Which is better, a directory 301 redirect or each page in the directory?

[anthonytjm]

A customer of mine has a site with lots of articles and they are all quite spammy. They have not been affected by penguin yet so they asked what to do. I suggested losing the articles directory and 301 redirect to either the home page or another important page.

Would a 301 redirect on the entire directory to a single page be the way to go or add redirects from each page within the directory and spread out redirects to various pages in website?

Or do you have a better suggestion?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Anthony,

First of all, it is always better to redirect URLs to individual pages than perform sitewide 301 directs. But in this case, if the individual pages aren't getting much traffic, it may not make much difference.

If the articles are truly low quality, and you are worried about a future penalty, you may want to simply remove them without a redirect at all. Serve a 410 HTTP response (gone) instead, and carefully watch your traffic/rankings to make sure nothing drops.

It's most likely Google is simply ignoring these pages. The best defense is to build up an offense of quality material so the bad doesn't outweigh the good.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.

[MargaritaS]

No, I would only do this for articles that have a good "inbound" link profile. 301 redirects can slow down the servers, so having too many isn't good either.

[anthonytjm]

Thanks MargaritaS, good point on the spammy links and redirecting with them. To clarify, it is the article content that is not well written and just about keyword stuffed, but not terribly. The articles look like someone use a boiler template and just replaced keywords and a sentence here and there and called it a new article.

I was thinking the best thing to do would be to bury the evidence (haha!!) and apply redirects to valued pages. Then I would have them start writing good original content in a blog.

So should I apply 40+ individual redirects? or just redirect whole directory to a single page?

Thanks again for your feedback.

[MargaritaS]

Anthony,

This sounds tricky. When you say "spammy" are you talking about their inbound links, or are you referring to the content within those articles? I think there is an important difference there. If you do indeed have articles that look spammy because of the content itself (ex: keyword stuffing) but actually happen to have decent inbound links from reliable sources, then I would say to individually 301 redirect those. If you mean spammy as in the case that the inbound links pointing to these individual articles, then I would say lose them because you don't want to pass those bad links onto this "other" important page on your client's site.

Hope this helps!

MS