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
-
How to add parameter to url with 301 and wildcard
So this is my situation. I want to redirect : example.com/post1/ to example.com/post1/?m=yes
Technical SEO | | CarlLSweet0 -
Maintaining Link Value Of Old URLS With 301 Redirects
Large ecommerce site that has been around for a long time (15+ years.) During that time technology has changed a lot and we are running into issues maintaining 301 redirects for very old urls. For example we have a good amount of links to product and category pages. Some of the old links are to products that still exist and will exist for many years to come.(of note little to no traffic comes via these links. Most of them are close to 9 years old so they are buried deep within articles, forums, or websites) However as we make changes to the site and URL structure these old urls are taking up more resources to continue to maintain 301 redirects. I am Leary of no longer supporting them because I do not want it to impact rankings however there is concern on how much development time and technology resources it takes to continue to support as time goes on. Does anyone have experience handling redirects 3 or 4 url structures old? Looking for insight from someone who has crossed this bridge before.
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC0 -
Which way round to 301 redirect?
Hi We have just added a new layered navigation menu to our website. so for example we had Before : www.tidy-books.co.uk/chidlrens-bookcases (this has the seo juice) And Now: http://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-book-storage/childrens-bookcases Might be a stupid question but do I redirect the 'now' url to the 'before' url or the the other way round I look forward to hearing your thoughts Thanks
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
Htaccess code to 301 redirect a folder change
Hi, I need some help to redirect all my site as there was a folder change. eg, the old structure was www.mysite.com/stuff-1/bags.html and I need it to go to the same structure without the "-1" eg: /stuff/bags.html
Technical SEO | | Paul_MC
The "bags.html" will be lots of different products, so this would be a wildcard? What would the htaccess code need to be? Thanks0 -
Simple 301 redirect a subfolder to another subfolder
Hi, I have a number of sub-folders that I have to move, each of which contains a number of files. subfolder A has files a, b & c subfolder B has files d, e & f
Technical SEO | | aactive
subfolder C has files g, h & i A, B & C folders need to be X, Y & Z Will the following work? RewriteRule ^subfolder-A/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-X/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-B/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-C/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Z/ [R=301,L] will this result in visitors to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-B/f.html being redirected to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/f.html? All on the same domain. in reality we are talking hundreds of sub folders and thousands of files so we don't want to have to reference every file individually in the htaccess. Thanks0 -
301 permanent re-direct
My site can be accessed either with or without the www. Does this affect my search positions and do error 301-redirect cause any ill effects?
Technical SEO | | fireman0 -
Could a URL change path conflict a 301 redirect?
Hi Mozzers, We create multiple pages for one of my client. Some of them are replacing old pages. I setup 5 of them out of 40. I was able to set them live via the drupal CMS. The new pages were actually published but didn't have any URL but had nodes in directory such as www.example.com/node298. To set them live i changed the url path to one page that already existed( www.example.com/old). In order to setup the replacing page: www.example.com/node298 i added the same name as the old one but in order to avoid URL conflicts with new page(www.example.com/new) I had to change the old page's url path as well such as www.example.com/old2) I know i have to 301 redirect the old to the new obviously but my question is: does a URL path change on the old page www.example.com/old matters in when 301 ing it? will it still transfer all the juice to the new page Visual Process: Main goal: www.example.com/old redirect to www.example.com/new but these two are exactly the same url So modification of URL path: www.example.com/old to www.example.com/old2 to avoid URL conflict Therefore www.example.com/old2 =www.example.com/old (just url change path difference) Question: Because of this url change, will a 301 from www.example.com/old2 to www.example.com/new will still carry all the juice that www.example.com/old carried or not? I hope i didn't make it too confusing. Let me know if it is the case Thanks Mozzers Ty
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
301 Redirect "wildcard" question
I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following: sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=2d&page=1 sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=3a&page=1 etc etc. I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark. These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0