Are 301s advisable for low-traffic URL's?
-
We are using some branded terms in URLs that we have been recently told we need to stop using. If the pages in question get little traffic, so we're not concerned about losing traffic from broken URLs, should we still do 301 redirects for those pages after they are renamed?
In other words, are there other serious considerations besides any loss in traffic from direct clicks on those broken URLs that need to be considered?
This comes up because we don't have anyone in-house that can do the redirects, so we need to pay our outside web development company. Is it worth it?
-
If those pages are indexed by Google and Google returns them in SERPs then yes, they will 404. That is why you need to test the page first and do a header redirect 301 to either the category page or the home page.
Hope that was the This Answered My Question : )
-
Great feedback! I still just have 1 remaining question, though, which I've posted below Richard's comments. Thanks!
-
The trademark issue is with the names of the subfolders, not the domain name.
-
So can you just change the links to look at the new URL? Still best to redirect them though.
Curious about why you have to change them now though as I just assumed you were using a competitors trademark in a domain before
-
Thanks for that tool! I was not familiar with it.
-
This almost fully answers my question. Those pages don't have inbound links from other sites. We have over 10,000 pages on the site, so we can't have links to them all. So, they aren't worth keeping for traffic or links.
But you say, "I would hope that you capture your 404 errors and 301 redirect all the time anyway." So, my last remaining question is: Am I necessarily creating 404 errors by not redirecting?
Thanks, everyone!
-
Yes, these are just pages on our main site. They will be renamed, and we will be keeping the content on the site.
-
If I'm reading this right though, it is only the URLs they've got to stop using, not the content. Therefore a 404 provide alternate content suggestions isn't necessary in this case; I agree that a 301 redirect is best solution - it passes the human traffic and the link juice to the correct location.
As to whether it is worth the cost, then of course it is the famous answer of "it depends". However, I'd imagine that the cost of redirects should be pretty minimal and if the old URLs drive just a couple of conversions (whatever that may be) then it should have been worthwhile, even ignoring the link juice.
-
As Ryan was stating; if those pages have inbound links, test those links for strength and if they are worth keeping, then 301.
Either way, I would hope that you capture your 404 errors and 301 redirect all the time anyway.
-
Sites put up and take down pages all the time. Broken links are of no consequence to the overall site quality.
This is a different discussion altogether, but broken URL situations actually offer an opportunity for a 404 page that offers users alternate content.
-
Are you linking out to these sites you have to get rid of?
In fact are they even sites or just other pages on your main site? I have maybe misunderstood
EDIT - I'll go ahead and assume I've just got the wrong end of the stick and it's pages on your site that you need to get rid of.
In that case if you can't redirect them can you change the links to point to different pages or even just remove them?
-
Thanks for this reply, and for the others!
OK, so the fact that your site has broken URLs doesn't bring your site in general down in the search engine rankings? Broken URLs aren't necessarily an indicator of a poor quality site that would result in some sort of penalty?
-
Redirecting them won't help the main domain rank for these brand terms, but it will capture the type in traffic and pass most of the link juice coming into these other sites.
Ultimately it shouldn't take your web development company long (unless you have hundreds) and indeed you could maybe even do it at the registrar easily (if not efficiently), so don't pay through the nose for it.
On the other hand, unless you rely on links from those other sites it won't harm your main site in any way by letting them die.
-
There are two things I would look closely at in such a situation...
Traffic: First, you want to know if these pages are generating any traffic. If they are, you should keep them. If they aren't (which it sounds like they aren't), move on to checking links...
Links: Before you scrap pages generating little inbound traffic, you should check to see if said pages have any inbound links. If they do, you would want to evaluate the quality of those links and determine if that is greater or lessor than the cost of keeping the pages and setting up redirects. If you determine these pages have valuable links, definitely 301 redirect them to a good substitute page.
When I speak of the cost associted with setting up the redirects I'm talking about the time taken to set up the redirects (likely your time or ITs time).
We use Open Site Explorer to help us audit inbound links to pages.
-
The link doesn't need to be broken. 301 redirect the existing link to the new one and anyone that is linking or typing or clicking into the old URL will be forwarded to the new one and they wont know it. Make sense? Yes, do it!
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
-
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
Why are only PDFs on my client's site being indexed, and not actual pages?
My client has recently built a new site (we did not build this), which is a subdomain of their main site. The new site is: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/uk/en/. (Their main domain is: http://itelligencegroup.com/uk/) This new Addstore site has recently gone live (in the past week or so) and so far, Google appears to have indexed 56 pdf files that are on the site, but it hasn't indexed any of the actual web pages yet. I can't figure out why though. I've checked the robots.txt file for the site which appears to be fine: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/robots.txt. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti0 -
What's with the redirects?
Hi there,
Technical SEO | | HeadStud
I have a strange issue where pages are redirecting to the homepage.Let me explain - my website is http://thedj.com.au Now when I type in www.thedj.com.au/payments it redirects to https://thedj.com.au (even though it should be going to the page https://thedj.com.au/payments). Any idea why this is and how to fix? My htaccess file is below: BEGIN HTTPS Redirection Plugin <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^home.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^photos.htm$ http://photos.thedj.com.au/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^contacts.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/contact-us/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^booking.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/book-dj/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^downloads.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/downloads/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^payonline.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/payments/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^price.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/pricing/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^questions.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/faq/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^links.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/links/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^thankyous/index.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/testimonials/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://thedj.com.au/ [L,R=301]</ifmodule> END HTTPS Redirection Plugin BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mrdj.net.au$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mrdj.net.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "https://thedj.com.au/" [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mrdj.com.au$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mrdj.com.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "https://thedj.com.au/" [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thedjs.com.au$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.thedjs.com.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "https://thedj.com.au/" [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^theperthweddingdjs.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.theperthweddingdjs.com$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "https://thedj.com.au/" [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thedjs.net.au$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.thedjs.net.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "https://thedj.com.au" [R=301,L]0 -
Changing URLs
As of right now we are using yahoo small business, when creating a product you have to declare an id, when we created the site we were not aware that you will not be able to change the id but also the ID is being used as the URL. we have a couple thousand products in which we will need to update the URLs. What would the best way to be to fix this without losing much juice from our current pages. Also I was thinking that if we did them all in a couple weeks it would hurt us a lot, and the best course of action would be to do a slow roll out of the URL changes. Any help is appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TITOJAX0 -
Webmaster Tools vs Screaming from for 404's
Hey guys, I was just wondering which is better to use to find the 404's effecting your site. I have been using webmaster tools and just purchased screaming frog which has given me a totally different list of 404's compared to WMT. Which do I use, or do I use both? Cheers
Technical SEO | | Adamshowbiz0 -
Best Practices for adding Dynamic URL's to XML Sitemap
Hi Guys, I'm working on an ecommerce website with all the product pages using dynamic URL's (we also have a few static pages but there is no issue with them). The products are updated on the site every couple of hours (because we sell out or the special offer expires) and as a result I keep seeing heaps of 404 errors in Google Webmaster tools and am trying to avoid this (if possible). I have already created an XML sitemap for the static pages and am now looking at incorporating the dynamic product pages but am not sure what is the best approach. The URL structure for the products are as follows: http://www.xyz.com/products/product1-is-really-cool
Technical SEO | | seekjobs
http://www.xyz.com/products/product2-is-even-cooler
http://www.xyz.com/products/product3-is-the-coolest Here are 2 approaches I was considering: 1. To just include the dynamic product URLS within the same sitemap as the static URLs using just the following http://www.xyz.com/products/ - This is so spiders have access to the folder the products are in and I don't have to create an automated sitemap for all product OR 2. Create a separate automated sitemap that updates when ever a product is updated and include the change frequency to be hourly - This is so spiders always have as close to be up to date sitemap when they crawl the sitemap I look forward to hearing your thoughts, opinions, suggestions and/or previous experiences with this. Thanks heaps, LW0 -
Magento Robots & overly dynamic URL-s
How can i block all URL-s on a Magento store that have 2 or more dynamic parameters in it, since all the parameters have attribute name in it and not some uniform ID Would something like: Disallow: /?&* work? Since the only thing that is constant throughout all the custom parameters is that they are separated with "&" Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | tilenkrivec0 -
Fowarding URL's Have No SEO Value?
Good Morning from -3 Degrees C no paths gritted wetherby UK 😞 Imagine this scenario. http://www.barrettsteel.com/ has been optimised for "Steel suppliers" & "Steel stockholders". After runnning an on page SEO moz report its recommended that the target terms should be placed in the url eg www.steel-suppliers.co.uk Now the organisation will not change the url but think setting up a forwarding url eg registering www.steel-suppliers.co.uk to then forward to www.steel-suppliers.co.uk will be of benfit from an SEO perspective. But i think not. So my question is please "is a forwarding url of no value but a permanent URL (struggling for the terminology to describe the url a site is set up with) such as www.steel-suppliers.co.uk would be of value?" Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0