301'ing over 700 internal links to the main page
-
I just got a contract for a site. After I analyzed their website, I noticed that they have over 700 pages indexed. However, their internal linking structure sucks. It's basically all 700 pages in one directory.
What do you recommend? I redirect all the internal structures to their new locations, or would it be better to redirect all those internal pages to their main domain name, and build a completely new seo-friendly structure?
Redirecting their current pages to each individual page is gonna take a lotta time, and I don't think they're gonna pay for it. :l
-
EGOL has a very important answer you need to consider, which is what I was really getting at in my second and last sentences. (but I didn't say it well)
But to answer about the redirect of every page to the root: I don't have any actual experience of this but I wouldn't think it would be a good thing because the front page is untargeted, compared to the page the visitor thought they were going to get.
If doing this was a good idea, there would be no reason for using a 404 page not found. You would instead just redirect all missing pages to the front page.
My guess is that as soon as that pattern was discovered, the value you got from it would evaporate.
Remember that the whole purpose of all those pages was to satisfy the needs of a visitor. Send them to an inappropriate place and you have failed. (by the way, google does this a lot themselves. Their own redirects leave a lot to be desired.)
-
After I analyzed their website, I noticed that they have over 700 pages indexed. However, their internal linking structure sucks. It's basically all 700 pages in one directory.
What do you recommend?
STOP!
Do not do this until you have clearly defined two things.
-
Why you are doing this.
-
The goal that you want to accomplish.
Any actions that you take without considering BOTH of those questions are shooting without taking aim and not knowing what your target should be.
You might not need the redirect because linking structure and directory structure are completely different things. Redirects could cause a significant loss of power for this site.
-
-
If the pages you are redirecting have links pointing at them and you 301 them to your home page, chances are your home page will rank higher and DA will increase.
Whatever plan you decide on, my advice would be to do it a few pages at a time and see what happens.
-
Thanks for the detailed response.
I've been analyzing the website and their pages for the past hour.
For example, lets say the keyword is "send flowers to city". The domain name is "cityflorists". And she has pages for every city. I'm gonna 410 them, and just keep pages relevant to the city, it'll being down the number of pages to below 50 for sure.
The main question I want to ask, however, without any complications is, that what happens if you 301 over 700 internal pages to the main domain? Will the website get penalized? Or will the domain authority increase?
-
700 pages is nothing.
It really depends on what you are trying to do, but if you are a programmer, it would be very simple and fast to decide how to split up the files into the final structure, then get a listing of the new locations and generate the .htaccess file from that, because you know the original location.
I would do it by taking an exact copy of the current data and do this in a different location, so as not to cause any disruption. Once it all works, then do a fast swap.
What would make this more complex is if you had to rename the pages, but I would just write a file that contains old,new and use that to generate the needed changes.
interlinking the pages is another job (in their new locations) but if you are a programmer, as noted in the previous line, it is simple.
Something else you must consider is how will the client manage the system afterwards. Be sure not to put them in the situation that they need you in order to add a new page..
At least you are thinking about this before doing it. I just heard from a friend whose client got someone else to restructure his site and they completely destroyed the fantastic #1 and page 1 ranking they spent years creating.
-
Hi,
Will do my best to understand and your answer question appropriately.
If those pages are not are not providing any value in terms of traffic, ranking or links then there's no point of keeping them on the site. You could redirect but I would just implement a 410 status code to indicate to search engines that these pages no longer exist.
For pages which are providing value, restructure the site and place them in different directories (with 301 from old to new pages). Obviously you should build out these pages in terms of content and links in the following months.
It wouldn't be too difficult to evaluate your most important pages through Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools e.t.c
However the most difficulty for this project is prioritsation and how you present this to the client, considering there are 700 pages. Take the following steps when handling this with the client:
(1) Map out and plan how you want to structure the site.
(2) In plain english, list what you want to do with the site and the steps you will be taking to do so (for the next 3-6 months). Also be prepared for alternatives and difficult questions the client might potentially ask. In addition calculate the time, resource and how much you can do based on your allocated budget.
(3) Present this to the client in a clear and honest approach- be upfront with the situation. You should try and negotiate a common ground - Maybe he can give you a bit more budget this month but you get less next month for link building. How you bargain this depends on your payment terms which I do not know. But you should also be prepared to take some of the costs from your own pocket.
Next time I would suggest before taking on a contract to clearly identify the number of pages, site issues e.t.c so that project scope creep and this difficult situation does not occur to you again.
But to end this on a calmer note, buddy it's ok and you shouldn't allow yourself to get stressed about this, its all good and take this as a positive step towards your career. Whatever happens, just know that in future effectively planning will help you anticipate these issues beforehand and behave accordingly.
Take care and hope this helps.
Vahe
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
-
Removing indexed internal search pages from Google when it's driving lots of traffic?
Hi I'm working on an E-Commerce site and the internal Search results page is our 3rd most popular landing page. I've also seen Google has often used this page as a "Google-selected canonical" on Search Console on a few pages, and it has thousands of these Search pages indexed. Hoping you can help with the below: To remove these results, is it as simple as adding "noindex/follow" to Search pages? Should I do it incrementally? There are parameters (brand, colour, size, etc.) in the indexed results and maybe I should block each one of them over time. Will there be an initial negative impact on results I should warn others about? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Changed all external links to 'NoFollow' to fix manual action penalty. How do we get back?
I have a blog that received a Webmaster Tools message about a guidelines violation because of "unnatural outbound links" back in August. We added a plugin to make all external links 'NoFollow' links and Google removed the penalty fairly quickly. My question, how do we start changing links to 'follow' again? Or at least being able to add 'follow' links in posts going forward? I'm confused by the penalty because the blog has literally never done anything SEO-related, they have done everything via social and email. I only started working with them recently to help with their organic presence. We don't want them to hurt themselves at all, but 'follow' links are more NATURAL than having everything as 'NoFollow' links, and it helps with their own SEO by having clean external 'follow' links. Not sure if there is a perfect answer to this question because it is Google we're dealing with here, but I'm hoping someone else has some tips that I may not have thought about. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagJeff0 -
Internal Links - Different URLs
Hey so, In my product page, I have recommended products at the bottom. The issue is that those recommended products have long parameters such as sitename.com/product-xy-z/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs The reason why it has that long parameter is due to tracking purposes (internally with the dev and UX team). My question is, should I replace it with the clean URL or as long as it has the canonical tag, it should be okay to have such a long parameter? I would think clean URL would help with internal links and what not...but if it already has a canonical tag would it help? Another issue is that the URL is different and not just the parameter. For instance..the canonical URL is sitename.com/productname-xyz/ and so the internal link used on the product page (same exact page just different URL with parameter) sitename.com/xyz/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs (missing product name), BUT still has the canonical tag!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Something happened within the last 2 weeks on our WordPress-hosted site that created "duplicates" by counting www.company.com/example and company.com/example (without the 'www.') as separate pages. Any idea what could have happened, and how to fix it?
Our website is running through WordPress. We've been running Moz for over a month now. Only recently, within the past 2 weeks, have we been alerted to over 100 duplicate pages. It appears something happened that created a duplicate of every single page on our site; "www.company.com/example" and "company.com/example." Again, according to our MOZ, this is a recent issue. I'm almost certain that prior to a couple of weeks ago, there existed both forms of the URL that directed to the same page without be counting as a duplicate. Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wzimmer0 -
How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??
I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages. SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website. SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link. WHY? and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is. THINGS I"VE TRIED: (1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page. (2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag. (3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference. I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/'); to $redirect_url = home_url(''); nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) : RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dillman
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Please help friends.0 -
Should I have as few internal links as possible?
On most pages of my site i have a Quick Links section, which gives x3 cross sales links to other products, a newsletter sign up link, link to Blog, x4 links from images to surveys, newsletters, feedback etc. Will these links be hurting my optimal SEO juice between pages, should the number of internal links be kept to a minimum? My site is www.over50choices.co.uk if that helps. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep1
Ash0 -
Number of Links for Internal E-commerce Search Pages (and Anchor Text)
Hello! We have an internal search engine for different email, postal, and phone data products on our website (75,000 product pages... calling all direct marketers!), I've noindexed all our dynamic search pages, but I'm wondering how else I can improve these pages. Should I reduce the amount of links on each page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Currently there are 20 search results per page. " <variable>Mailing List" has been a pretty good source of traffic for our product pages.
Should I change the anchor text for all the product pages listed to include the added long-tail keyword, or would that be extremely spammy, having the word "Mailing List" 20+ times on my page? We have both static and dynamic search pages - here is one of static ones: http://www.consumerbase.com/direct-marketing-mailing-lists.html
My main problem with adding the long tail KWs to the anchor text is that we still want our static search pages indexed.</variable> Thanks!0 -
Long term strategy to retain link 'goodness', I need some help!
Hi, I have a few questions around the best approach to retain as much link juice / authority from transitioning multiple domains into 1 single domain over the next year or so. I have 2 similar websites (www.brandA.co.uk and www.brandB.co.uk) which I need to transition to a new website (www.brandC.co.uk) over the next 2 years. Both A&B are established and have there own brand value, brand C will be a new website. I need to start introducing the brand from website C onto A&B straight away and then eventually drop the brands from A&B and just be left with C. One idea I am considering is: www.brandA.co.uk becomes brandA.brandC.co.uk (brandA sits as a subdomain on brandC website) Ultimately over time I would drop the subdomain (brandA) and just be left with www.brandC.co.uk The other option is: www.brandA.co.uk becomes brandC.co.uk/brandA...with the same ultimate aim as above. In both above case the same would be done for brandB, either becoming a subdomain of a folder on brandC website What I need to know is what is the best way to first pass any SEO goodness from the websites for brandA and brandB to the intermediate solution of either brandA.brandC.co.uk or brandC.co.uk/brandA (I see this intermediate solution being in place for approx 2 years). And then how to transition the intermediate solution into just having brandC.co.uk Which solution will aid growing the SEO goodness on the final brandC.co.uk website? Does google see subdomains as part of the main domain and thus the main domain will benefit from any links going to the subdomain or is it better to always use /folders as google sees these as more part of one website? ...or is there another option that I haven't considered? I know it's rater confusing so please give me a shout if you want anymore info. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cewe0