If you remove a 301-re-direct, will there be a corresponding drop in traffic?
-
We built a better version of a search results page and re-directed from the old search results page to the landing page, and are seeing a huge uptick in traffic. Wondering if we remove the re-direct and 404 the original search results page if we'll see a drop in traffic.
I ran the search results page through open site explorer and Google Webmaster tools, and there aren't many links, but the search results page used to see quite a bit of of traffic over the past couple of years.
-
If you are seeing a large increase in traffic as the result of the redirects, then removing them will reverse that shift in traffic.
If it's SE referrals from long tail keywords going through the redirect, then you're going to definitely feel the hit from moving to 404's. Sure, your newly created pages may replace that traffic eventually, but the 301's are helping them do that now. Just the traffic standpoint is one reason, but passing any and (dang near all) of the link equity through to the new pages in the process.
-
I understand the "don't fix it if its broken" -but, I am wondering if there is any documentation about removing 301 re-directs after the proper URL is indexed.
-
I would imagine that you would see drop n traffic if you began to receive traffic immediately a upon creating the 301. I would leave it in place unless theres a really compelling reason (that I can't think of) to remove it.
-
Why fix it if it isn't broken?
Meaning, why do you want to remove the redirects? I see little benefit from serving a 404 page in stead of redirecting to a better suited landing page.
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
-
Gradual traffic drop of personal finance website in the last three months
Dear All, I have personal finance website https://mymoneysouq.com and the traffic dropped by less than half of what is was before last three months. I am figuring out all the possible issues and doing everything that comes to our mind to improve the quality of our website. I tried the following before posting here:1. Tried contacting website owner which we think spam and add all such domains to our disavow list2. We found little duplicate content on sites like Quora, we made those answers down by reporting to Quora3. Reported to DMCA on 3 articles articles(partial) from our website.4. We are trying improving user experience5. Removed one of our page that shared by many people but our page was not indexed by Google.6. Checked and modified content if any our articles are having more keywords than what SEO experts recommend. 7. We are working on researching more and figuring our what else can might have gone wrong with our traffic.8. Working on improving EAT I attached our traffic drop graph. I believe this drop is not natural it happened because of some issue at our end and we are not able to figure out the exact reasons.Surprisingly another site with not so high quality content started ranking now in the top.I am here to get community members/experts help on this. I could provide you if you need any further details. Thanks a lot for your time. We really appreciate any tips that you can share with us.Q2S1tlK Q2S1tlK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | swamyallamraju0 -
Removing the Trailing Slash in Magento
Hi guys, We have noticed trailing slash vs non-trailing slash duplication on one of our sites. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup
Duplicate: https://www.example.com.au/living/
Preferred: https://www.example.com.au/living So, SEO-wise, we suggested placing a canonical tag on all trailing slash pointing to non-trailing slash. However, devs have advised against removing the trailing slash from some URLs with a blanket rule, as this may break functionality in Magento that depends on the trailing slash. The full site would need to be tested after implementing a blanket rewrite rule. Is any other way to address this trailing slash duplication issue without breaking anything in Magento? Keen to hear from you guys. Cheers,0 -
Moving content to a newer domain - 301 re-direct not possible
I had a website that was getting decent traffic. Around 2k visits a day. Owing to some issues, the domain was suspended my the domain provider and they won't be releasing it anytime soon. Now, I'm in talks with my domain provider and it might take some good time to get back the domain live (weeks if not months). So, I have decided to migrate all my content to a new domain. Also, Google has stopped displaying my earlier domain (the suspended domain) in the search results now and I have removed the property from webmaster tools/search console. And since my earlier domain is suspended, redirection is not possible. So, I had a couple query in regards to this: I'm in the process of moving the content from the older suspended domain to the newer domain. What should I do that Google does not penalise my new site on the grounds of duplicate content, etc. What other things I should do while I'm in the process of this migration.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Evaway0 -
Is it possible to direct HTTP www 301 to HTTPS non www?
I have a question that has been stumping me and if someone could help I would gladly buy your coffee for a month. I have a website that used to be www and http a year or two ago. Now it is https and non www. A lot of my older links point to the www and http version of my site. This results in two 301 redirects. I.e. A link on another site to my site points to http://www.mysite.com The network waterfall shows: http://www.mysite.com 301 -> http://mysite.com http://mysite.com 301 -> https://mysite.com https://mysite.com (finally) **2 part question. ** **--Do you think that this two 301 redirect hop would affect SEO performance? I can see it did affect page authority through Moz. ** --Is there away around this? I.e. to redirect http:// AND http://www directly to https:// with no hops in between. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stodzy0 -
Technical SEO Issues - Traffic Drop
Hi guys, I hope you're all doing well! We're a small personalised gifts company who specialise in the provision of phone cases, mugs, macbook covers and the like. I head up the Digital Marketing but have little experience in the technical side of SEO and have very limited resources in terms of budget and staffing. Over the past few months, I've been working on stripping down the thin content on the site, fixing duplicate content issues and focusing on other digital channels to boost revenue. However, as of recent we've noticed a significant drop in traffic and our rankings. I've tried to diagnose the problem and I'm convinced there are some technical SEO fixes that need to be implemented. Our website is www.mrnutcase.com If any of you have any ideas, I'd love to hear some of them. Greatly appreciated, Danny
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyNutcase0 -
Why does our main keyword keep dropping?
Hey Guys, We've seen an alarming drop in our main keyword for our website. Our biggest driver of traffic has always been the search term 'gifts for men' which we commanded the top spot for a while, but have always been in the top 4 for. Recently (in the last 3-4 months) we dropped to 6 and as of last night we dropped down to 9th. We still rank number 2 for 'gift ideas for men'. Both search terms point to this page: GIfts For Men Nothing onsite or technically has changed, and there is consistently new content in the form of products being added almost daily. We hit a manual action back in October of last year and I'm concerned that the toxic links (that we didn't create mind you) we disavowed may have been unnaturally boosting this page and now we're dropping significantly because they're gone. Any ideas on how we can curb this concerning trend? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheGreatestGoat0 -
Almost no organic traffic
Hi, We have an online store, it is up & running since January 1st. Since then we really didn't see any improvements on our organic traffic at all. About 10% of our traffic is coming from organic search, and more than 20% of organic search actually coming from branded keywords. We haven't paid a lot of attention to SEO so far. I mean, we paid attention to the practices, however we focused on a better customer/user experience more than SEO. We improved our product pages, reduced checkout process to one step, used bigger icons / buttons. According to our customers, our website is pretty easy to navigate and shop. We haven't received any major complaint so far. Except couple of products, all the content we have is original, we didn't use any manufacturer product content or copied from another website. However, looks like all these efforts don't mean a lot to Google, unless we have a solid backlinks. Currently i am considering to make category pages NOINDEX and implement microdata from schema.org. However, Is it good idea to make category pages NOINDEX for an ecommerce website? I would like to hear your comments/recommendations what else we can do to create some organic traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | serkie0 -
301 Not Allowed...Other Solutions?
A client's site where both the www. and non-www. versions are both being indexed. The non-www. version have has roughly 1000 or so links where the www. version has over twice as much pointing back to the site. In addition, the www. version has higher domain authority. Their programmer has suggested that they can't implement 301's permanent redirects across their site for a few reasons. My question is, what would be the best alternative to block/redirect the non-www. version from being indexed yet still pass link-juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VidenMarketing0