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
-
301 Re-direct help
Hello Mozzers, I have a technical question that perhaps someone has experience with and can help with. I currently have 2 e-commerce websites: SITE-A.COM (original site) & SITE-B.COM (new site) SITE-B.COM is the newer site that has a lot of new products and new features and great content and is very user friendly. We are thinking about funneling all of our visitors and traffic to SITE-B.com since it is the better experience for the users ... the question is this: If we want to 301 redirect all traffic from Site-A.com to Site-B.com ... where do we initiate those redirect requests? Would it be on the server for Site-A.com? If so, would i have to keep that server up and running forever if i don't want to lose the re-directs? Also, how do i do this properly without violating Google's guidelines? Any help is appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
How to create site map for large site (ecommerce type) that has 1000's if not 100,000 of pages.
I know this is kind of a newbie question but I am having an amazing amount of trouble creating a sitemap for our site Bestride.com. We just did a complete redesign (look and feel, functionality, the works) and now I am trying to create a site map. Most of the generators I have used "break" after reaching some number of pages. I am at a loss as to how to create the sitemap. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | BestRide0 -
Home page indexed but not ranking...interior pages with thin content outrank home page??
I have a Joomla site with a home page that I can't get to rank for anything beyond the company name @ Google - the site works fine @ Bing and Yahoo. The interior pages will rank all day long but the home page never shows up in the results. I have checked the page code out in every tool that I know about and have had no luck....by all account it should be good to go...any thoughts/comments/help would be greatly appreciated. The site is http://www.selectivedesigns.com Thanks! Greg
Technical SEO | | DougHosmer0 -
Can you do a 301 redirect without a hosting account?
Trying to retire domain1 and 301 it to domain2 - just don't want to get stuck having to pay the old hosting provider simply to serve a .htaccess file with the redirect rule.
Technical SEO | | TitanDigital0 -
Is it bad to have your pages as .php pages?
Hello everyone, Is it bad to have your website pages indexed as .php? For example, the contact page is site.com/contact.php and not /contact. Does this affect your SEO rankings in any way? Is it better to have your pages without the extension? Also, if I'm working with a news site and the urls are dynamic for every article (ie site.com/articleid=2323.) Should I change all of those dynamic urls to static? Thank You.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
How can you tell if a 301 has been set up correctly?
How can you tell if a 301 has been set up correctly. We had a .co.uk site that has moved over to a .com However the .co.uk we have hasd problems with the old webmaster giving control, but he has said he has implemented a 301 redirect to the new .com site, and if you click on .co.uk it does transfer you to the .com site How can we check that it is a 301 set up and not another sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
SEOMoz is finding jpegs on my site and reporting them as pages with missing meta titles
SEOMoz has just done a crawl of my site, and found 600 pages with missing meta title errors. When I have checked the list of these pages, they are all jpegs and not pages. Why is SEOMoz reporting that this .jpg files have missing meta titles on my site, which is www.webmakercms.com? SEOMoz has run several crawls of my site and this is the first time it has brought up this list of jpegs as errors and I don't understand why?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
301 redirect: Old pages to new
Hi, We have recently made some changes to our agency site. Looking in webmaster tools we have identified a number of old pages with existing link juice. Not a great deal mostly 32/100 PA. There are a mixture of URLs "meet the team" and people pages etc. The anchor text on the majority of pages is our brand name. Could we now 301 all these pages to one page, or is this a no no in the eyes of Google? Any help greatly appreciated. Best Regards Sean
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0