Is it worth setting up 301 redirects from old products to new products?
-
This year we are using a new supplier and they have provided us a product database of approx. 5k products. About 80% of these products were in our existing database but once we have installed the new database all the URLs will have changed.
There is no quick way to match the old products with the new products so we would have to manually match all 5k products if we were were to setup 301 rules for the old products pointing to the new products. Of course this would take a lot of time.
So the options are:
1. Is it worth putting in this effort to make the 301 rules?
2. Or are we okay just to delete the old product pages, let the SE see the 404 and just wait for it to index the new pages?
3. Or, as a compromise, should we 301 the old product page to the new category page as this is a lot quicker for us do do than redirecting to the new product page?
-
As a follow up to this post, we launched the new site 3 weeks ago and seen a site-wide drop in SERPS
Of course there could be other variables involved, but we pushed ahead with the new product db without 301-ing the old products to new products as when we tried to do it, it was a far too time consuming exercise trying to pair up all the URLs in Excel.
Google has already indexed the new pages so hopefully the new site structure will not cause long term damage. In the mean time trying to 301 redirect as many of the best performing old product pages (as per Page Authority in the PRO crawl diagnostic tool).
-
If the old products are indexed then you will get some long tail traffic to the no doubt, so deleting the page is a no no, i would either keep the page and display the new products underneath or 301 to the new product page.
-
If the old products are indexed then you will get some long tail traffic to the no doubt, so deleting the page is a no no, i would either keep the page and display the new products underneath or 301 to the new product page.
-
The answer probably differs from site to site. I'd start by looking at how much you earn a month from people who land on product pages to give you an idea of the potential cost of that traffic bouncing.
I suspect that the compromise is something along the lines of redirecting to categories as you suggest. However I would additionally be looking at all of the top entry pages that are product pages and 301ing those. How many will depend on that value.
Also do talk to your developer. It might not be as hard to match the old urls to the new ones as you imagine. There are usually some fields that you can tie together and build a redirect rule from.
Another alternative to directing to the category page might be to direct to a search (it can still return a 404 if you wish). If your URLs were KW rich you might be able to turn that in to a search so that the product still comes up.
Few options there to think about. Good luck with it.
-
From a usability perspective I'd look at the redirects as a 404 is some what off putting when your trying to buy. It could lead to visitors losing trust and ultimately sales.
In turn, if usbility is effected in such a way then doubtless the SEO will follow.
If you have matching products which have indexed pages with some page authority, then I'd take the time to redirect them.
Your compromise is not bad, it would save a mountain of time which can be devoted to other cool things and its certainly better than several thousand 404 errors!
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
-
I have lose my ranking Via 301 Redirection - How To Recover?
Hey, Folks! I Have Used 301 Redirection Method to Increase My Rankings but When i applied this Method My Website Ranked Down To 55 Numbers. Can anyone Suggest me How to Recover it?
Technical SEO | | SumitJiGupta0 -
301 redirect question
Hi Everyone When doing 301 redirects for a large site, if a page has 0 inbound links would you still redirect it or just leave it? Im just curious on the best practice for this Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
Automatically write Mass 301 redirects for csv
Hi Guys Does anyone know if there is away to write say 30 x 301 redirects in one go? I have a list from a client with old links and new links and I want to do it all at once. Any suggestions would be appreciate?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
301 redirects reverting to 302 redirects
We recently built a new website with a new site structure. To prevent there being a load of 404's I redirected the old pages to the new relevant pages with 301 redirects. A few days later the SEOmoz crawl report alerted me to a load of 302 redirects. When I looked into this for some reason all of the 301 redirects I set up are reverting to 302 redirects. I did a test by 301 redirecting a made up URL to an existing page and the same thing happens - it 302 redirects. I can't find any settings in WordPress to possibly explain why this is happening. Has anyone got any ideas why this could be?
Technical SEO | | Tone_Agency0 -
How can you tell if a 301 has been set up correctly?
How can you tell if a 301 has been set up correctly. We had a .co.uk site that has moved over to a .com However the .co.uk we have hasd problems with the old webmaster giving control, but he has said he has implemented a 301 redirect to the new .com site, and if you click on .co.uk it does transfer you to the .com site How can we check that it is a 301 set up and not another sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
What factors matters the most when using a 301 permanent redirect?
Hi SEOmozzers, I have a client that has couple of duplicates but I am debating if i should just kill those pages or use 301 Permanent redirects. I know SEO moz provides 2 important factors to look at which are PA and link root domain. 1.Which one matters the most? or which one should I look at first to make a decision? 2. I have empty pages creating duplicate content with a PA of 14 and 1 linking root domain. my thought is to kill the page by inserting a meta NO INDEX. If you don't agree and think I should 301 to an existing page that needs link juice, let me know. Thank you mozzers 🙂
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
301 redirects and Dynamic URLs
I just ran my first diagnostic and one of my primary immediate problems are duplicate titles and duplicate content. My guess it that because the root URL http://sitename.com (which has not yet been redirected to www...) has generated an entire tree of content which is identical to the tree rooted at http://www.sitename.com. QUESTION: Do I need to do a redirect simply for the root url (sitename.com -> www.sitename.com) or do I now need to develop specific 301 redirects for each of the sub-nodes/pages? ie sitename.com/?q=about-us -> www.sitename.com/?q=about-us sitename.com/?q=our-team -> www.sitename.com/?q=our-team etc.
Technical SEO | | Barrycliff680 -
301 Redirection of entire section to the homepage
Hi Guys, So here's the deal. Let's say I have a site at mysite.com/ which talks about tomatoes, and I also have a subsection that talks about potatoes at mysite.com/potatoes I want to stop providing information about potatoes altogether so i'm thinking about doing a 301 redirection from all of the pages at mysite.com/potatoes(.*) to the home page. The thing is, mysite.com/potatoes actually has a great page authority (3475 links from 145 domains) so I really don't wan to lose all that juice... Here are my questions: Will the links be added to the ones i have for the homepage already? Since my home page and my /potatoes section ranked for 2 different subjects, how is this transfer going to affect my rankings for the homepage? will it now also rank for both tomatoes AND potatoes? How much time does it usually take for google to recognize the 301 and pass the link juice? Any other tips on optimizing this process? Thank you for your time! -francois
Technical SEO | | nyakim0