301 redirect question
-
So I have an employer who owns a retail site and his category URLs are horrible. So, I am suggesting to him to create a new page with a pretty URL and 301 redirect the old page to the new page. I am suggesting this to him, because this will help increase CTR for the targeted keyword & help him rank higher for the term. He is apprehensive about this cause he thinks this will cause him to drop in ranking. Does anybody know any resources or have any past experiences that will back up my suggestion or his for that matter?
-
Thanks Elias for your fast response. You are correct in assuming that the URLs are not optimized & i appreciate your feedback. I totally agree with you about creating websites for both users and search engines, from my experience this is often overlooked.
-
From my experience...Initially, the site may drop in rankings - but over a period of time rankings should normalise and improve.
I think too often people forget that we are creating websites for users as well as search engines. I assume that currently the URLs are not optimised? Although optimising URLs doesn't have as much of an effect as it used to it should still help.
I think providing that you carry on with a link building campaign with links pointing directly to your new URLs you should be fine. It's important that the client is aware that rankings may drop in the short term so that they don't get a nasty shock!
Good luck!
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
-
Website's server IP address is redirected to blog by mistake; does Google responds?
Hi all, Our website's server IP address is set to be redirected to our blog by mistake and it stayed same for months. Is there any way Google recognises it and how it responds if so? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Question: About Google's personalization of search results and its impact on monitoring ranking results
Given Google's personalization of search results for anyone who's logged into a Google property, how realistic and how actually meaningful/worthwhile is it to monitor one's ranking results for any keyword term these days?
Algorithm Updates | | RandallScrubs0 -
Puzzling Penalty Question - Need Expert Help
I'm turning to the Moz Community because we're completely stumped. I actually work at a digital agency, our specialism being SEO. We've dealt with Google penalties before and have always found it fairly easy to identify the source the problem when someone comes to us with a sudden keyword/traffic drop. I'll briefly outline what we've experienced: We took on a client looking for SEO a few months ago. They had an OK site, with a small but high quality and natural link profile, but very little organic visibility. The client is an IT consultancy based in London, so there's a lot of competition for their keywords. All technical issues on the site were addressed, pages were carefully keyword targeted (obviously not in a spammy way) and on-site content, such as services pages, which were quite thin, were enriched with more user focused content. Interesting, shareable content was starting to be created and some basic outreach work had started. Things were starting to pick up. The site started showing and growing for some very relevant keywords in Google, a good range and at different levels (mostly sitting around page 3-4) depending on competition. Local keywords, particularly, were doing well, with a good number sitting on page 1-2. The keywords were starting to deliver a gentle stream of relevant traffic and user behaviour on-site looked good. Then, as of the 28th September 2015, it all went wrong. Our client's site virtually dropped from existence as far as Google was concerned. They literally lost all of their keywords. Our client even dropped hundreds of places for their own brand name. They also lost all rankings for super low competition, non-business terms they were ranking for. So, there's the problem. The keywords have not shown any sign of recovery at all yet and we're, understandably, panicking. The worst thing is that we can't identify what has caused this catastrophic drop. It looks like a Google penalty, but there's nothing we can find that would cause it. There are no messages or warnings in GWT. The link profile is small but high quality. When we started the content was a bit on the thin side, but this doesn't really look like a Panda penalty, and seems far too severe. The site is technically sound. There is no duplicate content issues or plaigarised content. The site is being indexed fine. Moz gives the site a spam score of 1 (our of 11 (i think that's right)). The site is on an ok server, which hasn't been blacklisted or anything. We've tried everything we can to identify a problem. And that's where you guys come in. Any ideas? Anyone seen anything similar around the same time? Unfortunately, we can't share our clients' site's name/URL, but feel free to ask any questions you want and we'll do our best to provide info.
Algorithm Updates | | MRSWebSolutions0 -
Timeline for 301 Redirects to Take Full Effect in SEO Rankings?
Hey, I am working on transitioning a website and all of my current URL's will be slightly changed (moving to dynamic pages). I understand that I will need to 301 redirect all the old pages to their new counterparts but I would like to know how long it will take for the 301 redirects to take full effect in the search rankings. I ask because my site is an e-commerce site that receives 90% of it's business in January and the transition would take place December 15th. If my search rankings are not back up to par by January 1st then I will take a drastic hit to revenue. Please help this SEO noob out!
Algorithm Updates | | Stew2221 -
301'ing away from an exact match domain.
Hi Moz Community! My website gets just over 50% of its traffic from ranking in the top 3 in over 10 countries for my exact match keyword domain. 80% + from keywords related to the exact match domain. We are now looking at doing a to 301 re-direct to a new domain to start a fresh branding to the site to increase scope and expand. This would involve removing the keyword from the homepage and domain entirely . However. Considering all competitors ranking for our main keyword, have the keyword in their domain as either a subdomain to or in their root domain and in their homepage content, would this make ranking without the keyword in domain & content hard? I have found a very similar example that has done so, so I guess the answer to that question is no its not. about 65-70% of our anchor text on our backlinks is for our domain keyword. Can anyone advise how best to go about maintaining rankings after 301ing or how best to go about 301ing to make sure that we can maintain the rankings for our main keyword! Any advise at all would be greatly appreciated, Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | howiex10 -
Google is forcing a 301 by truncating our URLs
Just recently we noticed that google has indexed truncated urls for many of our pages that get 301'd to the correct page. For example, we have:
Algorithm Updates | | mmac
http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html as the url linked everywhere and that's the only version of that page that we use. Google somehow figured out that it would still go to the right place via 301 if they removed the html filename from the end, so they indexed just: http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/ The 301 is not new. It used to 404, but (probably 5 years ago) we saw a few links come in with the html file missing on similar urls so we decided to 301 them instead thinking it would be helpful. We've preferred the longer version because it has the name in it and users that pay attention to the url can feel more confident they are going to the right place. We've always used the full (longer) url and google used to index them all that way, but just recently we noticed about 1/2 of our urls have been converted to the shorter version in the SERPs. These shortened urls take the user to the right page via 301, so it isn't a case of the user landing in the wrong place, but over 100,000 301s may not be so good. You can look at: site:www.eventective.com/usa/massachusetts/bedford/ and you'll noticed all of the urls to businesses at the top of the listings go to the truncated version, but toward the bottom they have the full url. Can you explain to me why google would index a page that is 301'd to the right page and has been for years? I have a lot of thoughts on why they would do this and even more ideas on how we could build our urls better, but I'd really like to hear from some people that aren't quite as close to it as I am. One small detail that shouldn't affect this, but I'll mention it anyway, is that we have a mobile site with the same url pattern. http://m.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html We did not have the proper 301 in place on the m. site until the end of last week. I'm pretty sure it will be asked, so I'll also mention we have the rel=alternate/canonical set up between the www and m sites. I'm also interested in any thoughts on how this may affect rankings since we seem to have been hit by something toward the end of last week. Don't hesitate to mention anything else you see that may have triggered whatever may have hit us. Thank you,
Michael0 -
301 Or Canonical, Which one is more effective for eCommerce Website ?
I have my own eCommerce website. I want to avoid duplicate category pages so which method is more useful 301 redirection or Canonical url?
Algorithm Updates | | yuvastyle0 -
Duplicate Pate Content - 404's or 301's?
I deleted about 100 pages of stale content 6 months ago and they are currently returning 404's. The crawl diagnostics have pointed out 77 duplicate pages because of this. Should I redirect these as 301's to get rid of the error or keep them as 404's? Most of the pages still have some page authority but I don't want to get penalized. Just looking for the best solution. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | braunna0