When is it safe to remove 301 redirects?
-
I have created over 500 301 redirects in my .htaccess file, some of them are more than 2 years old now. Should I delete them? I don't like seeing the "notices" number in crawl diagnostics so high
-
Hi again Daniel,
Notices are nothing to worry about - if you take a look at the message from Roger and the Mozzers above the blue tabs in the Notices section, you will see a little explanation:
"Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling."
They are just there to make you aware of things in the background that might not be obvious
You will find a short explanation on each of the other sections too.
Incidentally, lots of 302's is not such a good thing - which is why they are in the "Warnings" section instead of the "Notices.
Another little thing to be aware of is the tiny blue "Help" link toward the top right of each page in the Pro Tool. Whichever page you are on, this link will take you to the help documentation for that particular feature. Some good stuff in there and a great way to get to know the tools when you are starting out.
If you have questions about your campaigns, you can also email the Help Team direct - help at seomoz.org. It's worth it just to see the awesome thankyou video when you answer the feedback survey!...or register for the weekly Welcome Webinar with Moz staff.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Is it possible that the high level of 301's affect my MOZ trust raking or Google Ranking at all? Each time I work on the "errors" section in SEOmoz, the "notices" section keeps on rising...
-
Any ideas of what would be a potential solution?
-
Hi Daniel,
I have to say I really don't agree with the idea of deleting 301's after a period of time. The only place where there is a time frame involved in the 301 scenario is at the Search engines.
Links can come from any number of other sources including links from other sites, browser bookmarks, links passed in emails, pdf documents, embedded in Youtube videos ...to name just a few.
If the 301's were originally placed to fix the problem of broken links, why would I want to "unfix" them?
Even for large sites with a lot of 301's there are ways to manage processing load etc and if you have found a solution that is acceptable for a period of time, the same solution should be acceptable over the longer term.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Are the 301's for old urls on the existing domain that now point to a new one? Or are they from an old (or expired) domain that you are looking to pass along that value?
If it's an old or expired domain, you should be able to remove the 301 after 90 days.
If everything is still on the same server, you should keep them intact. 500 re-directs isn't a tremendous amount.
I work with some enterprise level clients that have millions of 301's in place.
Hope this helps!
-
I would ask the following question:
Regarding those 500 redirects: Do you have external sites linking to any of those 500 pages ?
I would at-least identify pages that have external links and keep them if possible. -
Only as soon as you've found another way to solve the problem that the 301s were the solution to.
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 Redirects from example.com to store.example.com and then removing store.example.com subdomain
Hi I'm trying to wrap my head around the best approach for migrating our website. We're migrating from our example.com (joomla) site to our existing store.example.com (shopify) site... with the plan to finish the redirects/migration then remove the subdomain from shopify and use example.com moving forward. I've never done this and asking here to see if any harm will come from re-directing example.com URLs to store.example.com URL's then changing the store.example.com URL's to example.com. Right now my plan would run like this: redirect example.com URL's to store.example.com remove subdomain on store.example.com use example.com moving forward. wonder what happens next? Is there going to be any issues here, possible harm to the URL's?
Technical SEO | | Minarets0 -
I have a question about the impact of a root domain redirect on site-wide redirects and slugs.
I have a question about the impact (if any) of site-wide redirects for DNS/hosting change purposes. I am preparing to redirect the domain for a site I manage from https://siteImanage.com to https://www.siteImanage.com. Traffic to the site currently redirects in reverse, from https://www.siteImanage.com to https://siteImanage.com. Based on my research, I understand that making this change should not affect the site’s excellent SEO as long as my canonical tags are updated and a 301 redirect is in place. But I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a potential consequence of this switch I’m not considering. Because this redirect lives at the root of all the site’s slugs and existing redirects, will it technically produce a redirect chain or a redirect loop? If it does, is that problematic? Thanks for your input!
Technical SEO | | mollykathariner_ms0 -
Proper 301 redirect code for http to https
I see lots of suggestions on the web for forwarding http to https. I've got several existing sites that want to take advantage of the SSL boost for SEO (however slight) and I don't want to lose SEO placements in the process. I can force all pages to be viewed through the SSL - that's no problem. But for SEO reasons, do I need to do a 301 redirect line of code for every page in the site to the new "https" version? Or is there a way to catch all with one line of code that Google, etc. will recognize & honor?
Technical SEO | | wcksmith10 -
Soft 404's on a 301 Redirect...Why?
So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
How to verify a page-by-page level 301 redirect was done correctly?
Hello, I told some tech guys to do a page-by-page relevant 301 redirect (as talked about in Matt Cutts video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA) when a company wanted to move to a new domain when their site was getting redesigned. I found out they did a 302 redirect on accident and had to fix that, so now I don't trust they did the page-by-page relevant redirect. I have a feeling they just redirected all of the pages on the old domain to the homepage of the new domain. How could I confirm this suspicion? I run the old domain through screaming frog and it only shows 1 URL - the homepage. Does that mean they took all of the pages on the old domain offline? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EvolveCreative0 -
Does 301 redirect cause penalty
Good Morning, I am considering doing a 301 (permanent) re-direct of roughly 100 domains, split between my 3 main e-commerce sites. Would taking an action like this put any of the 100 domains or any of the 3 recipient domains at risk of violating G's guidelines? Thanks...
Technical SEO | | Prime851 -
301 redirect on wordpress.com
Hi, How/where do I input a 301 redirect for my http site within wordpress.com. I am already redirecting my wordpress url to myy new non wordpress domain Thanks Lisa
Technical SEO | | lisamarieCunn0 -
424 Crawl Notices Found - Most of these notices are 301 redirects for our blog. Are notices something that would keep me from ranking well for my keywords?
212 are rel canonical and 176 are 301 permanent re-direct. An example of the re-direct is a change I made to the /trackback 302 status on my blog like; http://www.bluesunproperties.com/2012-spring-biker-rally-thunder-beach/trackback/ Are these Crawl Notices something that I should spend resources on, or should I focus more on my errors and warnings?
Technical SEO | | classa0