Negative effect on google SEO with 301's?
-
Cleaning up the website by consolidating pages - each with a little bit of useful info - into one definitive page that is really useful and full of good content.
Doing 301's from the many old pages to the one new really good one. Didn't want to do rel canonicals because I don't want the old pages around, I want to get rid of them.
Will google see the 301s and go nuts or see that there is one definitive, really good page with no duplicate content? The change is very good from a user perspective.
Also, On-Page Report Cards on SEOMoz suggests that you put a rel canonical on a page to itself to tell google that this page is the definitive page. What do you think?
Thanks so much for anyone who has time to answer - so many gurus - this is a great forum. - jean
-
Good on 301. On rel=canon, I did not mean to imply "each page to itself." There are various issues that arise in coding pages, making changes to pages, etc. So, here is a classic: to a non coder, www.example.com and www.example.com/ are the same page. To the bots they are two. So by inserting rel=canon for that page you are saying if example.com/ comes up treat it the same as example.com.
For your example, if it were me, manual juicer and highest rated manual juicer are very distinctly different pages. The first could lead to a description of 4 and the second speaks only to one. You have to be careful with this in the SEO because if you get too diffuse in adding modifiers to the keyword (making them long tail for example) you can draw strength from the main keyword page. Sometimes it is good to do, sometimes not....this part is the art of SEO.
BTW........what type of OR wine???? (Nothing like a Willamette Valley Pinot....and, yes, I know how to pronounce Willamette!)
-
Thanks for the expert help. Generally there are 2 to 8 pages that I am consolidating - for me it's info about different models of a product - we have reviewed them all on different pages but having all of the info on one page with photos and background info is a lot juicier than a dib and a dab on each page - and is more useful for a reader on our site. There are incoming links to most of the pages from other sites so I don't want people to end up on our 404 page. Thus the 301 strategy. Fascinating about the rel canonical. I didnt know. So I need to put a rel canonical to itself on each page that is the main page for a topic. What if there are pages optimized to similar topics? Like manual juicer and highest rated manual juicer? Will a rel canonical for the page optimized for the keyword "manual juicer" and a rel canonical on the page for "highest rated manual juicer" reduce seo juice if the two pages are on the same site? To me when I hear Oracle I think of the database company. Shows how old I am. Ha. Thanks a lot for your time answering my questions.
-
Here is the issue as I see it: how many pages are you "consolidating" and why? First, if you are using a 301, IMO you are saying I have links on this page and link juice I do not want to lose. I want to move that link juice to my new page of similar type content. If you have 5 pages as an example that you are "consolidating" and three have one link that is the same to each page, then I would take one of the three for the 301 to the new page. On the other two, if one has no links, I would not redirect it unless there was some navigational reason. If the last page had 12 links, etc. then it absolutely gets 301'd.
It is likely that even 25 pages to one would not be an issue. The question is, is there a reason to redirect? If you are trying to redirect 50 pages for example and they are similar and all have different links, I would do the redirects slowly, maybe 3 to 5 per week for 10 weeks or more. The reason is I would not want it to take a chance an unnecessary flag is raised.
Yes, every page needs a rel=canon.Gurus, shmurus, have you seen the friggin' Oracles!!! Last year the final was gurus 32 oracles 33 (but it was an OT loss for the gurus - gotta love their heart!)
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
-
What's best practice for cart pages?
i don't mean e-commerce site in general, but the actual cart page itself. What's best practice for the links that customers click to add products to the cart, and the cart page itself? Also, I use vanity URLs for my cart links which redirect to the actual cart page with the parameters applied. Should I use use 301 or 302 redirects for the links? Do I make the cart page's canonical tag point back to the store home page so that I'm not accruing link juice to a page that customers don't actually want to land on from search? I'm kinda surprised at the dearth of information out there on this, or maybe I'm not looking in the right places?
Technical SEO | | VM-Oz0 -
Google’s Latest Manual Action Penalty: Spammy Structured Markup
Anyone out there begin receiving this and or know when it started? Google has recently began sending a new manual action spam notification to webmasters for “spammy structured markup” also known as rich snippet spam. Your pal, Chenzo
Technical SEO | | Chenzo0 -
Are Collapsible DIV's SEO-Friendly?
When I have a long article about a single topic with sub-topics I can make it user friendlier when I limit the text and hide text just showing the next headlines, by using expandable-collapsible div's. My doubt is if Google is really able to read onclick textlinks (with javaScript) or if it could be "seen" as hidden text? I think I read in the SEOmoz Users Guide, that all javaScript "manipulated" contend will not be crawled. So from SEOmoz's Point of View I should better make use of old school named anchors and a side-navigation to jump to the sub-topics? (I had a similar question in my post before, but I did not use the perfect terms to describe what I really wanted. Also my text is not too long (<1000 Words) that I should use pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev" attributes.) THANKS for every answer 🙂
Technical SEO | | inlinear0 -
Canonical tags pointing at old URLs that have been 301'd
I have a site which has various white label sites with the same content on each. I have canonical tags on the white label sites pointing to the main site. I have changed some URLs on the main site and 301'd the previous URL to the new ones. Is it ok to have the canonicals pointing to the old URLs that now have a 301 redirect on them.
Technical SEO | | BeattieGroup0 -
Does a CMS inhibit a site's crawlability?
I smell baloney but I could use a little backup from the community! My client was recently told by an SEO that search engines have a hard time getting to their site because using a CMS (like WordPress) doesn't allow "direct access to the html". Here is what they emailed my client: "Word Press (like your site is built with) and other similar “do it yourself” web builder programs and websites are not good for search engine optimization since they do not allow direct access to the HTML. Direct HTML access is needed to input important items to enhance your websites search engine visibility, performance and creditability in order to gain higher search engine rankings." Bots are blind to CMSs and html is html, correct? What do you think about the information given by the other SEO?
Technical SEO | | Adpearance0 -
Is Buying Domains Good For SEO? Can I 301 redirect domains to an Original website?
I have a friend that purchased multiple domains related to their website. Each of these domains have the back ground of the original website and irrelevant content on them. Is is possible to redirect the various domains to certain pages on the original website. For example if the website is www.shoes.com and they purchased domains such as www.leathermensshoes.com and a few others related to the website. Is it SEO friendly to link the domains purchased to the original website?
Technical SEO | | TSpike10 -
Url's don't want to show up in google. Please help?
Hi Mozfans 🙂 I'm doing a sitescan for a new client. http://www.vacatures.tuinbouw.nl/ It's a dutch jobsite. Now the problem is here: The url http://www.vacatures.tuinbouw.nl/vacatures/ is in google.
Technical SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
On the same page there are jobs (scroll down) with a followed link.
To a url like this: http://www.vacatures.tuinbouw.nl/vacatures/722/productie+medewerker+paprika+teelt/ The problem is that the second url don't show up in google. When i try to make a sitemap with Gsitecrawler the second url isn't in de sitemap.. :S What am i doing wrong? Thanks!0 -
What's the best way to switch over to a new site with a different CMS?
Is it better to 301 or to closely duplicate each page URL when switching over to a new website from an established site with good ranking and a different CMS ( Drupal switching to Wordpress)?
Technical SEO | | OhYeahSteve0