Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site?
-
A client site has thousands of pages with unoptimized urls. I want to change the url structure to make them a little more search friendly.
Many of the pages I want to update have backlinks to them and good PR so I don't want to delete them entirely. If I change the urls on thousands of pages, that means a lot of 301 redirects. Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site?
Thanks,
Dino
-
I've never had a problem on creating a large number of redirects on a site before. It's something that happens quite a bit, for instance if a site is moving to a a site to a new domain or a new CMS, where it can often be very difficult to exactly recreate the same URL structure.
There's no limit to the number of redirects, just the number of hops. If the site had existing redirects in place, you might want to update those existing redirects as well, to point to the new final destination.
-
I'm doing the same thing with a site I'm rebuilding. The page structure is changing to make it more logical to users and hopefully google. I've changed the urls on my site a couple of times over the years and I haven't noticed much change in the short-term and a considerable boost in the long term.
The site I'm building has hundreds of pages with tons of 301 redirects as well.
-
There is some loss in PR with 301 but it's about linking in the future too. Is it easier for someone to link to example.com/red-apples or example.com/?page_id=53.
I personally don't think it's a waste of time and it certainly helps with UX.
-
I do not know how much an optimized url is worth. I also do not know how much link juice would be lost by redirecting. I wasn't aware that any would be lost. If so, then I need to consider if leaving them alone is the best option at this point. Definitely do not want to do more harm than good.
-
You hope to get a tiny bump out of changing the URL ?
But, you are going to waste some linkjuice in redirecting....
and create thousands of htaccess lines that must be processed...
and you are worried that tons of redirects are going to cause a problem....
How much do you think an optmized URL is worth in the search engines?
I don't think that it's worth a whole lot.
-
There won't be any issue. But you need to check with system admin if your server could be able to handle thousands of redirects. Most of the time, reducing duplicates from the current site and using regular expression for 301 redirects will reduce the number of 301 redirects considerably.
-
Simple answer is no, but.....
Make sure that your 301s are not more than 3 redirects from the original post. For example, if you have a page called pageid=44 and it's about red apples, then make sure that the 301 goes to /red-apples (meaning the exact page you want it to go to)
Matt Cutts has a great video on this on WMT.
This should really answer all your questions but if you have any more then please feel free to ask.
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
-
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
301 migration - Indexed Pages rising on old site
Hello, We did a 301 redirect from site a to site b back in March. I would check on a daily basis on the index count using query "site:sitename" The past couple of days, the old domain (that was 301 redirected) indexed pages has been rising which is really concerning. We did a 301 redirect back in march 2016, and the indexed count went from 400k pages down to 78k. However, the past 3 days it went from 78k to 89,500. And I'm worried that the number is going to continue to rise. My question - What would you do to investigate / how to investigate this issue? Would it be screaming frog and look at redirects? Or is this a unique scenario that I'd have to do other steps/procedures?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Redirecting old mobile site
Hi All, Trying to figure out the best option here. I have a website that used to utilize a separate mobile site (m.xyz.com) but now utilizes responsive design. What is the best way to deal with that old mobile site? De-index? 301 redirect back to the main site in the rare case someone finds the m. site somewhere? THanks! Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Do I have to optimize every page on my site?
Hi guys I run my own photography webstie (www.hemeravisuals.co.uk Going through the process optimizing my page for seo. I have one question I have a few gallery pages with no text etc? Do I still have to optimize these ? Would it rank my site lower if they weren't optimized? And how can i do this sucessfully with little text on these pages ( I have indepth text on these subjects on my services & pricing pages? Kind Regards Cam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hemeravisuals0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Huge e-commerce site migration - what to do with product pages?
My very large e-commerce client is about to undergo a site migration in which every product page URL will be changing. I am already planning my 301 redirect process for the top ~1,000 pages on the site (categories, products, and more) but this will not account for the more than 1,000 products on the site. The client specified that they don't want to implement much more than 1,000 redirects so as to avoid impacting site performance. What is the best way to handle these pages without causing hundreds of 404 errors on site migration day? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Redirecting 2 aged site to brand spanking new one
Does 301 redircting 2 aged domain to a new one have a compounding effect? Ive redirected domain #1 to teh new site and my new domain has now jumped to position 6 on Google for the keyword. I have noticed that the sites above me are all aged domains and some with very few backlinks. Number 1 is 4 years old and 20 backlinks, thats it! I am wondering, if I redirected a 11 year old domain that is in the same niche, but never really targeteed that same keyword, would that bump my site even higher? Obviously i am building quality backlinks to the new domain and making sure these are hard to get high quality backlinks. Thanks for your help guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Should I change site link structure? Will that make things worse?
I've got an Exact Match Domain that has just started to do well in Google for say the past year. I've always received good rankings from Bing and Yahoo but I love the traffic levels that Google sends. Long story short on the 25th according to webmaster tools, my impressions on their search engine have been destroyed. No problems, not de-indexed, just not showing my site anymore. I like this site and have been careful, built some links and the anchor text is suspect but also not suspect because its the same as the domain. What I feel the problem may be is the site structure. I set it up a long time ago like this: Exact-Match-keyword. com/ Exact-match-keyword.php/state I thought it looked kinda spammy at the time but also thought it may help. Now I'm wondering if I shorten all the page titles to the state name and 301 the old links if I will regain rankings, or if I may lose some from other search engines. I used to think Penguins were cute......
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TEGS1