480,000 Redirects - Is this hurting my SEO? PLEASE HELP!
-
Hello everyone,
I have over 480,000 internal rewrites in my Magento site. The reason I have so many is because I have over 1,500 products on my site and I update inventory every day via Bulk Import Extension. For the first few months I didn't realize that the URL was changing by a single digit every time I imported the .xml with new inventory counts. This of course created thousands and thousands of 404s.
I figured out how to avoid the digit change and then I started redirecting the 404s via a Bulk Rewrite Extension. I managed to rewrite over over 50,000 404s but new ones still pop up every day and there is no end to them in sight.
My traffic is terrible. Only about 40 organics daily. It's been like that for months. I can't get it off the ground and I think it's because of this excessive rewrite and 404 issue.
My question is, does having so many internal rewrites and 404s hurt my SEO efforts?
Would it be better just to start from scratch with a new site, new domain, new everything?
Please help me. I'm going crazy with this. Thank you.
Nico.
-
Hello Nicolas,
You're welcome! I am glad you found the answer helpful. I direct the SEO strategy for seOverflow, and yes we do work with small businesses. Fill out our contact form and we'll be in touch. You can also look into other reputable SEO agencies and freelancers listed here on Moz.com.
Nice site.
-
Thank you Everett. You don't know how much this helps me. I was dreading having to start the site from scratch, so I will continue with the one I have and work on it for as along as it takes. This is the site by the way: http://devilswink.com/
Do you offer SEO consulting services for small businesses in the U.S. Everret?
-
Nico,
Great question. Technically speaking, a permanent 301 redirect should stay up indefinitely. However, I have heard more than one Google employee say publicly that they should stay up for "at least a year". At that point I think you can take them down and the destination page will retain the link juice from the old links since Google will have supposedly updated their link graph. However, I don't trust that most Google employees really know what's going on under the hood all the time, and recommend leaving any redirects from pages with external links in place for as long as you have control over it (e.g. you obviously couldn't leave them in place across domains if you sold the old domain).
If the page doesn't have any internal or external links pointing to it you can safely remove the 301 redirect at any time. A year would be plenty.
-
Hi Everett,
Thank you very much for your feedback.
This does put me at ease because I was ready to pull the plug and start a new site from scratch.
Quick question, do old Rewrites disappear after a while? In others words, do they keep getting crawled?
If so, can I deleted them after a few months for example, or after a year, or do search engines need them to exist permanently because other wise they would generate new 404s?
Thank you.
Nico.
-
Hello Nico.
I think I have some good news for you. Unless there is live link to those URLs (internal or external) there is no need to redirect them. In my experience more than 99% (an educated guess) of product pages do not have any external links. So assuming you have not cleaned up your internal linking (if you haven't, you should) there really is no need for the 301 and you can just let it resolve as a 404.
As long as the old URLs return a 404 status code they should be removed from the index within a matter of weeks. However, if they don't have any external or internal links - again, most of those pages probably do not - it may take months for Google to decide to recrawl an indexed page without any link paths to it. Googlebot couldn't just "crawl" its way there, but would have to retrieve the URL from a database just to check it, which would take longer. I have a tested and recommended solution to this issue, which can be found here on the Moz.com blog.
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
-
Barba Plugin and SEO
Hello, community! My client wants to use the barba.js plugin for their new site. What are the implications for SEO?
Technical SEO | | SimpleSearch0 -
Redirect and ranking issue
Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!
Technical SEO | | rwat0 -
Does having dots in my brand name hurt my SEO? ie: BoatU.S. vs BoatUS ?
Our official brand name has dots in it and we're wondering if having those dots will hurt our organic ranking and (or) lead to a mis-interpreted crawl by the bots..
Technical SEO | | BoatUS0 -
Moving From HubSpot Help
I am migrating from hubspot to wordpress. How do i do this so i maintain my previous seo efforts. I have about 10 optimized blog posts. Can i cut and paste them into the wordpress blog or use a 301 url rewrite? Add to domain? Totally clueless! Your Noobian Friend! Jay
Technical SEO | | freshairtech0 -
One-Pager and SEO
We're building a page that is going to feature over 31 people as difference makers in their field. We're unveiling one a day for an entire month. The very early mockup of the page has name, pic, some bio info, and a link to open up a new window with the full bio. I would love to have all of the bio content for all of the people on the page (and indexable), but I'm not sure how to do that while still being able to hide the full bios until they are expanded. Anybody have any tips that are SEO-friendly and/or examples of a page that is built like this and ranks well. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | spackle0 -
Canonicalization help
Hi Moz Community, If I have two different sub-category pages: http://www.example.com/rings/anniversary-rings/
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby
http://www.example.com/wedding/anniversary-rings/ And the first one is ranking for all KWs, should I add a rel=canonical to the second URL or leave it since it's slightly different? Or should I try and create different unique content for the second URL? Everything in terms of content is the same on both these pages except for the URLs, which aren't that different to begin with. Thanks for your help! -Reed0 -
Pageflip SEO friendly?
Client of mine utilizes pageflip for their product brochures and would love to have this content be crawl-able by search engines. Is there a way to make them SEO friendly so I may utilize this content?
Technical SEO | | richn330 -
What to do with 302 redirects being indexed
Hi there, Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor. For example: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/ In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL; en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/ (there is no content here, and never has been). This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links. Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting. Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable. But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index? Is the canonical tag the best way? I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | etruvian0