Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    6
    11
    7930
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Visually
      Visually last edited by

      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.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • RobertFisher
        RobertFisher @KeriMorgret last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Visually
          Visually @RobertFisher last edited by

          Thanks guys. For the record these pages do not have back links so I am going to be using the 301 redirect.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • RobertFisher
            RobertFisher @RobertFisher last edited by

            Very well put. (As usual) Thanks so much,

            David, hopefully you will see EGOL's reply. Best of luck.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • EGOL
              EGOL @RobertFisher last edited by

              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.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • RobertFisher
                RobertFisher @EGOL last edited by

                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.

                EGOL RobertFisher Visually 3 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • KeriMorgret
                  KeriMorgret last edited by

                  David,

                  Have you read Dr. Pete's post about Should I Change my URLs for SEO? He talks about this very topic.

                  RobertFisher 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • EGOL
                    EGOL last edited by

                    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.

                    RobertFisher 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • RobertFisher
                      RobertFisher last edited by

                      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

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • CaseyKluver
                        CaseyKluver last edited by

                        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.

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                        • JoshPugh
                          JoshPugh last edited by

                          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.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          Got a burning SEO question?

                          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                          Start my free trial


                          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.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • MikeBlue1

                            301 Redirect - Rank Recovery Examples?

                            Hi All, I recently did a 301 redirect. Page to Page and the notified google via its console. Its been 6 days since. The home page and one other high traffic page swopped out with the new domain on google search index with 3-4 drops in ranking for each. The rest of the sites pages have been indexed but still reflect the old domain when searched. Recently today my home page dropped even further to the second page of google index for the specific keyword. Can you share similar experiences and how long it took you to recover rank fully? and how long for all pages to swop out on google search's index? Regards Mike

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeBlue1
                            0
                          • ParisChildress

                            If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?

                            Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress
                            1
                          • Chris8198

                            301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain

                            We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain.  We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris8198
                            0
                          • garrettkite

                            Images Returning 404 Error Codes. 301 Redirects?

                            We're working with a site that has gone through a lot of changes over the years - ownership, complete site redesigns, different platforms, etc. - and we are finding that there are both a lot of pages and individual images that are returning 404 error codes in the Moz crawls. We're doing 301 redirects for the pages, but what would the best course of action be for the images? The images obviously don't exist on the site anymore and are therefore returning the 404 error codes. Should we do a 301 redirect to another similar image that is on the site now or redirect the images to an actual page? Or is there another solution that I'm not considering (besides doing nothing)? We'll go through the site to make sure that there aren't any pages within the site that are still linking to those images, which is probably where the 404 errors are coming from. Based on feedback below it sounds like once we do that, leaving them alone is a good option.

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite
                            0
                          • Branden_S

                            Using pictures from another domain

                            We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer.  Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server.  There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues. Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues?  will this generate Google penalties?  Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it.  We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters.  How important is the file name for SEO?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S
                            0
                          • BbeS

                            How does the use of Dynamic meta tags effect SEO?

                            I'm evaluating a new client site which was built buy another design firm. My question is they are dynamically creating meta tags and I'm concerned that it is hurting their SEO. When I view the page source this is what I see. <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">keywords</a>" id="<a class="attribute-value">keywordsGoHere</a>" content="" /> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" id="<a class="attribute-value">descriptionGoesHere</a>" content="" /> <title id="<a class="attribute-value">titleGoesHere</a>">title> To me it looks like the tags are not being added to the page, however the title is showing when you view it in a browser and if use a spider view tool, it sees the title. I'm guess it is being called from a DB. So I'm a little concerned though that the search engines are not really seeing the title and description. I'm not worried about the keywords tag. Can anyone shed some light on how this might work? Why it might not being showing the text for the description in the page code and if that will hurt SEO? Thanks for the help!

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BbeS
                            0
                          • sbrault74

                            Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?

                            I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today. I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care. My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again. Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault74
                            1
                          • tylerfraser

                            301 Redirect With A Message And Delay

                            Hello, I'd like to sell a site I own. I'd like the site to be redirected to the buyers site with a 301 redirect. But I'd like the viewer to be informed that the site was purchased by this company and they will be redirect in 5 seconds.I'd like for the redirect to be a complete 301 and pass as much linklove as possible. Are you familiar with how to do this? Thanks, Tyler

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          • Digital Marketers
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter

                          Access all your tools in one place. Whether you're tracking progress or analyzing data, everything you need is at your fingertips.

                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.