Google Re-Index or multiple 301 Redirects on the server?
-
Over a year ago we moved a site from Blogspot that was adding dates in the URL's (i.e.. blog/2012/08/10/) Additionally we've removed category folders (/category, /tag, etc). Overall if I add all these redirects (from the multiple date options, etc) I'm concerned it might be an overload on the server?
After talking with the server team they had suggested using something like 'BWP Google Sitemaps' on our Wordpress site, which would allow Google some time to re-index our site.
What do you suggest we do?
-
100's or redirects is no big deal from a server load point of view, so personally I would unless there was a good reason not too.
Assuming you believe the ranking factors of the existing pages to be good, I would transfer those factors to the new url by using 301 redirects.
Depending on the structure of the redirects you are doing, you may be able to use regular expressions to simplify the process.
You may want to take a look at the SEOMoz best practices article on redirection if you haven't seen it
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection -
Would you always do this, even in extreme cases? Say for example you had to 100's of redirects? Would that be overkill?
-
Personally I would set-up 301 redirects, the load on the server is minimal even on reasonably busy sites.
A 301 will transfer most of the link juice and authority the pages have.
Whereas if you don't redirect, any links directly to the blog articles using the old url's will return a 404, in turn the inbound links will be lost and you will pretty much be starting from scratch with no inbound links to your articles.
Redirect everytime for me, unless there is a good reason not to, such as Panda/Penguin issues
Hope that helps
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
-
batch 301 redirects with an external tool
Hi, I am migrating my e-commerce to another platform of a internet company in Brazil (Tray) that has no way to redirect 301 urls in batch, I also do not have access to files and ftp of it. Anyway, as I have hundreds of urls, I would like to know if there is any way to do batch redirects with an external platform tool? Thank you very much in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | didi090 -
How do internal search results get indexed by Google?
Hi all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
301 re-direct affect on SERPS
Hi Moz Community, please can I hit you with a scenario and get your thoughts? We have a client site - clientsite.com - with reasonable rankings for some of our client's target search terms/branded terms. We have built language specific subdomains - it.clientsite.com, de.clientsite.com - which have been manually translated into local languages. These subdomains have robots 'noindex' as we only want to drive traffic to clientsite.com. We've installed a geo location tool on clientsite.com that 301s visitors to the appropriate subdomain, so content is served in their local language. clientsite.com will be the 'catch all' for locations where sub domains have not yet been created. If Google crawls clientsite.com and is 301ed to a sub domain, will we lose SERPS? The sub domains will have the same content (99% the same content anyway) as clientsite.com, but in local languages. Cheers guys. Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steviechat1 -
Can I undo 301 redirects to purchase site
A website I am thinking of buying has 301 redirected all pages on his site to one page that explains the site is closing down. If I tell him to change the 301 to 302s will I be able to recover the old pages on the site and keep the authority, rankings and link power of the old pages and not the "Closing page"? Is all i have to do is undo the 301 redirects and everything will go back to how the site was before the 301s were in place? Or will I lose all the link power on individual pages because they already transferred to the "Closing page"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline0 -
301 redirects broken - problems - please help!
Hi, I have a bit of an issue... Around a year ago we launched a new company. This company was launched out of a trading style of another company owned by our parent group (the trading style no longer exists). We used a lot of the content from the old trading style website, carefully mapping page-to-page 301 redirects, using the change of address tool in webmaster tools and generally did a good job of it. The reason I know we did a good job is that although we lost some traffic in the month we rebranded, we didn't lose rankings. We have since gained traffic exponentially and have managed to increase our organic traffic by over 200% over the last year. All well and good. However, a mistake has recently occurred whereby the old trading style website domain was deleted from the server for a period of around 2-3 weeks. It has since been reinstated. Since then, although we haven't lost rankings for the keywords we track I can see in webmaster tools that a number of our pages have been deindexed (around 100+). It has been suggested that we put the old homepage back up, and include a link to the XML sitemap to get Google to recrawl the old URLs and reinstate our 301 redirects. I'm OK with this (up to a point - personally I don't think it's an elegant solution) however I always thought you didn't need a link to the xml sitemap from the website and that the crawlers should just find it? Our current plan is not to put the homepage up exactly as it was (I don't believe this would make good business sense given that the company no longer exists), but to make it live with an explanation that the website has moved to a different domain with a big old button pointing to the new site. I'm wondering if we also need a button to the xml sitemap or not? I know I can put a sitemap link in the robots file, but I wonder if that would be enough for Google to find it? Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
301 Redirecting multiple domains to brand new domain
Hi guys, I have read quite a bit of stuff on 301 redirects after Penguin. Hoping someone could help me out. im looking at a way to do a legit 301 redirect without passing the penalty. I have acquired two businesses, business1 and business2, that both had websites that were hit by penguin. Ive anaylsed there backlinks and theres a lot of spammy forum links and comments and I was also informed they were both using buildmyrank. A side note, buiness2 only started using BMR after it noticed business1 have large amounts of high PR links. business1.com was ranking at position 1 till the penguin hit. Business2.com was ranking around page 2 I work in the same arena as these two businesses and didnt generate any business via the internet. When these 2 businesses failed (due to loss of rankings and traffic) i decided to take them over. What I am thinking of doing is 301'ing both business domains to my brand new, zero links, domain which will be the name of my new company. I will combine the content from both sites, around 1000 pages, in to the new one. So my question is, does 301'ing multiple domains, that target the same keywords, and operate in the same niche, look less "spammy" then 301'ing 1 domain? I'm trying to look at it in the eyes of google. It is a legit merging of businesses. Thanks for your help, really appreciate your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
2-stage 301 redirects
Dear colleagues, I have quite an unusual situation with one of my client's websites, and I could use an advise from someone who experienced the same circumstances: They are currently planning on launching a new site under the same domain (by September), when several key current pages are intended to be replaced with new equivalent pages under new URLs. So far it's pretty simple, BUT - due to a merger with another company they will be migrating their entire website to a different domain within a year. My question is - what would be the optimal solution for redirects? We are considering a 301 from the current pages to the new pages under the same domain, and once the new domain is activated - aside from defining 301 redirects from the new pages under the same domain to the new domain, we will cancel the original 301 from the old pages to the new pages on the same domain, and instead define new 301 for those pages to the new domain. What do you think? Is there a better solution - like using 302 redirects for the first stage? Has anyone tried such a procedure? Your input will be highly appreciated! Thanks in advance, Omer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Usearch0 -
Is it safe to redirect multiple URLs to a single URL?
Hi, I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates. The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date. The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links. Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain. My intention is to: Shut down the old site Focus all attention on building up content on the new website Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...) Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage Sounds good, right? But there is one issue I need some advice on... The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site. I call these my "black sheep pages". So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death? OPTION A: oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndreVanKets
oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION B: oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION 😄 oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com -> newsite.com My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique. What would you do? Help 😐1