Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
-
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages.
We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices).We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page.
Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank.
Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!
-
Yes that's correct
The pages will be found just as quick thought there new links as they would have been though their old links with 301's
-
Thanks Alan.I Take it by this you mean we should only 301 redirect pages with valuable links and forget the rest?
The pages dont have any links worth worrying about as its the "weaker" half of the site. We're more concerned over the site restructure and the affecting the general health of the site by losing so many pages at once.
-
I would look at your links coming into those pages, and 301 the links only, I doubt all 100,000 pages have links.
A 301 only redirects link juice, so if no external links no problem, of cause you need to change your internal links. You should never 301 internal as 301's leak link juice, you should fix your internal links.
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
-
New site migration (multiple sites into one + new domain)
Hi, I have read so many very helpful guides and experiences from you guys that will greatly help me but I have a few questions please. Our company has 3 sites, the main site and 2 sites for different product ranges: BrandProductName.com (main site - DA = 22 raking well for product name) Productname2.com (DA = 10 ranking very well for product name and little competition) BrandProductName3.com (DA = 10 poor ranking) We wish to bring all the sites into one with categories for the 3 different product. The main site is an e-commerece site whereas the other 2 are not (currently). On top of this as the main domain has one of the product names in it they wish to change the domain to be just Brandname.com. So the plan is to combine site 2 and 3 into site 1 and change that domain name. As you can imagine this is going to be quite a job. I am fairly happy with the steps required (having read all the guides and migrated many sites in the past) but with the added domain name change this is a little daunting. So my questions are: Should I merge the 3 sites into 1 and then changed the domain at a later point? Should I change the domain of the main site first and then merge site 2 and 3 in later? Should I just do it all together? Or based on the data i have provided do you disagree with the plan, what would you recommend? We are not in a massive rush to complete all of this so we have the time to plan and execute this when we are fully ready. Any help / advise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csimmo0 -
Have You 301 Redirected Domain A to Domain B ?
I only have two questions.... Approximately when did you do it (year is close enough)? Did the rankings of Domain B go up? Any other information that you care to share will be appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
301 redirects for a redesign.
About to completely redo a client's site and I want to make sure I don't loose our link juice. The current site is a old template site from another provider. They host it and we do not have access at all to the site itself, so there will be no transferring of the site from server to server because they feel the site is their property. Basically the site is a monthly service not a product. So this will be a completely new website, including new URL structure. So my question is how do keep the link juice flowing to the new site? I know I need to use 301 redirects, but do I rebuild those old URLs on my site and redirect them to their new counterpart or what? The link profile is not that impressive, maybe 15 back links (all mainly going to the homepage). But they all are local and coming from pretty good domain authority. But its keeping us ahead of our competition. Back story: This is one of my local search clients, we now have them ranking #1 across the board in the local packs. After analyzing the traffic, they are losing 75% of all traffic because of the sites design. So a new site is a must. I build a lot of websites, but have never worried about the back link profile before now. Thanks for all your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masonrj0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
How to redirect an url in .htaccess when "redirect 301" doesnt work
I have an odd page url, generated by a link from an external website, it has: %5Cu0026size=27.4KB%5Cu0026p=dell%20printers%20uk%5Cu0026oid=333302b6be58eaa914fbc7de45b23926%5Cu0026ni=21%5Cu0026no=24%5Cu0026tab=organic%5Cu0026sigi=11p3eqh65%5Cu0026tt=Dell%205210n%20A4%20Mono%20Laser%20Printer%20from%20Printer%20Experts%5Cu0026u=fb ,after a .jpg image url, and I can't get it redirect using the redirect 301 in .htaccess to the properly image url as I use to do with the rest of not found urls eg: /15985.jpg%5Cu0026size=27.4KB%5Cu0026p=dell%20printers%20uk%5Cu0026oid=333302b6be58eaa914fbc7de45b23926%5Cu0026ni=21%5Cu0026no=24%5Cu0026tab=organic%5Cu0026sigi=11p3eqh65%5Cu0026tt=Dell%205210n%20A4%20Mono%20Laser%20Printer%20from%20Printer%20Experts%5Cu0026u=fb to just: /15985.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Status0 -
How should I manage duplicate content caused by a guided navigation for my e-commerce site?
I am working with a company which uses Endeca to power the guided navigation for our e-commerce site. I am concerned that the duplicate content generated by having the same products served under numerous refinement levels is damaging the sites ability to rank well, and was hoping the Moz community could help me understand how much of an impact this type of duplicate content could be having. I also would love to know if there are any best practices for how to manage this type of navigation. Should I nofollow all of the URLs which have more than 1 refinement used on a category, or should I allow the search engines to go deeper than that to preserve the long tail? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FireMountainGems0 -
Consolidating MANY separate domains into a much better, single URL: Should I point a landing page or redirect to the new site?
I am consolidating a site for a client who previously, and very foolishly, broke up their domains like so: companyparis.com companyflorence.com companyrome.com etc... I am now done with the new site, which will be at: company.eu with pages as appropriate: company.eu/paris company.eu/florence company.eu/rome This domain, although not entirely new, does not have much authority or rank. In terms of SEO and link-building, is it better to redirect the old domain to the specific page on the new domain: companyparis.com --> company.eu/paris or... is it better to put a landing page at the old domain LINKING to the page on the new domain: companyparis.com --> landing page linking to --> company.eu/paris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thongly0 -
Is it a problem to have too many 301 redirects within your site
my website is translated into 10+ languages, but our news articles are often only published in 1-2 languages. Currently, URLs are created in the unpublished news languages that then 301 redirect the user to main news page since the content doesnt exist in that language. Is this implementation okay or is there a preferred method we should be using so that we don't have a large number of pages on the site with redirects? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0