301 redirects - one overall redirect or an individual one for each page url
-
Hi
I am working on a site that is to relaunch later on this year - is best practise for the old urls (of which there are thousands) to write a piece of code that will cover all of the urls and redirect them to the new home page or to individually redirect each url to its new counterpart on the new site. I am naturally concerned about user experience on this plus losing our Google love we currently have but am aware of the time it would take to do this individually. Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks
-
Search Office Space's answer nailed it.
-
We have just done this. Not for thousands but for about 800 links.
We matched each category to category, each product type to product type. Each homepage to homepage.
For products we just redirected to the brands main page which contains all products for that brand. Once stock is sold its sold so better to redirect to the brand in case rather than to a homepage or nothing at all.
Extra work but worth it in the end I would say.
-
It might be more work, but as you point out your users would be happier to have a result that better matches their query rather than all going to a home page.
However, I do recognise the work involved here so rather than do each page 301'ed to the new equivalent I would often break the site up into categories or sections and sub-sections, so in that way the most important pages (good link profile, higher PR etc.) are linked to their exact new equivalent, while the majority get a script that redirects them to the most relevant section of the site so that the user is getting a relevant page returned for their query.
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
-
Is 301 redirect the only way when using Vanity URLs?
We have been using vanity urls for some of our pages. Mostly the pages that have a vanity URL have a long URL length. But now the problem is, the vanity URL is getting displayed on the search engine when the particular keyword related to the page is entered. I checked the google search console, the vanity URL is indexed and the original URL remains unindexed. What should I do? Is adding 301 redirect to the vanity URLs are solution? Since some of vanity URLs are not redirecting to the original. Some of the original pages are not getting traffic. Also, can using canonical tag help?
Technical SEO | | tejasbansode0 -
Missing 301 redirects
I just had a developer friend call me in a panic, because they had gone live with a new site and found out (the hard way) that they had missed some pages on their 301 redirects. So the pages are appearing in Google but serving 404s. Ouch! So their question was: other than running a report for 404 errors in something like Screaming Frog, is there a way to hunt down ONLY pages serving 404s, then export to CSV so they can be redirected? Anyone got any tricks up their sleeve?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Redirect Without Passing Old Page Properties
Is there a way to redirect one page to another, e.g. test.com/ to test.com/home, without passing link juice or any other associated properties of the latter to the former?
Technical SEO | | NTGproducts0 -
Temporary Redirect - on nonexistant URL
I'm getting a Temporary Redirect issue on | http://www.luckygemstones.com/botswana-legends.htm http://www.luckygemstones.com/botswana-legends.htm | http://www.luckygemstones.com/page-not-found.htm | 1 | 0 | 302 | YET! There is no such page on my site. I believe I had one once, but has been corrected for a while now. WHY is SEOMOZ picking this up as an error and how can I fix? Kathleen http://www.luckygemstones.com
Technical SEO | | spkcp1110 -
Redirecting over-optimised pages
Hi One of my clients websites was affected by Penguin and due to no 'bad link' messages, and nothing really obvious from the backlink profile, I put it down to over-optimisation on the site. I noticed a lot of spammy pages and duplicate content, and submitted recommendations to have these fixed. They dragged their heels for a while and eventually put in plans for a new site (which was happening anyway), but its taken quite a while and is only just going live in a couple of weeks. My question is, should I redirect the URLs of the previously over-optimised pages? Obviously the new pages are nice and clean and from what I can tell there are no bad links pointing to the URLs, so is this an acceptable practice? Will Google notice this and remove the penalty? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Is it better to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Is it better for SEO to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Technical SEO | | CustomOnlineMarketing0 -
Link Juice passing through a redirect of a disallowed URL
Hey guys! Suppose I disallow search bots from indexing anything on my secure server in my robots.txt, and 301 redirect all of my secure server traffic to my non-secure site. Will the search bots see the redirect before they realize that they're disallowed from accessing that page? Or will they see that page is disallowed and not follow the redirect? Should I change my robots.txt to allow search bots to crawl my secure site so they can find the redirects?
Technical SEO | | john4math0 -
How should 301 redirects affect Page Authority?
We recently setting up 301 redirects from one of our sites so that the site redirects from the www version to the non-www version for all pages. We want to quantify what we expect to see as results. From what the experts say, we'd expect that the Page Authority of the canonical versio (non-www) will be higher than either of the two separate ones were previously. For instance, if this page - www.website.com/information/ - had a PA of 57 and this one - website.com/information/ - had a PA of 53, some time after the 301 redirects from www to non-www have been put into place, we should see the non-www version of that page move up to some PA about 57. It our thinking correct? How long does it normally take to see a PA update take place in a scenario like this? Thanks, Richard
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0