Help with redirects
-
Our travel company used to maintain a set of country destination guides on our site, under the www.oursite.com/destinations/country folder path. Because we offer tours all over the world, we used these pages as high-level guides to each country so a prospect could get a sense of the highlights of those destinations. These pages operated as landing pages too. Unfortunately the pages became stale and unfocused, and we decommissioned them. In order to bring them down, we put a 301 redirect on these URLs, pointing them to a faceted-search page that showed all of our tours to that country, with URLs: www.oursite.com/trips/country. These faceted-search pages were pulling double duty as both search pages and landing pages, which isn't ideal (from a users perspective).
We are now in the process of redoing our search function and we'll need to move the search URLs off /trips/ and onto /search/. Within this transition, we are going to re-launch destination guides, and I think the best place for them will be back on the old /destinations/ subfolder. So, a few moving parts here.
My question: Do you see problems with reversing the redirect path completely? Ie. where we currently redirect /destinations/country to /trips/country, we are now proposing to redirect /trips/country to /destinations/country. Our concern in this equation is that, over the last few years, we've built up significant link volumes and equity to the /trips/ pages, and we don't want to lose that.
-
I'll put the content/user considerations aside for a moment, since I can't comment on content I can't see, and focus on the technical SEO aspect. You could reverse the 301-redirect, and send it back to the old page, but I'll be honest - it's likely to take a while for Google to process it. They're likely to be confused by the reversal.
It's a tough call, but what I think I'd do in this case is the following. Let's say the original URL is (A), the "new" URL is (B). Currently, you're 301-redirecting (A) --> (B), and now you're going to put the content back on (A)...
STEP 1
Remove the 301-redirects
Rel-canonical (B) --> (A)
Rel-canonical (A) --> (A)Change the signals from a 301-redirect to rel-canonical may help nudge Google. It will also allow you to place a self-referencing canonical on (A), which could help offset the old 301-redirect.
STEP 2
Once the URLs are cleared, put a 301-redirect back in place from (B) --> (A)You could also just leave the canonicals, if they seem to be working. These situations often require some monitoring, to make sure Google is processing the new directives correctly. Give it time, though - don't panic and change things every week, or you could make the situation worse.
-
I agree with Frederico. By setting up 301's you'll lose just a little Pagerank, but not much.
If you are already moving the search pages to the /search/ directory, do you need to put the destination guides into a new directory or could you keep them in the /trips/ directory?
The things I'd be thinking about is...
- Is there a user experience component to this?
- Does the change need to be made for internal development reasons?
- Will the change help with search results?
- Is it worth the time and effort to make the change?
Keep in mind that exact match and partial match URLs don't help with search results anywhere near as much as they used to.
Hope that helps.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
The redirects will cause a small dilution of the pagerank on those pages, just the same amount as having a single link in the trips/country to destinations/country.
But forget about the pagerank, do you expect to get more search traffic from search if the URL says trips or destinations? It all comes down to what you want achieve. The URL you have now doesn't look bad at all, and you can probably keep it by tweaking the code a bit without redirecting all pages to the destination/country page, so again, study the pros/cons:
Pros:
- Keyword matching on search?
Cons:
- Pagerank dilution
- Shorter URLs (trips)
- Keyword matching on search?
- ...
I only suggest to implement redirects if they really offer a better option, but in this case, you will end up with the same result with less pagerank, and longer URLs...
Just my 2 cents
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
-
Does the blog widget with latest blog-posts at homepage helps in SEO?
Hi all, We are planning to add a widget at our website homepage which displays recent blog-posts with dates. Google favours new and latest content. So will these consistent new posts help in improving website ranking? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Https Implementation - Weird Redirection After Putting 's' in http://
Hi Mozers, I have come across some websites with their https version going to a totally different website. For example, http://www.samplesite1.com will load fine but when the protocol is changed to https (https://www.samplesite1.com) it will go to a total different domain say, https://www.samplesite2.com How does this happen, in technical sense? In the warning from browser, it says the the security certificate is from the other website but I would like to understand how this happens and how it impacts SEO. I seem to be not able to understand the relationship of this error and SEO impact. Thanks in advance for your response. Malika
Web Design | | Malika10 -
Help with error: Not Found The requested URL /java/backlinker.php was not found on this server.
Hi all, We got this error for almost a month now. Until now we were outsourcing the webdesign and optimization, and now we are doing it in house, and the previous company did not gave us all the information we should know. And we've been trying to find this error and fix it with no result. Have you encounter this issue before? Did anyone found or knows a solution? Also would this affect our website in terms of SEO and in general. Would be very grateful to hear from you. Many thanks. Here is what appears on the bottom of the site( www.manvanlondon.co.uk) Not Found The requested URL /java/backlinker.php was not found on this server. <address>Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) Server at 01adserver.com Port 80</address> <address> </address> <address> </address>
Web Design | | monicapopa0 -
What happens if I 301 Redirect my homepage to a different page on site
If i were to 301 redirect the index page of my website to a page in a different subdirectory of my site would that adversely affect SEO? Does your home page need to be in the root of your site? I'm asking because a developer has told me that it would be best to do that since he needs to install OpenCart on the root of our domain...
Web Design | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
301 redirects from old site to new
hey all, we just did a site redesign and have less pages on the new site than the old. is it bad to redirect multiple pages from the old site to the same page on the new? for example redirect ...com/apps ...com/android ...com/mobile and point them all to....com/custom-apps thanks!
Web Design | | jaychow0 -
Best Website Builder - Help Me Choose
I need to built a multi language site (to built a Pilates, Yoga site) and I will use a site builder. After posting questions on wix.com I came to the fact I should continue my research because there are not SEO friendly. Do you have a suggestions? Limited to html knowledge, using a website builder is my only option. Here are some of the features I need: Multilanguage Web Site Mobile version SEO Friendly Nice Template Selections( this is important) HTML customization Twitter, Facebook, Blog... I'm not looking at free website builder, when you want good features, there is a price to paid. Thank you for your help and suggestions, BigBlaze
Web Design | | BigBlaze2050 -
Help choosing an E-Commerce platform for SEO, Product Videos and Usability today?
7 months ago I asked the same question.. I am reaching out to all of you What platforms do you hate? and want to meet the guys or girls that coded it in a dark ally way... and What platforms are good? I keep looking at the code of some sites and its shocking. No GA Async code, No canonical tags.. it goes on and on.. If you want to pitch to me and you are in the UK email me robert@thefurnituremarket.co.uk
Web Design | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Optimal redirect configuration from a misspelled domain that we own.
We have a handful of inbound links to www.t-chek.com (note the hyphen). Our normal site is www.tchek.com (no hyphen). We own both domains and have some sort of domain-wide redirect set up now. This works fine for traffic, but I suspect it's not optimal for SEO purposes. I came to this conclusion by looking in OSE and noticing that none of the inbound links to www.t-chek.com were also being attributed to www.tchek.com. 2 questions: Is it immediately evident what type of redirect I have in place now, or do I need to figure that out? Is the fix as simple as editing the .htaccess file on the hyphenated domain? I don't have direct control over the hyphenated domain, and I'd like to be able to know exactly what we need to do so I can request help from my IT department. I'd appreciate hearing your wisdom. Thanks!
Web Design | | SheriGolla0