Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
-
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys.
In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL.
This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
-
Keri,
You never cease to be able to recall the good stuff. Funny, its been a busy week so am just getting to some of this. Great post here, thanks.
-
Thanks guys. For the record these pages do not have back links so I am going to be using the 301 redirect.
-
Very well put. (As usual) Thanks so much,
David, hopefully you will see EGOL's reply. Best of luck.
-
Thanks Robert,
I think that this is a question of weighing an improvement in optimization against a loss of external authority (backlinks from other websites).
If these are brand new pages with no accumulated external authority then there is very little loss in redirecting and a gain in optimization. That means DO IT NOW - before any valuable external authority accumulates.
However, if there are a lot of external links into these pages then a percentage of that accumulated authority will evaporate through the redirect. The more powerful these pages, the greater the loss. In this case the decision to redirect becomes more difficult. Only google could calculate the value of the improvement in URL optimization compared to the loss of external authority. If it was my site I would value the external authority much more than changing a url from /toys/ to /chew-toys/
So, I would give two different answers to this question based upon the characteristics of the website webpages involved.
-
EGOL,
You make a great point. My question is this: David says above that: None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
I think his assumption is that by changing the url's to something (that appears to be from his example) more query oriented and optimized he will be able to impact this. Given that and given that a 301 will transfer 90% plus of the link juice, do you think he is served in making the change?
Curious as I respect your opinions.
-
David,
Have you read Dr. Pete's post about Should I Change my URLs for SEO? He talks about this very topic.
-
How much ranking power do you think that an optimized URL delivers to a page? Consider that title tag is enormous, links are enormous..... URL is probably tiny tiny tiny.
Now consider that the authority that these pages carry will pass through your site.
So, if this was my site I would be asking... How much of my external linkjuice is hitting these 20 pages. If none then I would not expect to lose very much by redirecting the pages. But if these pages had lots of offsite assets pointing to them the URLs would have to be really fugly before I redirected them.
-
David,
First, as to your last sentence, I am assuming you are redirecting 20 urls that are "not optimal" to 20 new urls that are optimized. Such that your example above is one and another would be http://www.dog.com/food to http://www.dog.com/organic-raw-dog-food, etc. for approximately 20 urls.If these follow the best practices (301's url to url in the .htaccess file) you should have no issue with the change. Understand that if the "poor" url /toys is ranking number 8 on page 1 of Google, and you do the redirect, it does not mean that you will rank for /chew-toys in the same place. For a short while you will likely continue to rank and then likely will fall off quickly.
Your new page will gain the link juice but not the ranking of the old.
We do a lot of site redesigns to bring them to SEO and CRO standards and therefore use a lot of 301's to maintain PA and grow it. We typically see the juice move over two to three months or more in a gradual fashion. An example is a site that we transferred every url for in late Aug. had about 170 links to its home page. Two months later, when looking at the old url there were only a couple showing and the links were showing on the new. So, it will change but not overnight.
Hope this helps
-
Hi David,
From what you describe, you will have no negative effects from using 301 redirects to a new URL structure. Thats what 301's are for
Rankings may dip for maybe 3-7 days (depending on which pages are ranking, etc) if at all, but after that you should be good.
-
According to SEOMoz's article on redirection, 301 redirects DO pass on the page authority ("about 90-99%") however it will take time. This number varies depending on who you listen to, but there is evidence that it does eventually pass through Google.
Depending on how often your pages get crawled, this may take a while but if you're not going for rankings, this won't affect too much.
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
-
Have You 301 Redirected Domain A to Domain B ?
I only have two questions.... Approximately when did you do it (year is close enough)? Did the rankings of Domain B go up? Any other information that you care to share will be appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
Can I undo 301 redirects to purchase site
A website I am thinking of buying has 301 redirected all pages on his site to one page that explains the site is closing down. If I tell him to change the 301 to 302s will I be able to recover the old pages on the site and keep the authority, rankings and link power of the old pages and not the "Closing page"? Is all i have to do is undo the 301 redirects and everything will go back to how the site was before the 301s were in place? Or will I lose all the link power on individual pages because they already transferred to the "Closing page"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline0 -
301 Redirect from unused domain
Hi All First question here so go easy.. I have a property site which is working well so far considering it;s early days, unfortunately some of my earlier efforts did not go so well and one in particular I pretty much destroyed in my attempts to improve the site SEO. Lucky enough my SEO skills have improved quite a bit lately, largely thanks to the great tools, tutorials and experts here at Moz 🙂 My question is whether I can use a 301 redirect to pass the domain authority and any link equity from an unused site to the one that ive done a better job on? it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy... Thanks everyone and thanks for all the help over the last 6 months or so.. Wes Dunn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wesdunn19771 -
Redirecting 404 pages
Hello,We have a wordpress site that has some "hidden" pages with weird URL's. Due to the way the site was built (not by us) if we setup our standard practice for 404 pages some site functionality will be lost.Standard Practice for 404's www.domain.com/fafsaf shows 404 error pageProposed solution:- www.domain.com/safaf >forwards to> www.domain.com/404 - shows 404 error page. Will this stop the search engines indexing the pages? - we have also amended the robots.txt to try and stop some pages being indexed but we still keep finding the odd little "hidden" page.The aim is to try and get all the search engines just to index the few simple pages on the sitemap instead of finding all these extra pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
301 Redirection and apostrophes in URLs
Hi I am experiencing trouble getting any redirects with apostrophes in the URLs to 301 redirect in order to eliminate 404 errors. I have tried replacing the instance of the apostrophe in the source URL field to %27 and variations of this but to no avail. The site is a wordpress site (the old URLS are legacies from the old Business Catalyst site) and I am using the redirection plug in. I have gone into some detail with a helpful soul here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-deal-with-apostrophes-in-source-url but unfortunately to no result. If anyone has any idea how to solve this puzzle I would be grateful for the help. Example: http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1%E2%80%93_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seamoose0 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
Need advice on 301 domain redirection
Hello friends, We have two sites namely spiderman-example.com & avengers-example.com which sells the same product listed out under similar categories, since we are about to stop or put down the site “avengers-example.com” because we just want to concentrate in bringing up a single brand called spiderman-example.com. “Spiderman-example” has comparatively more visitors and conversion rates than ''avengers-example'' ie. 90 % more traffic and conversion. Avengers-example has a small fraction of loyal customers who still search for the brand-name & there are a hand-full of potential keywords those ranking on its own. So is it advisable to redirect Avengers-example to spiderman-example using 301-redirect? Will this help to gain any link-juice from Avengers-example? If so how can we effectively redirect between two domain’s with minimal loss in page authority & linkjuice to enhance ''spiderman-example''? Off beat:These names "Avengers" and "Spiderman" were just used as an example but the actual site names has no relation to the ones mentioned above.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | semvibe0 -
Should I 301 a penalized domain to another domains subfolder?
I have a niche domain seems to have been hit by Penguin. It had very good rankings before the update, and I think at least a good part of the penalty might be due to overoptimized anchor text. So here is the question; If I decide to take this site down, should I 301 the entire domain to a relevant sub-folder of another site? i.e comtemporaryfurniture.com to domain.com/category/modern-furniture.html Will the penalty get passed onto the new domain? If the penalty is partly due to anchor text, then pointing it to another site's subfolder would mean the tartget URL has more varied anchor text and could boost rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0