon 41 URLs that Google is reporting as 404 that include a '%' in the URL, but I don't know how to redirect. Here is an example: URL: bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ Attempted redirect: redirect 301 /bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ http://www.mysite.com/ Unfortunately, after implementing the redirect, http://www.mysite.com/bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ still resolves a 404 error. Anyone successfully fix these errors using Apache .htaccess?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
301 redirects and OSE
We run a blog/video real estate site (yochicago.com) as one of the venues for sponsored content for our clients looking for off-page SEO and inbound links. I'm working with a client who we've linked to a handful of times in the last few weeks, but I'm not seeing any external links from our site on PRO/OSE. Come to find that our writer has been linking to http://clientsite.com, instead of http://www.clientsite.com, which is the canonical site. I wouldn't have thought that this would make a difference, and about an hour of web research seems to confirm that it shouldn't make a difference, save for losing a little bit of SEO credit. What am I missing? Any input would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mikescotty0 -
301 mistake in Google Webmaster Tools?
Google webmaster tools has a warning for our site map saying that this url (and a couple of others) have a 301 redirect in them. http://www.aquinasandmore.com/catholic-gifts/Immaculate-Heart-of-Mary-Bookmark/sku/59682 I've checked the link and don't see that it actually is redirecting. Any thoughts on why this is popping up?
Technical SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
200 Redirects for SEO instead of 301
We are working with a company on re-platforming our website. On a call yesterday they outlined a strategy to use 200 redirects for our top keywords instead of 301s. I am not familiar with this type of redirect and was wondering if anyone could provide some more insight.
Technical SEO | | EvergladesDirect0