Restructuring/Removing 301 Redirects Due To Newly Optimized Keywords
-
Just to be clear, this is for one unique page on a website. Also, please see my diagram attached.
Let's say that a page's URL was originally /original. So, you optimize the page for a new keyword (keyword 1), and therefore change the URL to /keyword-1. A 301 redirect would then be placed...
- /original > /keyword-1
However, let's say 6 months down the road you realize that the keyword you optimized the page for (keyword 1) just isn't working. You research for a new keyword, and come up with (keyword 2). So, you'd like to rename the page's URL to /keyword-2.
After placing a redirect from the current page (keyword 1) to the 'now' new page (keyword 2), it would look like this...
- /original > /keyword-1 > /keyword-2
We know that making a server go through more than one redirect slows the server load time, and even more 'link-juice' is lost in translation.
Because of this, would it make sense to remove the original redirect and instead place redirects like this?
- /original > /keyword-2
- /keyword-1 > /keyword-2
To me, this would make the most sense for preserving SEO. However, I've read that removing 301 redirects can cause user issues due to browsers caching the now 'removed' redirect. Even if this is ideal for SEO, could it be more work than it's worth?
Does anyone have any experience/input on this? If so, I greatly appreciate your time!
-
Hi Corey,
I appreciate the you taking the time to read through our questions and provide some insight. Thanks for all of your help!
P.S. we're also from Chicago. So if I see you out and about, remind me that I owe you a brew.
Thanks,
Drew and the rest of the Logical Media Group team
-
Sure, the chaining redirects thing is something that Matt Cutts has talked about, I think in a few videos. I'm blessed with the ability to actually test/observe this stuff on loads of major sites that are in production as well, which is always the ultimate bit of validation on an SEO theory. Every now and again even Google will give advice that is flat out wrong, and for the most part, the SEO community will repeat it again and again as it's lore.
As for extracting headers, I have some back-end automation that I've written. Here's a nice little free tool that lets you see a single page though:
http://www.northcutt.com/tools/free-seo-tools/http-header-viewer/
If you have a chain of redirects occurring on a page, it will show. Sometimes this is necessary, especially if you have them flying in from all over (ie. in the application, in your .htaccess, in the Apache config files). It always helps to test; I've surprised a few clients with this one.
-
Hi Corey,
Thanks for taking the time to read through this and provide a response!
I'm happy to hear that you think the latter is indeed a better method. You say that chaining redirects causes other issues as well. Do you mind elaborating on this? I just watched a Matt Cutts video and he does confirm that you should avoid chaining too many redirects because Googlebot could actually stop following them at some point (sounds like around 4 or 5).
It's also interesting to hear that you mine for this situation during your auditing process. Do you do this by looking through the .htaccess file or is there a tool you use?
Thanks again for taking the time to help us out with this! Any additional feedback is greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
The Logical Media Group Team
-
Well, first of all, you can't use a keyword as your TLD.
I think I see what you're getting at though. No, don't ever chain redirects; part of my auditing process in fact involves mining for that exact thing, because it causes other issues. Instead of:
/originalUrl.php -> /secondTry.php -> /thirdTry.php
Do:
/originalUrl.php -> /thirdTry.php
/secondTry.php -> /thirdTry.phpI'd also add, at least half of the SEO blogs that I've read over the years are provably wrong in one way or another. But I think I see what that person was getting at too. 301 redirects do sometimes get cached, because a 301 redirect is supposed to be a permanent redirect (unlike a 302 redirect). That doesn't mean that you can't change it though.
In the scenario that they described, they said that they would not just remove the redirect and expect everything to return to normal. It was a 'permanent' redirect. It needs to be 'permanently' directed back to definitely be undone where actually possible.
Good luck.
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
-
Will 301 Redirects Slow Page Speed?
We have a lot of subdomains that we are switching to subfolders and need to 301 redirect all the pages from those subdomains to the new URL. We have over 1000 that need to be implemented. So, will 301 redirects slow the page speed regardless of which URL the user comes through? Or, as the old urls are dropped from Google's index and bypassed as the new URLs take over in the SERPs, will those redirects then have no effect on page speed? Trying to find a clear answer to this and have yet to find a good answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
NGinx rule for redirecting trailing '/'
We have successfully implemented run-of-the-mill 301s from old URLs to new (there were about 3,000 products). As normal. Like we do on every other site etc. However, recently search console has started to report a number of 404s with the page names with a trailing forward slash at the end of the .html suffix. So, /old-url.html is redirecting (301) to /new-url.html However, now for some reason /old-url.html/ has 'popped up' in the Search Console crawl report as a 404. Is there a 'blobal' rule you can write in nGinx to say redirect *.html/ to */html (without the forward slash) rather than manually doing them all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign0 -
Is This 301 redirection correct??
Hello Everyone, I have Added This in .htaccess. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] ErrorDocument 404 /index.html Is this Correct ?? or need any change, please help, thanx in advace .0 -
301 Redirect / Canonical loop on home page?
Hi there, My client just launched a new site and the CMS requires that the home page goes to a subfolder - clientsite.com/store. Currently there is a redirect in place such that clientsite.com -> clientsite.com/store. However, I want clientsite.com to be the canonical version of the URL. What should I do in this case, given that there is now a loop between the redirected page and the canonical page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
301 Redirect and Webmaster Central
I've been working on removing canonical issues. My host is Apache. Is this the correct code for my htaccess? RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spkcp111
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^luckygemstones.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] SECOND!!! I have two websites under Google's Webmaster Central; http://luckygemstones.com which gets NO 404 soft errors... AND http://www.luckygemstones.com which has 247 soft 404 errors... I think I should DELETE the http://luckygemstones.com site from Webmaster Central--the 301 redirect handles the"www" thing. Is this correct? I hate to hose things (even worse?) Help! Kathleen0 -
Http://blogsearch.google.com/ping
Is there any reason why a website would submit all their content (videos, photo galleries, articles) to this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
How long do 301 redirects have to stay in place?
For a large retail site we have plenty of "old" pages that are 2-3 years old and still have 301 redirects to a new page. After a search engine has recognized a 301 redirect and dropped the "Old" URL from the index and started displaying the "New" URL, is it safe to delete that old page and thus remove the 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOmoxy0 -
Redirecting www.example.com to www.example.com/directory/
Hi All, There's been some internal debate going back and forth about redirecting the homepage of a site to a directory. There are a few different POVs circulating, one of which is that it's no different than redirecting to a /index page. Basically, the homepage is ranking for the keyword that we want the directory to rank for but I can't seem to justify placing this type of redirect. The content on both pages is different, but for the term both the homepage and the directory make sense to rank. Has anyone ever done anything like this before? Can anyone see any reason to do something like this? I believe this move would dilute the link value we currently have going to the homepage and potentially cause us to lose our #2 slot with the homepage in favor of a lower spot with the directory. I'd love to hear any thoughts on this/learn if anyone has experimented with this tactic. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamieCottle280