Help with redirects

[Adventures]

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.

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

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

[FedeEinhorn]

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