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
-
Sudden issue: no google cache for any product detail pages and offer schema missing from SERPS
Absolutely no idea what is going on. All of our category / subcategory and other support pages are indexed and cached as normal, but suddenly none of our product pages are cached, and all of the product / offer schema snippets have been dropped from the serps as well (price, review count, average rating etc). When I inspect a product detail page url in GSC, I am either getting errors or it is returned as a soft 404. There have been no recent changes to our website that are obvious culprits. When I request indexing, it works fine for non-product pages, but generates the "Something went wrong
Technical SEO | | jamestown
If the issue persists, try again in a few hours" message for any product page submitted. We are not SEO novices. This is an Angular 7 site with a Universal version launched back in October (new site, same domain), and until this strange issue cropped up we'd enjoyed steady improvement of rankings and GSC technical issues. Has anyone seen anything like this? We are seeing rapid deterioration in rankings overnight for all product detail pages due to this issue. A term / page combination that ranked for over a decade in the top 10 lost 10 places overnight... There's just no obvious culprit. Using chrome dev tools to view as googlebot, everything is kosher. No weird redirects, no errors, returns 200 and page loads. Thank You0 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
Robots txt. in page with 301 redirect
We currently have a a series of help pages that we would like to disallow from our robots txt. The thing is that these help pages are located in our old website, which now has a 301 redirect to current site. Which is the proper way to go around? 1- Add the pages we want to disallow to the robots.txt of the new website? 2- Break the redirect momentarily and add the pages to the robots.txt of the old one? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
What to do with 404 errors when you don't have a similar new page to 301 to ??
Hi If you have 404 errors for pages that you dont have similar content pages to 301 them to, should you just leave them (the 404's are optimised/qood quality with related links & branding etc) and they will eventually be de-indexed since no longer exist or should you 'remove url' in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Webmaster tools doesn't pick up 301 redirect
I had a few hundred URLs that died on my site. Google Webmaster Tools notified me about the increase in 404 errors. I fixed all of them by 301 redirecting them to the most relevant page and did multiple header checks to ensure that the 301 has been implemented correctly. Now a few weeks later, Google is giving me the exact same message in Google Webmaster Tools but they are all still 301 redirected. WTF?
Technical SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
We're no longer turning up in Google SERP for our brand search when we used to be #1 after our site update. Any ideas why?
We recently updated our website and during the push, someone mistakenly 301 redirected "www.brandx.com" to "brandx.com" instead of the otherway. Since then, our website no longer turns up for the search "brandx" on Google. We have reversed the mistake a few days ago, but we're still not turning up, and we used to rank #1 in Google SERP. Could it just be due to timing between the crawls and that our www. site didn't make it in Google's index due to this mistake? We have submitted our new sitemap to google a couple of days ago as well, as a side we're still showing up #1 in Bing's results however. And it should still show up based on SEOMoz's SERP report. Any help would help as I'm growing increasingly concerned.
Technical SEO | | JoeLin0 -
301 Re Direct Question for www
Can smeone check this code to make sure it is right so thaqt my site uses www always. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^exercisebiology.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.exercisebiology.com/$1 [R=301,L] I had the hostgators customer service personnel perform this. But I cannot get it to redirect. But he says it works.
Technical SEO | | anoopbal0 -
301 Redirect & re-use
I have an old site which is being moved to a new tld due to re-branding. I understand I would do a series of 301 redirects from the pages of the old site to capture the authority and move to the new site. However, at some point in the future (probably 1-2 years) we may want to re-use the old site again for a different brand (it has a good brand, just not for what we're going after). Question is - can a redirected site be re-used at some point in the future? And if so, which site would new authority (links, etc.) go to?
Technical SEO | | uwaim20120