I know I'm missing pages with my page level 301 re-directs. What can I do?
-
I am implementing page level re-directs for a large site but I know that I will inevitably miss some pages. Is there an additional safety net root level re-direct that I can use to catch these pages and send them to the homepage?
-
It really depends on the platform you're on and the way the page level redirects are set up, but if you list all the rules for the existing pages, you can always add a redirect at the very end. If implemented properly, anything left over should just that rule.
The alternative is to build a custom 404 handler that actually implements a 301-redirect to the new site.
I'd agree with this post, though - if the content really is dead, in some cases, it's better to let it 404 -
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022739.html
If you're really starting over, and for pages that aren't very active (no links, very little traffic), it can make more sense to clean things up. There's no one-sized-fits-all answer - it depends a lot on the scope of the site and the nature of the change.
-
So there is not a way to put some kind of catch all re-direct without doing it at the root and redirecting everything to the homepage?
-
ErrorDocument 404 /
In the htaccess. Or spider the frick out of the site with Screaming Frog. There's an article on this;
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/8-ways-to-find-old-urls-after-a-failed-site-migration-whiteboard-friday
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
-
Can we re rank our Penalyzed website in Google?
Hello This is Maqbul, from India. I have a jobs portal blog [ bharatrecruit.com]. It was getting around 50K to 100K Views a Day and made me $100 a day. But after a few months, my competitor made negative SEO with 12,000 Spammy backlinks. Suddenly my site was hit by Google and now it is getting 200 to 300 Pageviews a day. So the question is I did not disavow bad links for a long time like 3 to 4 months. Now I disavow all the bad links but the website is not ranking. Can we re-rank this site or create another website. Please reply must. None of the bloggers can answer this. Thanks, Regards Maqbul
Technical SEO | | vinaso960 -
How to 301 trailing URLs to new domain home page - wildcard?
How would I add a redirect rule so all old domain URLs redirect to a new domain? All the old pages no longer exist on a new website. The domains have been through several CMS platforms, so it would be unnecessary to recreate them. Problem is, they're indexed in search engines from the past 10 years, so it's causing a lot of 404s. Example: search "NARI Tampa Bay" and you'll find 2 old domains: nari-tampabay.com & nari-tampabay.org. The new domain is naritb.org Those 2 old domains are now pointed to the same nameservers as the new and listed as parked domains. Here's the current rules in htaccess: <code>RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nari-tampabay.org [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.nari-tampabay.org [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.naritb.org/$1 [L,R=301] RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nari-tampabay.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.nari-tampabay.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.naritb.org/$1 [L,R=301]</code>
Technical SEO | | CartoMark0 -
Lower Level Pages Being Ranked for Key Terms
Good Afternoon We've been having problems with a site for a little while now. It had a penalty (partial link) a few years ago and never really recovered back to it's full potential despite the fact that the penalty was eventually removed and we've since changed the domain completely as well as moving over to https and left behind / disavowed bad links. In the Moz ranking stats now, I'm seeing that some of our lower level pages are ranking for core terms and the erratic nature of the ranking graph seems to indicate that Google is confused and not knowing what page to pull. For example, the top level page would be Hotel in Spain but the page that is ranking for that term is one of the individual hotel information (lower level) pages lets say the Holiday Inn . The lower level page has info on the individual property but also makes reference to it being a "Cheap Hotel In Spain" My suggestion to resolve the problem is to scale back the references to the top level terms on the hotel pages and reintroduce breadcrumb links to help Google follow the structure of the site again Does this sound reasonable or would anyone be able to suggest anything else to try?
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
Duplicate Page Titles and %3E, how can I avoid this?
In my crawl report I keep seeing duplicate page title warning with URL's being referenced twice: e.g. /company/ceo-message/ /company/ceo-message/%3E I'm using canonical link tags but after the new crawl report, I'm still seeing this duplicate page title crawl error. How can I avoid this? I've been looking for answers for a few days but don't seem to see this exact problem discussed. Any insight is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mxmo0 -
Https-pages still in the SERP's
Hi all, my problem is the following: our CMS (self-developed) produces https-versions of our "normal" web pages, which means duplicate content. Our it-department put the <noindex,nofollow>on the https pages, that was like 6 weeks ago.</noindex,nofollow> I check the number of indexed pages once a week and still see a lot of these https pages in the Google index. I know that I may hit different data center and that these numbers aren't 100% valid, but still... sometimes the number of indexed https even moves up. Any ideas/suggestions? Wait for a longer time? Or take the time and go to Webmaster Tools to kick them out of the index? Another question: for a nice query, one https page ranks No. 1. If I kick the page out of the index, do you think that the http page replaces the No. 1 position? Or will the ranking be lost? (sends some nice traffic :-))... thanx in advance 😉
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Is it better to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Is it better for SEO to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Technical SEO | | CustomOnlineMarketing0 -
301 redirect domain to page on another domain
Hi, If I wanted to do a 301 permanent redirect on a domain to a page on another domain will this cause any problems? Lets say I have 4 domains (all indexed with content), I decide to create a new domain with 4 pages, one for each domain. I copy the content from the old domains to the relevant page on the new domain and set it live. At the same time as setting the new site live I do a 301 permanent redirect on the 4 domains to the relevant pages on the new domain. What happens if Google indexes the new site before visiting the redirected domains, could this cause a duplicate content penalty? Cheers
Technical SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Grr . . . Just can't seem to get there
mrswitch.com.au is one site that we are consistantly struggling with . . . It has a page rank of 3 which beats most of the competitors, but when it comes to Google AU searches such as Sydney Electrician and Electrician Sydney etc, we just can't seem to get there and the rankings keep dropping. We backlink and update the pages on a regular basis Any ideas? - Could it be the custom CMS system?
Technical SEO | | kayweb0