Will "internal 301s" have any effect on page rank or the way in which an SE see's our site interlinking?
-
We've been forced (for scalability) to completely restructure our website in terms of setting out a hierarchy.
For example - the old structure :
country / city / city area
Where we had about 3500 nicely interlinked pages for relevant things like taxis, hotels, apartments etc in that city :
We needed to change the structure to be :
country / region / area / city / cityarea
So as patr of the change we put in place lots of 301s for the permanent movement of pages to the new structure and then we tried to actually change the physical on-page links too.
Unfortunately we have left a good 600 or 700 links that point to the old pages, but are picked up by the 301 redirect on page, so we're slowly going through them to ensure the links go to the new location directly (not via the 301).
So my question is (sorry for long waffle) :
Whilst it must surely be "best practice" for all on-page links to go directly to the 'right' page, are we harming our own interlinking and even 'page rank' by being tardy in working through them manually?
Thanks for any help anyone can give.
-
Thanks Everett - sorry about delay in coming back to your response.
This 301 issue was one if the things we were worried about (along with a ton of others) so we can at least be a little self-assured that we're prgressing on all fronts and not leaving a gaping problem that will continue to dog us.
Cheers
W
-
I'm just going to answer your question directly. This was your question:
"Whilst it must surely be "best practice" for all on-page links to go directly to the 'right' page, are we harming our own interlinking and even 'page rank' by being tardy in working through them manually?"
Short Answer: As long as you are working to update those internal links, and you have 301 redirects in place during the meantime, you should be fine.
Technically speaking, it is best practice to link directly to the page internally, rather than relying on 301 redirects. Yes, it is true that a very small (very, VERY small so as to be virtually undetectable) amount of pagerank is lost when redirecting, it only becomes an issue when you begin adding redirect on top of redirect. Keeping your house clean, so-to-speak, by not relying on redirects to fix your broken internal links will keep this from happening, and is exactly what the tiny amount of pagerank loss is said to be created for (to discourage webmasters from relying on redirects to fix broken internal links) - if you believe Matt Cutts.
With that said, you may indeed have many other issues to deal with, as do most sites that have a geotargeted, deep URL structure like the one you have outlined. Panda slammed a lot of sites like that pretty hard. But all of that is beyond the scope of this question.
I hope you find whatever is wrong and get your traffic back. Good luck!
-
Hi Chris
Thanks - I 'love' the loose MC videos - "it is - but it isn't an issue".
That was my gut that there may be a temporary loss of link juice, but it would re-adjust after a period. Which means we have other issues.
Cheers
W
-
Thanks for your advice - amended the question so it is simpler to read. sorry about that.
Well that's what I thought - but anecdotal evidence ( as well as past experience ) is making me wonder whether we're losing a significant passing of link juice. We put the 301s in place about 6 or 7 months ago so any loss of link juice between pages should have come back by now.
Maybe we have some other issues?
W
-
Agree with Chris, thumbs up. I would just add that "ideally" you would have manually gone through all the links ahead of time and had the 301s in place prior to launch. That way there is no downtime/confusion to Google on what they are supposed to do with these pages. If you think about it you have 600 pages that are in limbo and so after a while Google will just say, well, I guess those pages are dead and start to crawl them less often and eventually drop them.
I would make it a priority to go through those pages and setup the new 301s ASAP. Google will keep trying a old page for a while (few months) if it 404s or even if you have a 301. It knows that mistakes happen. So in the case of the 301, it will still crawl the old URL for a while even after it sees the 301 the first time, just to make sure that the 301 is really permanent. You have a bit of a grace period so take advantage of it to get things cleaned up quickly.
-
Hiya,
First off let me post this video from Matt Cutts regards to 301 redirects http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw
As long as the 301 is pointed towards either the same page or a page of equal value (content wise) you should be good. Whilst going through them manually may loose you a bit of rank over time at least you can know you are directing to the correct pages.
short answer
manual - Short term rank loss long term benifit
Auto - visa vesa
Hope this helps
-
Hello,
I don't quite understand your question, if you are adding more category pages, you should have more pages instead of less, just make sure to 301 redirect every single old page and you shouldn't have a problem.
I had to do something similar to one of my sites like 3 months ago and I did loose pagerank on some pages but ranking got better so I wouldn't worry much about pagerank.
Cheers
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
-
Content that's behind CSS..
For content that's been loaded onto the page.. but it requires a click for it to be revealed.. as in a slider, or a tab, to save space or for a page's organization.. what are your thoughts on Google counting or weighting this content? It would make sense for Google to give it partial or no weighting as if Google attributes the content to being there, its confusion for the user to land on the page and have to find it/click around to find it.. Sorry if this is an obvious question to SEOs.. I've always assumed as long as it was loaded, it'd be mostly counted.. but I'm beginning to doubt my assumption. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | speedcommerce0 -
How many internal links should a (sub-)page maximal have?
What would the effect of having too much be? Does google stop crawling after a number and punish more internal links?
On-Page Optimization | | brainfruit0 -
Will changing a URL negatively affect ranking?
Hello Mozzers, We would like to change the URL for a page on our website which ranks well for some our keyphrases/words. We are hoping the change of URL, through the addition of an additional keyword would help boost the rank of that URL further. At the moment out page gets 2 x A and 2 x B 1xF on the MOZ page rank tool using 5 keyphrase/word variations . One phrase ranks 4, one ranks 3 and the other 3 are 'not in the top 50' Our plan was to change the URL, using SHF404, and use 'Fetch' in the Google search console to re-submit the page to Google. Appreciate you can't give any guarantees how Google will behave, just wondered what your thoughts were on the wisdom of changing the URL in the first place? Thanks Ian
On-Page Optimization | | Substance-create0 -
Meta Titles On Site Different From Google Index Page
This is very embarrassing but I hope someone can help. The Meta Titles on my site are not being shown correctly on the Google site index. For example, when I got directly to the page the appropriate page title is shown obviously. However when I go view that page on Google, the title in completely different. Page title: <a class="attribute-value">Web Design, SEO, PPC, Mobile Development In Philadelphia, Bucks| Infinity Digital Agency</a> Google Shows: Our Services - Infinity Digital Agency Here is the result page. I am currently running WordPress and Yoast. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.infinitydigitalagency.com%2Fservices%2F&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
On-Page Optimization | | infinitydigitalagency0 -
Google Page Rank has no any rankings as of now. what to do?
my domain and page authority is working well right now but my Google Page Rank has no any rankings as we speak. What to do now? can some of you give me advice on this? Thank you very much in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Panoramictrip0 -
Site wide content like "why choose us" just above the footer on every single page
Hi Guys, I know that is not good having any kind of duplicate content on your site, but SEO is above all "competition", so I have to see what my competitor are doing to find the best way to outrank them. So this is my question: is it good or not having site wide content like "why choose us" just above the footer on every single page? At the moment, I can see many - too many - of my client competitors having the "Why choose us" as site wide content above the footer. The funny thing they don't use a couple of sentences, they have placed many words and 10/20 internal links, in other words, they have enough stuff to put down a stand alone page. What do you think: this is just a bad SEO practice or it may work, as I can see so many sites ranking well with this kind of piece of junk on each page. I am not going to recommend this to my client, but as am trying to detail every decision I make showing what the competitors are currently doing, my concern is that my client finds it and therefore will ask to have the same shiny piece of garbage above the footer. Thanks, Pierpaolo
On-Page Optimization | | madcow780 -
Page Rank
I had just made a 301 re-direct on one of our product pages which had a PR of 4, now that Google has indexed the new page, it's now got a PR of 0, i'm struggling to understand why this could be, i know that you may see a drop of 1, which has happened in the past, but this drop just does not make sense. Any ideas of why this could be? Kind Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Paul780 -
Anchor Texts on Internal Links on my Site Question
[Hey folks, Anchor text question for internal links on my site. We all know that proper anchor text is important for rankings, both in links pointing to your site and links on your site. Google webmaster tools is showing my top internal anchor text links to be letters. This is because of navigation on the site which is in a global footer on hundreds of thousands of pages. Do you think that this dilutes or minimizes the relevance of the real anchor texts that we are targeting which trail behind these, or if this went away it would have no effect on the rest of the anchor texts on the site. How would you handle this, we can just get rid of this navigation because it's passing PR and helping the pages get spidered. Thanks in advance. Anchor text 1. g 2. q 3. d 4. v 5. k 6. t 7. o 8. u 9. a 10. p 11. m 12. r 13. e 14. x 15. y 16. l 17. i 18. z 19. c 20. j 21. s 22. b 23. f 24. h 25. w 26. n](mailto:acaldarea@hotmail.com)
On-Page Optimization | | irvingw0