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
-
301 redirecting a previously abused URL
A client previously had their most important landing page at domain.com/example.htm They carried out the sort of link building that was commonplace a few years back (exact match anchors, paid blog links etc) targeting this URL, but they also got a bunch of legitimate decent quality links here. I believe they may have had a number of issues when link quality algo updates were rolled out, so rather than try and get links removed and go through the disavow process they instead decided to abandon this URL, let it 404 and start afresh at domain.com/example.html - updating all internal navigation, XML sitemaps etc. So fast forward to today. What is the best practice for this URL these days do we think? Is it now possible to 301 domain.com/example.htm > domain.com/example.html and recover whatever value may be left here? The argument for not doing so may be that you could pass over the negative metrics associated with the old URL, but would this not be handled by the real-time penguin update and the poor links just devalued rather than actually harming? And could this just be tested - i.e. add in the 301, monitor the impact and if things don't go the way we'd want then just remove the 301 again? Would be keen to get a few opinions on this. TIA
Technical SEO | | Salience_Search_Marketing0 -
301 Redirect Timing Questions
Hey all, Quick question on 301 redirects and the timing of creating them when transitioning from an old site to a new site. Does the timing matter? Can redirects interfere with DNS propigation (which seemed to happen to us when we did redirects minutes after redirecting someone's DNS A record to now point to the new site) And lastly, how long AFTER a new site launch can one still submit redirects and not lose the google juice? All the best,
Technical SEO | | WorldWideWebLabs0 -
301 redirect question
Hi Everyone When doing 301 redirects for a large site, if a page has 0 inbound links would you still redirect it or just leave it? Im just curious on the best practice for this Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
301 Redirect - Technical Question
I have recently updated a site and for the url's that had changed or were not transferring I set up 301 redirects in the htaccess file as follows This one works - Redirect 301 /industry-sectors http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing But this one doesn't - Redirect 301 /industry-sectors/equine http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing/application/equestrian/ What it does is change the url to this instead http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing/equine ..... which returns a 404 page not found error The server is nginx based server and we have moved from a joomal platform to a wordpress platform I would be grateful for any ideas
Technical SEO | | paulie650 -
301 Redirect
Hello, On the 26.2.13 we changed domain names having followed the guidance of both Matt Cutts Youtube videos and googles own online documentation. We have a 301 redirect in place from our old domain ukmotorhomehirerental.com to our new site leisurerentalsdirect.com on a page to page basis. The site structure has not been altered in anyway. Google has been informed of the change of address. After the change the new domain transition was pretty seamless and ranked in the same postion in the SERPsThe one thing I've not done yet is tell all the webmasters who link to the old site that the address has changed (could this be it?)
Technical SEO | | Badapplemedia0 -
301 redirect all 404 pages
Hi I would like to have a second opinion on this. I am working on an ecommerce website that they 301 redirect all 404 pages (including the URLs entered incorrectly) to the “All categories page”. Will this have any negative SEO impact?
Technical SEO | | iThinkMedia0 -
302 to 301 redirect
Our site has quite a few 302 redirects that really ought to be 301's. Our IT department is really busy so the question is, given that the 302's have probably been in place for years, is it worth changing them to 301's now? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
IP address URLs being indexed, 301 to domain?
I apoligize if this question as been asked before, I couldnt' find in the Q&A though. I noticed Google has been indexing our IP address for some pages (ie: 123.123.123.123/page.html instead of domain.com/page.html). I suspect this is possibly due to a few straggler relative links instead of absolute, or possibly something else I'm not thinking of. My less-evasive solution a few months back was to ensure canonical tags were on all pages, and then replaced any relative links w/ absolutes. This does not seem to be fixing the problem though, as recently as today new pages were scooped up with the IP address. My next thought is to 301 redirect any IP address URL to the domain, but I was afraid that may be too drastic and that the canonical should be sufficient (which it doesn't seem to be). Has anyone dealt with this issue? Do you think the 301 would be a safe move, any other suggestions? thanks.
Technical SEO | | KT6840