Redirecting Several Hundred Pages
-
As of May 21st 2013 (Penguin 2.0 update) we hit a triple-header and I think we can now officially dubbed the "KING OF GOOGLE PANALTIES"!
-July 2012 - recieved 2 "Unatural Links" email
-April 2012 - 20% traffic hit
-May 21st 2013 - 35% traffic hit
We have/had lots of very low quality links using the same anchor text as well as about 150 very low quality articles and almost 100 categories w/several hundred products that recieved little to no traffic.
We have spent the last several weeks cleaning up our link profile and were highly successful in getting most of them removed and have kept detailed reports for our Reconsideration Request for the manual "Unatural Links" penalty. We have also went a step further and have completely redesigned the site that is now much faster/better on-page seo with new, high quality articles and are removing all the low quality articles, categories and products but we are unclear what to do with these.
Which brings me to my question. Should we redirect these pages back to the home page or just let them go to 404 error? I have been doing lots of reading on this subject but there doesnt seem to be any good answers. From what I read, neither are good choices and I cannot decide between the lesser of the 2 evil's ..so any help with this would be greatly apreciated!
Note:
-These category and product pages have absolutly no inbound links (link benefit) and in my opinion are only sucking off link juice and generating little to no revenue. There are also no similar categories or products that these could be redirected to. For example, redirecting dog toys to the dog bed category just sounds like it would increase our bounce rate.-Again, the articles also have no link benefit and only a small handful of the articles actually generate any traffic to speak of (several thousand visitors per year) and the rest generate less than 1000 visitors per year. All have high bounce rates and low conversions.
It would be nice to keep them live as I think some are okay and could be rewritten/re-purpose over time but maybe in light of our Panda penalty it might be better to just to save them offline, let them go to 404 errors and rewritten/re-purpose them another time?
-We did create a very nice 404 page with category navigation and huge search bar so I am leaning more toward this option.
..
Thank in Advance! -
Excellent! Thanks guys! That was really stressing me out trying to figure out the best thing to do with those pages ...404 it is
-
If it were me dealing with this, this is what I would do. I would craft a 404 page that has your most popular articles on it. Then right below the navigation in a very obvious place, I would Put an error message that says the article has been removed or what ever you want really. Then I would follow your page guides and have a list of several other articles that the person might like. Be sure in all of this to send the 404 status code with the header and make sure that no other pages link to the 404 page. If you use a different 404 page for the site, I would set it so that this special page only works with the articles that you are removing.
-
I would definitely set a 404 on those pages. Even more when you got a manual penalty. Although perhaps they aren't carrying any penalty nor benefit, why have them redirected to the index? You said you build a nice 404 page, then set all those bad pages to 404s and let the user/crawler decide what to do when they reach there (search for another page, or go to your homepage by clicking your home link).
Just avoid ANYTHING that can cause you any further damage!
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
-
301 Redirects - Clearing out a 300 Page WordPress Website (HELP)
I'm working on a WordPress website that has around 300 pages (not posts, pages), many of which have very little content and / or content that is super outdated with zero relevancy. The site has been up and running for 10 years and ranks well overall, 1st in many instances for competitive keywords. The company holds yearly events and works with various other companies who exhibit at their events. In their very early years, they created pages on their website for each of these companies, some of which don't even exist anymore. If I had to delete all of the pages that are deprecated there would only be 10 pages of the site left (with blog posts counted separately). Would it be safe to remove these pages and set a 301 redirect to a semi-related page without hurting the website rankings? Any and all advice appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | enimmo19970 -
Avoid landing page redirects
Avoid landing page redirects for the following chain of redirected URLs. http://domainname.com/ https://domainname.com/ https://www.domainname.com/ Anyone know how to solve this issue the correct way?
Technical SEO | | Sammyh0 -
404 Errors for Form Generated Pages - No index, no follow or 301 redirect
Hi there I wonder if someone can help me out and provide the best solution for a problem with form generated pages. I have blocked the search results pages from being indexed by using the 'no index' tag, and I wondered if I should take this approach for the following pages. I have seen a huge increase in 404 errors since the new site structure and forms being filled in. This is because every time a form is filled in, this generates a new page, which only Google Search Console is reporting as a 404. Whilst some 404's can be explained and resolved, I wondered what is best to prevent Google from crawling these pages, like this: mydomain.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=90&catalogId=1008&homePage=Y Implement 301 redirect using rules, which will mean that all these pages will redirect to the homepage. Whilst in theory this will protect any linked to pages, it does not resolve this issue of why GSC is recording as 404's in the first place. Also could come across to Google as 100,000+ redirected links, which might look spammy. Place No index tag on these pages too, so they will not get picked up, in the same way the search result pages are not being indexed. Block in robots - this will prevent any 'result' pages being crawled, which will improve the crawl time currently being taken up. However, I'm not entirely sure if the block will be possible? I would need to block anything after the domain/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?. Hopefully this is possible? The no index tag will take time to set up, as needs to be scheduled in with development team, but the robots.txt will be an quicker fix as this can be done in GSC. I really appreciate any feedback on this one. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | Ric_McHale0 -
Big page of clients - links to individual client pages with light content - not sure if canonical or no-follow - HELP
Not sure what best practice here is: http://www.5wpr.com/clients/ Is this is a situation where I'm best off adding canonical tags back to the main clients page, or to the practice area each client falls under? No-following all these links and adding canonical? No-follow/No-index all client pages? need some advice here...
Technical SEO | | simplycary0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
New EMD update effected my mom's legit author page? From page 1 in SERP to nowhere for her name
I think my mom's site, MargaretTerry.com was hit by this update for her name "Margaret Terry". Went from bouncing around the first page on google.com and .ca all the time to nowhere on the index. The results are now very strange, a mix of Youtube, linked in, and small book stores that she has done events at recently to promote her first book. I was checking after some of my SEO buddys were freaking out about their EMD's getting hit on Sunday. She is an aspiring author with a book coming out this month. There is obviously no ads or spam content on the site... I have never done SEO for it either except a bit of on page I guess. It sucks that people might be grabbing her book soon and when they Google her name nothing shows up. This couldn't have really happened at a worse time. Not to mention the hours spent building the site to her liking, free of charge of course 🙂 Is there anyone I can contact there to help me out? Shouldn't and EMD that is someones name still rank when you search their name?
Technical SEO | | Operatic0 -
Should i redirect my lost links to my home page
Hi, as some of you maybe aware, i had a major problem last year that has caused me nothing but trouble. in short, my hosting company lost me over 10,000 pages from my site and i had to rebuild the site from stratch which is still on going. I lost thousands of links to my site and i have been over the past week pointing the pages not found to the sections that is best suited to them. But i am just wondering if it would harm my site if i also point some of those links to my home page. I was a page rank four before disaster happened to my site and now i am a page rank two and i want to build this up. so i am just wondering if i should point some of those good links to my home page i am redirecting the pages using 301 in my htaccess file any advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Https redirect
Hi there, a client of mine is asking me if Google would penalize to redirect from all the http urls to https (they want to change the security protocol). I assume it is going to work as a classic 301, right? so they might lose some authority in they way, but I am not 100% sure. Can anyone confirm this? does anyone has a similar experience? thanks a lot!
Technical SEO | | elisainteractive0