After the 301 redirect
-
Hi all,
A quick question, after you have setup your 301 re-directs in .htaccess - is it necessary to keep your content in the original domains directory?
My thinking is that requests do get as far as referencing the directory, thus it should be safe to delete all the files on the old domain?
Thanx!
-
Thanx all, once this content is deleted, what would I show on my sitemap.xml?
This domain has become a landing page and now redirects to two other location businesses.
eg. www.business.co.za used to be the main site, but now they have split to www.business1.co.za and www.business2.co.za
Do I now add a simplified site map showing only these two links? Or do I show the old sitemap with the two new links to the new domains?
-
You really should delete the old content that you are redirecting to a new page. If you have forgotten to de index the old page then because it physically exists Google may list that page which technically redirects to page #2. Not good.
The purpose of 301 redirects is to redirect users trying to access a deleted/moved resource to it's new location. I don't see why you would keep the old content where it is.
-
There is no need for the content to exist any more if you have 301'd the containing URL.
-
Technically you can delete the old files if the redirect is in place correctly.
However, do test it out after you delete the pages to ensure that everything is fine. You can use Google WMT's 'Fetch as Googlebot' to know the exact response Google gets.
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
-
Need advice on redirects
Hi, I have new web addresses for my subpages. None if them have external links. Should I do redirects to the new pages or just leave the old pages in 404 and let google crawl and rank the new page. I am asking because my current pages don’t have a good ranking and I am thinking starting with a clean url is better. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Too many 301 Redirects caused lower rankings :(
1. Ok so I code my eCommerce site myself first 2. Then switched to Shopify and re-direct all my URLs (terrible mistake) 3. Then Shopify didn't do in terms of seo, so I switched to BigCommerce and re-direct all my URLs (Yes I know but at least this platform is much better) I started getting 404 errors as you can imagine in webmaster tools after switching from Shopify and there were 504 of them. Why its too many because I realized that Shopfiy just creates so many urls for the same pages. One by one I re-direct them to their new destinations. As you can imagine my rankings dropped. As my site speed is now 5.5s at gmetrix. mobile 47 - desktop 80 on Google Site speed tool. Looking at the links now, some of the 404's does not make sense to redirect. How should I approach this? Should I remove some of them if they were not used on web anywhere, no sites linking to that page and let them die in time? OR Should I keep them all? I am giving some examples below, there are so many for each. Thank you all! /account/login/ /blog/?page=7 blog/tagged/recipe /blogs/news /blogs/news?page=6 /collections/all/category-name /collections/frontpage/category-name /collections/frontpage/products/product-name /collections/shop/category-name /collections/shop/products/product-name /product-name/ /pages/terms-privacy /pages/frontpage /products/product-name /shop/products/product-name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mounayoga0 -
If you do 302 redirect then change to 301 redirect do you lose all link juice?
Hello everyone, I was wondering if you could help me with understanding the following story: A website has been moved from its HTTP version to a HTTPS version. The SEO manager has advised developers that they needed to do 301 redirects. However, in the end, 302 redirects have been put in place instead. Now, 301s should be put in place ASAP. The million dollar question is: has the website lost all of its link juice already given the nature of the redirects? Also, does it depend on whether Google has indexed the new 302 pages or does it depend on something else? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingGH0 -
Tricky 301 question
A friend has relaunched a website but his web guys (he didn't consult me!) didn't do any 301s and now traffic unsurprisingly has tanked. The old site and database no longer exists and there are now 2000+ 404's. Any ideas how to do the 301s from old urls to new product urls WITHOUT it being a massive manual job?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
301 redirect a old site that has been "dead" for a while?
Hi guys, A quick question. I have a client who has an old business website that had some great links (Forbes.com, CocaCola.com, etc). The problem is that he knew nothing about SEO and let the hosting expire. He still owns the domain, but the site is no longer listed in Google. He did no SEO, so I am not worried about being hit by any artificial anchor text penalties, since the links are as natural as it gets. So my questions is, would there be any benefit from 301 redirecting that site to his new business? The new business is in almost exactly the same niche as the old site. I am thinking of 301'ing to a sub-page which will refer to his past venture with the old business, not to the homepage of the new site. Thanks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Buying Domains from an auction and 301 redirecting to your new site.
Lets say I have a website in not to competitive niche. I was considering buying a few aged domains from godaddy auctions and 301 redirecting them to my new domain. Can this alone be enough to rank pretty high for a uncompetitive niche? Can this also be a link building technique in itself since the link juice from the domain purchased carries over? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars0 -
Why isnt my crawl results showing a 301 redirect even though I have a 301 rewrite in my .htaccess file?
Ive searched the previous Q&A's & cant find an answer so I;ll ask it here 🙂 crawling my site shows isnt the 301 redirect that i have from my non www to my www domainIts only showing all the results for my www subdomain.As i'm new to SEO & SeoMoz I dont fully understand. Any help would be greatly appreciated because my site is like 2 & a half years old & i'm trying to learn seo so I can rank higher in the serp's. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PCTechGuy20120 -
What will happen after I 301 this domain?
A while back I created a new website. Somehow my "scratch" copies of the site got indexed even though I didn't have links built to them. (In the future I will use noindex tags when I am playing around with designing). Now, I have three versions of the site online...let's call them TheRealSite.com and Practice1.com and Practice2.com. Practice1.com and Practice2.com now rank #1 for their main keyword. (It's a relatively uncompetitive niche). TheRealSite.com is somewhere lower than page 20 despite having an exact keyword match domain name. I'm assuming that Google considered it duplicate content as it is the exact same thing as Practice1 and 2. I had considered simply removing Practice1 and 2 from the server, but I was worried that if I did that, I would lose my #1 rankings if TheRealSite didn't recover. So, what I've done is 301 redirect Practice1 and Practice2 to TheRealSite. I'm guessing that over time TheRealSite will come back to #1 and then I can just remove the files from Practice1 and Practice2. Is this the best way to handle this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes1