Whats the best way to revive a directory that was 301'd and now I want to remove that?
-
Last year i 301'd one of my directories on my site, pointing everything to a different directory. Long story short I am going to sell this product line again and would like to just remove the 301 to that original directory, but I am reading that the 301s are also cached in most browsers for a long time. Has anyone successfully done this and if you did what was it that you had to do?
Thanks
Mike
-
I agree with @Jimmy. Remove the 301's, ensure internal and some external links point to the new URLs and update the XML sitemap. As for the browsers saving the 301s, here what I found:
- IE7, IE8, Android 2.3.4 do not cache at all.
- Firefox 18.0.2, Safari 5.1.7 (on Windows 7), and Opera 12.14 all cache, and clear the cache on browser restart.
- IE10 and Chrome 25 cache, but do not clear on browser restart
There was a write up about redirecting 301's using 302 but I recommend using the above method instead... http://goo.gl/Z1uEr
-
Remove the 301 then, get links to the new site. Add a sitemap and make sure there are no duplication between the two sites of content. If your 301 was listed in Webmaster tools then remove it and also set the new as a preferred site and verify it.
Also generate an XML sitemap and submit that to Google, Bing, Yahoo etc
That should do it... It won't happen over night...
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
-
Using a Reverse Proxy and 301 redirect to appear Sub Domain as Sub Directory - what are the SEO Risks?
We’re in process to move WordPress blog URLs from subdomains to sub-directory. We aren’t moving blog physically, but using reverse proxy and 301 redirection to do this. Blog subdomain URL is https://blog.example.com/ and destination sub-directory URL is https://www.example.com/blog/ Our main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL site. This is on Windows server. Due to technical reasons, we can’t physically move our WordPress blog to the main website. Following is our Technical Setup Setup a reverse proxy at https://www.example.com/blog/ pointing to https://blog.example.com/ Use a 301 redirection from https://blog.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/blog/ with an exception if a traffic is coming from main WWW domain then it won’t redirect. Thus, we can eliminate infinite loop. Change all absolute URLs to relative URLs on blog Change the sitemap URL from https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml to https://www.example.com/blog/sitemap.xml and update all URLs mentioned within the sitemap. SEO Risk Evaluation We have individual GA Tracking ID and individual Google Search Console Properties for main website and blog. We will not merge them. Keep them separate as they are. Keeping this in mind, I am evaluating SEO Risks factors Right now when we receive traffic from main website to blog (or vice versa) then it is considered as referral traffic and new cookies are set for Google Analytics. What’s going to happen when its on the same domain? Which type of settings change should I do in Blog’s Google Search Console? (A). Do I need to request “Change of Address” in the Blog’s search console property? (B). Should I re-submit the sitemap? Do I need to re-submit the blog sitemap from the https://www.example.com/ Google Search Console Property? Main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL website, and blog is all about content. So does that impact SEO? Will this dilute SEO link juice or impact on the main website ranking because following are the key SEO Metrices. (A). Main website’s Avg Session Duration is about 10 minutes and bounce rate is around 30% (B). Blog’s Avg Session Duration is 33 seconds and bounce rate is over 92%
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshibhargav_200 -
Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown1 -
What is the best way to rank well in two countries simultaneously with only one CCTLD
I have a .co.nz website and would like to rank on .com.au without setting up a new country specific website for .com.au. What is the best way to do this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveK640 -
When Google's WMT shows thousands of links from a single domain... Should they be removed?
Hi, Looking at Google's WMT "links to your site" it shows few sites that have thousands of links pointing to mine. There are actually only 1-2 links pointing to me from a site that Google shows 2000.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
I assume that it is simply because they don't have canonical tags. Should I ask for the 2 links to be removed? Thanks0 -
What's the best way to manage content that is shared on two sites and keep both sites in search results?
I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BostonWright0 -
What's the best .NET blog solution?
I asked our developers to implement a WordPress blog on our site and they feel that the technology stack that is required to support WP will interfere with a number of different .NET production applications on that server. I can't justify another server just because of a blog either. They want me to find a .NET blog solution. The only thing that looks decent out there is dotnetblogengine.net. Has anyone had any experience with this tool or any others like it? Thanks, Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles1 -
What's the best theme for seo if you are going to use yoast anyway
I am going to edit my theme myself so I don't need something like thesis for that. But people say that the thesis framework is amazing for seo, and it's hard to edit it manually. Does using the thesis theme do anything for you if you are going to use yoast anyway? Thanks William
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | willie790
