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.
Does it really matter to maintain 301 redirect after de-indexing of old URLs?
-
Today, I was reading latest blog post on SEOmoz blog about. Uncrawled 301s - A Quick Fix for When Relaunches Go Too Well
This is very interesting study about 301 & How it useful to maintain traffic. I'm working on eCommerce website and I have done similar stuff on my website. I have big confusion to manage 301 redirect.
My website generates new URLs due to following actions.
- Re-write dynamic URLs.
- Re-launch entire website on different eCommerce platform. [osCommerce to Magento Commerce]
- Re-name category.
- Trasfer one product from one category to another category.
I'm managing my 301 redirect with old practice. Excel sheet data from Google webmaster tools and set specific new URLs for redirect. Hoooo... Now, I have 8.5K redirect in htaccess... And, I'm thinking it's too much.
Can we remove old 301 redirect from htaccess or not? This is big question for me. Because, all pages are not hyperlink on external website. Google have just de-indexed old URLs and indexed new URLs. So, Is it require to maintain 301 redirect after Google process?
-
I always use a 301 redirect.
2K is a lot of pages. If I can redirect them with a couple lines of htaccess code I would do it. If I had to code 2K lines and have that huge file scanned for thousands of visitors I might not do it if I am pretty sure that there is very little traffic.
I use lots of folders on my site and that makes these problems easy to solve.
-
Hi Egol. I am migrating a site with 6k pages. About 2K pages are useless old syndication articles with no incoming links; about 50 are old CID version of forms. These pages won't exist in the new site. How do I delete them, by no doing 301 redirect and not including them in any sitemap? Would they become 404 for a while and then disappear from google index?
-
My ecommerce [www.vistastores.com] website does not have issue due to change or URLs. I rarely change category page URLs and product page URLs. But, I'm facing issue due to narrow by search. If any attribute will remove from narrow by search so 100 pages will convert to 404 due to dynamic structure. That's why I'm setting up 301 redirect to category page URLs from all dynamic pages.
I have concern to reduce 301 redirect and broken links in website. But, I'm not able to stop it. Google may restrict my organic performance due to continue broken links on website and non associated 301 redirect.
-
I have 301 redirects on my sites. Every one that I have done is still out there in htaccess. I am not taking chances on how search engines handle these.
Other than deleting useless pages, I rarely change URLs. If I don't change URLs I don't have to worry about this stuff.
I have not emailed other sites to change the URL in their links. I have only changed the URLs on my own sites. I would worry that asking someone to edit a link might result in a loss... so I am happy with the redirected link.
-
No, I don't want to create romance on my website with 404.
EGOL & you have mentioned same about visitors and back links. Now, I have some good feeling after reading 20K redirect which is maintain by you. 8.5K is not big for me. -
In my view it is important to keep the old redirects, even after you have of replacing the Google index. With the 301 the relevance obtained in the old page, keep to the new page. The 301 is not only to Google index, but also backlinks your page has.
I consider that 8.5 k is not so big, I have sites with 20k and never had any problems or restrictions.
Anyway, if you want to remove the old ones, let the 404 page beautiful, which is always good: D
-
Oh Jesus... This is strong reason Why I'm your big fan since a member on SEO Chat forum.
I got your point. OR We can edit hyperlink on external website by email them... Right? -
Let's say that my website has ten links to your old URLs that deliver hundreds of visitors per day.
What will happen to all of those visitors if you remove the 301 redirects?
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
-
How effective are 301 redirects in passing page rank?
I have a blog which is ranking well for certain terms, and would like to repurpose it to better explain these terms it is ranking for, including updating the url to the new term the blog will be about. The plan being to 301 redirect the old url to new. In the past, I've done this with other pages, and have actually lost much of the rankings that I had earned on the original URL. What is your take on this? Maybe repurpose blog, but maintain original URL just to be on the safe side? Thanks
Technical SEO | | CitimarineMoz0 -
URL too long. Shorten and redirect, or leave alone?
MOZ is indicating that i have several URLs that are too long. Should I shorten the URLs and redirect the long URLs to the new, shorter, URL? Or should i leave them alone, as I've been reading to avoid redirects.
Technical SEO | | Hanover4401 -
Meta descriptions and h1 tags during a 301 redirect
My employer is shifting to a new domain and i am in the midst of doing URL mapping. I realize that many of the meta descriptions and H1 tags are different on the new pages - is this a problem ? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | ptapley0 -
Remove html file extension and 301 redirects
Hi Recently I ask for some work done on my website from a company, but I am not sure what they've done is right.
Technical SEO | | ulefos
What I wanted was html file extensions to be removed like
/ash-logs.html to /ash-logs
also the index.html to www.timports.co.uk
I have done a crawl diagnostics and have duplicate page content and 32 page title duplicates. This is so doing my head in please help This is what is in the .htaccess file <ifmodule pagespeed_module="">ModPagespeed on
ModPagespeedEnableFilters extend_cache,combine_css, collapse_whitespace,move_css_to_head, remove_comments</ifmodule> <ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header set Connection keep-alive</ifmodule> <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews</ifmodule> DirectoryIndex index.html RewriteEngine On
# Rewrite valid requests on .html files RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html?rw=1 [L,QSA]
# Return 404 on direct requests against .html files RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .html$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !rw=1 [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [R=404] AddCharset UTF-8 .html # <filesmatch “.(js|css|html|htm|php|xml|swf|flv|ashx)$”="">#SetOutputFilter DEFLATE #</filesmatch> <ifmodule mod_expires.c="">ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 years"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 years"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 years"</ifmodule> <files 403.shtml="">order allow,deny allow from all</files> redirect 301 /PRODUCTS http://www.timports.co.uk/kiln-dried-logs
redirect 301 /kindling_firewood.html http://www.timports.co.uk/kindling-firewood.html
redirect 301 /about_us.html http://www.timports.co.uk/about-us.html
redirect 301 /log_delivery.html http://www.timports.co.uk/log-delivery.html redirect 301 /oak_boards_delivery.html http://www.timports.co.uk/oak-boards-delivery.html
redirect 301 /un_edged_oak_boards.html http://www.timports.co.uk/un-edged-oak-boards.html
redirect 301 /wholesale_logs.html http://www.timports.co.uk/wholesale-logs.html redirect 301 /privacy_policy.html http://www.timports.co.uk/privacy-policy.html redirect 301 /payment_failed.html http://www.timports.co.uk/payment-failed.html redirect 301 /payment_info.html http://www.timports.co.uk/payment-info.html1 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | | dballari0 -
What tool do you use to check for URLs not indexed?
What is your favorite tool for getting a report of URLs that are not cached/indexed in Google & Bing for an entire site? Basically I want a list of URLs not cached in Google and a seperate list for Bing. Thanks, Mark
Technical SEO | | elephantseo3
