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
-
Does redirecting a duplicate page NOT in Google‘s index pass link juice? (External links not showing in search console)
Hello! We have a powerful page that has been selected by Google as a duplicate page of another page on the site. The duplicate is not indexed by Google, and the referring domains pointing towards that page aren’t recognized by Google in the search console (when looking at the links report). My question is - if we 301 redirect the duplicate page towards the one that Google has selected as canonical, will the link juice be passed to the new page? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lewald10 -
Website can't break into Google Top100 for main keywords, considering 301 Redirect to a new domain
A little background on our case. Our website, ex: http://ourwebsite.com was officially live in December 2015 but it wasn't On-Site optimized and we haven't done any Off-site SEO to it. In April we decided to do a small redesign and we did it an online development server. Unfortunately, the developers didn't disallow crawlers and the website got indexed while we were developing it on the development server. The development version that got indexed in Google was http://dev.web.com/ourwebsite We learned that it got indexed when we migrated the new redesigned website to the initial domain. When we did the migration we decided to add www and now it looks like: http://www.ourwebsite.com Meanwhile, we deleted the development version from the development server and submitted "Remove outdated content" from the development server's Search Console. This was back in early May. It took about 15-20 days for the development version to get de-indexed and around 30 days for the original website (http://www.ourwebsite.com) to get indexed. Since then we have started our SEO campaign with Press Releases, Outreach to bloggers for Guest and Sponsored Posts etc. The website currently has 55 Backlinks from 44 Referring domains (ahrefs: UR25, DR37) moz DA:6 PA:1 with various anchor text. We are tracking our main keywords and our brand keyword in the SERPs and for our brand keyword we are position #10 in Google, but for the rest of the main (money) keywords we are not in the Top 100 results in Google. It is very frustrating to see no movement in the rankings for the past couple of months and our bosses are demanding rankings and traffic. We are currently exploring the option of using another similar domain of ours and doing a complete 301 Redirect from the original http://www.ourwebsite.com to http://www.ournewebsite.com Does this sound like a good option to you? If we do the 301 Redirect, will the link-juice be passed from the backlinks that we already have from the referring domains to the new domain? Or because the site seems "stuck," would it not pass any power to the new domain? Also, please share any other suggestions that we might use to at least break into the Top 100 results in Google? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielGorsky0 -
HTML5: Changing 'section' content to be 'main' for better SEO relevance?
We received an HTML5 recommendation that we should change onpage text copy contained in 'section" to be listed in 'main' instead, because this is supposedly better for SEO. We're questioning the need to ask developers spend time on this purely for a perceived SEO benefit. Sure, maybe content in 'footer' may be seen as less relevant, but calling out 'section' as having less relevance than 'main'? Yes, it's true that engines evaluate where onpage content is located, but this level of granular focus seems unnecessary. That being said, more than happy to be corrected if there is actually a benefit. On a side note, 'main' isn't supported by older versions of IE and could cause browser incompatibilities (http://caniuse.com/#feat=html5semantic). Would love to hear others' feedback about this - thanks! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
Internal Links Query - What should be use as anchor text
Hello All, We are looking at our internal links and most of them say "More" or "View All" The "more" anchor Text links - are usually positioned on the Body Content as we only display a portion of the content and then the user clicks more to see all the content ? - Should we be changing the "More" Text to something more keyword /phrase friendly i.e " more information about carpet cleaning" or "more information on Tool hire" or would that be deemed as spammy ? thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
How do I tell if competitor's links are good?
One strategy I have seen recommended over and over is to look at your competitor's back links and see if any could be relevant for your site and worth pursuing. My question is how do I evaluate a link and not end up pursuing some penalized site? I would guess checking for Google index is a good idea since some of the webmasters may not be aware they are penalized. Is it DA and whether they are indexed alone? Many sites I have seen have DA in the teens but are legitimate in our industry. Should they not be considered due to low DA? Also I see links from directories on many competitor sites. Seems a controversial subject, but assuming the directory is industry specific, is it OK? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris6610 -
Can internal links from a blog harm the ranking of a page?
Here is the situation: A site was moved from its original domain to its new domain, and at the same time, the external wordpress.com blog was moved to a subdirectory, making it an onsite blog. The two pages that rank the highest on the site have virtually no links from the blog and no external links, while all the other pages are linked extensively from the blog and have backlinks. Their targeted keywords are not so much easier to rank than the other pages for that to be the sole cause. To confuse the matter even more, there was a manual penalty affecting incoming links which was removed last month. The old site, which has many backlinks to the new site, is still in Google's index. The old blog however, has been redirected page by page and is not in Google's index. Most of the blog posts are short 1-paragraph company updates and potentially considered low quality content because of that (?) The common denominator among the two highest ranked pages (I'm talking top 3 in SERP v. page 3 or 4) seems to be either the lack of external backlinks or the lack of internal links from the blog. Could there be an issue with the blog such that internal links from it are detrimental rather than helpful?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Is my text readable? I don't see it in the page source
Text on my site seems to be readable in a text only version (the page is not cached so I viewed it by disabling JAVA and then copy and pasted the page into Word) However, when I look in the page source I don't see the text there. The text was created using Open X html boxes to help us with formatting, but is this causing an SEO problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Should you replace the url on a damaged page and 301 to it ?
Hi, We have a couple of pages which have been damaged due to an SEO person we hired creating a stupid amount of bookmarks and generally poor links. I've tried to get the links removed where I can but on most of these blogging sites there is no contact webmaster etc so I am struggling. Panda update as also affected traffic by about 35%. My question is , should I consider creating new urls for the "damaged " pages and then doing 301 redirects to them from the damaged page to the new page. Then start to build up good links to the new page whilst google should de-index the old pages over a couple of months ?. Just at my witts end how to get rid of these blogging rubbish etc etc. Thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0