301 redirect + new website copy

[Stuart26]

Hi There,

We are currently redeveloping our website and we're rewriting and optimising our many of our service pages.

I think I may already know the answer but should we apply 301 redirects from our old services pages to the new versions? The content subject matter will be the same on the new versions, they will just be completely reworded.

I would be interested to hear your views.

Thanks,

Stu

[MikeRoberts]

Sorry... I just had to jump in on this since the other members of the Roberts Tribe of Moz have chimed in. I agree completely with their assessment.

[DougRoberts]

Good advice from Tom (no relation).

The only thoughts I'd add are:

1. Can you keep the URLs the same and just update the new page content and avoid the re-direct completely. (Unless of course you feel that optimising your URLs would deliver more benefit than retaining all the link equity)

2. Make sure you have an up to date list of your old pages and their URLs before you deploy the new site! Use this list to test!

3. Watch out for internal links in any old content and make sure these are up to date.

4. A good opportunity to look at your 404 page and see how you can improve that to help people find what they're looking for (not just telling them that the page can't be found)

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Stu,

I totally agree with Tom Roberts. Something to keep in mind as well. Redirects are absolutely necessary is you have incoming links to those pages. If you have a lot of pages you can get away with only doing redirects from the URL's that have incoming links.

[TomRayner]

Hi Stu

In general, yes - I would implement a 301 redirect here.

One thing to consider which might alter this decision are the links (if any) pointing to those pages at the moment.  If you see any links going to those pages that you think may be spammy or against Google quality guidelines, it would be a good idea not to implement the 301 redirect - as then those bad links will no longer point to your site.

If you ever have a decision on whether to bulk redirect a large number of 301s - here's two things to consider:

1. Do those pages have any external links pointing towards it?  If they don't, you're unlikely to get sustained 404 errors, as nothing will direct Google/Bing to visit those URLs (providing your on-site links and XML sitemap are updated too).

2. Have you had many page views for those pages?  Hop into Google Analytics and look at the number of page views for the last 3 months.  If it's a strong number, it would indicate people visit the page frequently and may have it bookmarked - in which case you'd want to redirect.  If the value is low or nil, then it may not be an issue if you don't redirect.

The reason why you may not want to redirect a big number of URLs is that every redirection you add to the .htaccess file makes the file size bigger - and the bigger it is, theoretically the slower it may be.  This is only a real concern when you have thousands of redirects to consider - so the above points are applicable then.

But if it's a small number, implement the 301s, update your onpage links and XML sitemap, and everything should be great!

Hope this helps