Redoing a site - 404 redirect or 301 redirect
-
I'm redoing a website, should i 404 the old pages, or 301 redirect to the main page? what is better? (around 100 pages)
-
Hi Felix,
If there is going to be a relevant, equivalent page on the new site, by all means a 301 redirect is best. If the old content is really not going to have a parallel page on the new site, then a 404 would be fine. Just keep in mind that 404s can frustrate users who are trying to access your site. It would be best to create a friendly, customized and humanized 404 error page if you intend on allowing old pages to 404. Even if 404s arent in the plan, you're bound to have some eventually so I'd strongly suggest creating a custom 404 page anyway.
I agree with cardiganMedia's comment about using 301 redirects for any pages that have built up any page rank or inbound links. Check them in OSE and make sure you preserve the authority the old site had by making sure to 301 redirect high authority pages to their equivalents on the new site.
Good luck! I hope these are helpful suggestions.
Dana
-
If the site ranks well and there's any way to preserve the present URL structure, that would be your best bet. If that's not possible, 301 the old URLs to the new applicable pages.
You can do this via .htaccess like this:
301 redirect /old-permalink-here http://new-full-url-goes-here
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
-
Consolidating a Large Site with Duplicate Content
I will be restructuring a large website for an OEM. They provide products & services for multiple industries, and the product/service offering is identical across all industries. I was looking at the site structure and ran a crawl test, and learned they have a LOT of duplicate content out there because of the way they set up their website. They have a page in the navigation for “solution”, aka what industry you are in. Once that is selected, you are taken to a landing page, and from there, given many options to explore products, read blogs, learn about the business, and contact them. The main navigation is removed. The URL structure is set up with folders, so no matter what you select after you go to your industry, the URL will be “domain.com/industry/next-page”. The product offerings, blogs available, and contact us pages do not vary by industry, so the content that can be found on “domain.com/industry-1/product-1” is identical to the content found on “domain.com/industry-2/product-1” and so-on and so-forth. This is a large site with a fair amount of traffic because it’s a pretty substantial OEM. Most of their content, however, is competing with itself because most of the pages on their website have duplicate content. I won’t begin my work until I can dive in to their GA and have more in-depth conversations with them about what kind of activity they’re tracking and why they set up the website this way. However, I don’t know how strategic they were in this set up and I don’t think they were aware that they had duplicate content. My first thought would be to work towards consolidating the way their site is set up, so we don’t spread the link-equity of “product-1” content, and direct all industries to one page, and track conversion paths a different way. However, I’ve never dealt with a site structure of this magnitude and don’t want to risk messing up their domain authority, missing redirect or URL mapping opportunities, or ruin the fact that their site is still performing well, even though multiple pages have the same content (most of which have high page authority and search visibility). I was curious if anyone has dealt with this before and if they have any recommendations for tackling something like this?
On-Page Optimization | | cassy_rich0 -
Company name in Site Meta description?
Ok. So I know that you should have your company name in the site title, but is it all that important in the site description? The reason I ask is because I am competing with another company for the #1 position (I was number 1, now #2) that has an 8 character name and mine is 22 taking away from a great deal of real estate in my 150-160 character site description in which I could provide additional information describing my company. Should I remove my name in the site description enabling me to use more descriptive keywords and actionable text such as (Find, research, contact, professional, info) etc. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | photoseo10 -
I have a site with jokes. What schema markup could I use?
My site is about jokes. I wonder what schema markup could I use to be more visible in the search results.
On-Page Optimization | | MichaelJanik0 -
Help for 404 error
Is it ok to use hash(#) in URL as right now it is showing 404 error while checking broken links using check my link chrome extension. E.g. http://instafrsh.com/index.php#aboutUs If not, Please suggest how to resolve this issue
On-Page Optimization | | Obbserv0 -
Unsure about improvement of inner sites
Hi ! I want to improve the ranking of Home on my site. Now I did some on-page SEO on Home itself for the keyword "Webdesign Freiburg". How much does it make sense to put this keyword also into inner sites - although I primarily want to rank Home for this keyword? Does Home profit from putting the keyword into subpages? Cheers and thanks Marc
On-Page Optimization | | RWW0 -
What is the best way to execute a geo redirect?
Based on what I've read, it seems like everyone agrees an IP-based, server side redirect is fine for SEO if you have content that is "geo" in nature. What I don't understand is how to actually do this. It seems like after a bit of research there are 3 options: You can do a 301 which it seems like most sites do, but that basically means if google crawls you in different US areas (which it may or may not) it essentially thinks you have multiple homepages. Does google only crawl from SF-based IPs? 302 passes no juice, so probably don't want to do that. Yelp does a 303 redirect, which it seems like nobody else does, but Yelp is obviously very SEO-savvy. Is this perhaps a better way that solves for the above issues? Thoughts on what is best approach here?
On-Page Optimization | | jcgoodrich0 -
301 rediects - weird characters
Hi, Just cleaning up some 404 errors in my site in GWT and noticed a couple of external links pointing at me that are wrong. Basically they are from a couple of DIY forum sites (I've not put these links in place myself they are 100% natural) and it appears that the owners of the forums amend the links (inserting characters into link) so they are not quite right. How would I go about redirecting the following - www.example.co.uk/blueberry_pie.htm Whatever I try doesn't work and I always end up with a 404! Cheers
On-Page Optimization | | Jon-C
J0 -
301 redirect results in plummeting DA. Why?
I redirected from my .co.uk site to my .com site (www.salesandinternetmarketing) and my Domain Authority has gone from 44 to 33!? Also SEO Moz states that it's crawled all my pages, yet isn't showing any on page reports, inculding keyword usage, meta descriptions, etc. I'm very confused and not receiving clear answers from the support team (they've said one of the reasons is that my keywords are not ranked in the top 50, well some are, nevertheless I should still be getting some report info shouldn't I)? Can someone please help, I'm rather fed up as this has been going on a for a couple of weeks now
On-Page Optimization | | lindsayjhopkins0