Massive 301 Permanant Redirects

[MozAddict]

Hello,

First thing first, I am not moving my website to new domain neither changing my hosting. I just want to change internal page URLs to make them user and search engine friendly, URLs of categories and URLs of category filers. What I am talking about is massive 301 redirection. There are some pages which have backlinks and I have no doubt about using 301-permanant redirection for those pages. But as far as the category filter pages are concerned there are no backlinks for those pages, but yes they do have some authority.

My website is 2months old. Now I want to know that

Does massive redirection effects the website authority?

Or avoid using permanent redirection for all pages instead use only for those pages which have back-links and avoid using for category filter pages.

http://www.artorca.com/

[Dr-Pete]

I apologize, but I'm going to paint a slightly more grim picture. While there's nothing wrong with 301s, in theory, large-scale URL changes on a new site do carry very real risk, even with a flawless 301 implementation. The 301s won't pass all authority (there is some small loss), and if your site is new enough or not on Google's radar quite enough, you could experience short-term ranking loss while everything gets sorted out. At very large scale, and for the wrong reasons, a massive 301 implementation could even raise red flags with Google.

I guess I'd ask two big questions:

(1) Why are you changing your URLs so soon? If it's to tweak out some tiny bit of keyword usage and SEO gain, I'd almost never do it on a 2-month-old site. If it's to fix a problem, that's different.

(2) Are the category filter pages active in the new structure/design? I'm not clear on why you wouldn't 301-redirect them.

My gut feeling is that you're trying to solve a problem with the current URLs, and the solution depends a lot on understanding that problem. Change for change's sake carries a lot of risk for a new site, IMO.

[KarlBantleman]

Tom's right, there is nothing wrong with having 301's on the website and you should use data to determine whether a 301 is necessary. However, if there is any chance that someone has linked to it then a 301 should be used.

Maybe get creative with your 404 page whilst there is a chance it may appear, customers like a good 404 and shows you are user friendly as well. Point them to the new URL and to other products they may like.

Good luck!

[TomRayner]

Hi Akram

Having a lot of 301 redirects won't effect your "authority" in a negative way.

However, having a huge amount could potentially slow down your .htaccess file, if you're running on an Apache server.  We're talking thousands before this happens, though.

I think you're right to redirect those pages with links, that's a no brainer.

As for things like the category page - I'd ask these 2 questions: Does anyone (including yourself) link to them or does anyone visit them? Use a combination of OSE and Analytics data to find out.

If the answer is yes to either of those questions, I would redirect.  If it was "no" to both - I'd consider if it was worth redirecting. Would it really break up a user journey if you didn't?

Remember, having some 404 errors is a perfectly natural occurrence.  If these pages aren't being visited, don't have links in them and aren't in the sitemap (make sure to update it when you redirect), you might get a few 404s to begin with, but eventually Google will stop trying to visit the page.

In short, 301 those pages with links. Ask the above questions about the pages that don't.

Hope this helps!