Massive 301 Permanant Redirects
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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!
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 Multiple 301's to the Same URL Cause Issues?
Hey Everyone, We have a client (I don't have permission to disclose) that has just attempted to create better URL's for their site, per our direction. In the process, their website platform kind of took over their renaming attempts and instead of creating the clean, short, descriptive URLs we all wanted, they got convoluted, longer URLs. This all happened within the past 3 or 4 days. So, they went out and got an add-on that's going to help them create better URL's. In the meantime, they now have the original page/URL plus two new ones for a total of three. No 301's have been setup yet. When they create the new and (hopefully) improved URL tomorrow, will it hurt their rankings to have three pages redirected to the new one? Is a 301 redirect the right method for this issue or should they do something different? Thanks in advance, Kirk
On-Page Optimization | | kbates0 -
Is it OK to 301 redirect 1000s of duplicate random URLs to homepag?
Hello, We found a critical error in our site internal link structure and the way Google indexes it. Website has 1000s of URLs that are basically 50% match to homepage. They all start the same example.com/category/random/random I can do a redirect match and 301 them to homepage. This way 1000s of bogus url are not indexed and no value given. Is it OK to redirect so many URLs to homepage? Platform is creating these URLs because of search query, where it adds all site content to one page. Currently this search page /category / has own canonical and all those duplicate content URLs have canonical to that /category /. To fix my plan is to a. Remove canonical from /category / that way all those duplicate URLs don't have it either. B. Redirect match all URLs that have /category / in them to homepage. (this is most important page where 50% of that content is and should be the main page). Is this plan ok?
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud1 -
Should I Redirect My Subdomain Or Not?
Hi everyone, I have a question regarding my subdomain. My website is japracool[dot]com and it was under coriate[dot]com (in my hosting service). I still can access my website trough japracool[dot]coriate[dot]com. My question, should I redirect it to japracool[dot]com? Thanks before.
On-Page Optimization | | Japracool0 -
How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect
Hi all I hope that someone can help.... How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect The url in question is: How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/search/Category/luxury_hotels_venues_uk_wedding_venues/exclusive_use_venues/letter/c http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/location/uk-england/bedfordshire-weddings/franklin-park http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/deal/location/uk-england/chorley-weddings/curtis-bay etc, going to http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business the above is just a few examples, google webmaster is showing over 8.000 404 page not found errors. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Taiger0 -
How Much Does a Missing www. 301 redirect hurt a business?
We're preparing a report for a potential client, and are trying to figure out a way to estimate rankings gains. One of the major issues is a lack of a 301 redirect for non-www. domains to www. domains. We checked and there's no canonicalization, so it's a clear issue. According to Google, the non-www. links from 8 different domains. The www. version of the website has links from 248 different domains. Nearly all anchor text is branded, as they've never had any SEO work done before. Does anyone have a suggestion for approximating benefits of setting up their .htaccess file correctly? Would the benefits even be that great? We're of course advising additional things, but we just want to be more certain about this step's SEO-boost.
On-Page Optimization | | FlynnZaiger0 -
301 redirected Duplicate Content, still showing up as duplicate after new crawl.
We launched a site where key landing pages were not showing up in google. After running the seomoz crawl it returned a lot of duplicate pages which may expalin this. The actual url of the page is /design and it was telling me the following were dupes: /design/family-garden-design
On-Page Optimization | | iterate
/design/small-garden-design
/design/large-rural-garden-design
/Design All of these URL's were in fact pointing to the /design landing page. I 301 redirected all of the pages so they all now resolve to /design After running another crawl the day after doing this it's still showing up as duplicate content on seomoz. Does seomoz evaluate the new changes right away?0 -
I noticed that my company owns a few exact match domains that are relevant to our business. Is it worth doing anything other than just redirecting them to our homepage?
It turns out we own a few exact match domains that are relevant to our business. Is it worth doing anything other than just redirecting? (We have owned these sites for a long time, over 15 years.) The keywords are moderate to low in traffic and moderate to high in competitiveness. (Right now they 301 to our main site.) I know exact match is not as valuable as it used to be and that there are mixed opinions about microsites...
On-Page Optimization | | Linda-Vassily0 -
Redirecting to an exact match root domain: good, bad, or neutral?
We have a client who wants to secure an exact match domain for their new website, but it's very long. They're wondering about securing an additional domain that is much shorter for marketing purposes (business cards, email addresses, etc). We would then 301 redirect the short domain to the main domain. Are we going to see negative SEO implications from that?
On-Page Optimization | | MackenzieFogelson1