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 -
Should I Redirect Pagination?
Working on a redirect map for a client moving platforms and they have all of their category pagination indexed - no canonical link and no rel next/prev's on any of them. Should I redirect the pagination pages to the main category page on the new platform? Or Should I allow the pagination to de-index itself type of thing? Thoughts and experience?
Web Design | | paul-bold0 -
How long should an old site redirecting to a new site remain activated on a server?
Once I switch a site to a new domain (with links to corresponding/relative pages), will I have to keep the old site live forever for those links to work, or how long should I wait before I inactivate the old site on our server?
Web Design | | jwanner0 -
301 htaccess redirect or 301 HTTP DNS Redirect
Hi, I was wondering which you would recommend for a 301 redirect. Should we do a 301 redirect from .htacess or should we do a HTTP DNS 301 redirect. The HTTP redirect, does a redirect from the DNS Provider and doesn't require that we keep hosting the site while the htacess redirect still requires hosting. Thanks!
Web Design | | MattJD0 -
Redirecting duplicate pages
For whatever reason, X-cart creates duplicates of our categories and articles so that we have URLs like this www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars
Web Design | | k9byron
www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/ or http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar
http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar/ now our SEO guy says that we dont have to redirect these because google is "smart enough" to know they are the same, and that we should "leave it as-is". However, everything I have read online says that google sees this as dupe content and that we should redirect to one or the other / or no /, depending on which most of our internal links already point to, which is with a slash. What should we do? Redirect or leave it as is? Thanks!0 -
CSS styling help needed
I'm hoping that to someone experienced this is a quick fix, but it may be a pain and a rat's nest of code. Five or so years ago, I designed my brother's website at https://www.argentdata.com/index.html. I built it off of the Mollio theme (http://www.mollio.org/), and used templates in Dreamweaver, so it's not in a CMS. It's not a work of art, and there are some issues with it, but it's served him fairly well. Longer-term it needs a redesign, but right now I'm asking about just one aspect of the existing design. There are two parts to the site - the plain HTML site, and the osCommerce store that's under the purchase tab. If you go to http://www.argentdata.com/catalog/ you'll see that the osCommerce store is full width, while the navigation header copied over from the main site is 1200 pixels wide and centered. If you're on a wide monitor, it looks weird. What he'd like to do: Make the main site align to the left, both the content and navigation, and make the navigation left aligned for the osCommerce portion. He figures this is the easier way to do things, rather than try to muck with osCommerce CSS (that also has some merged CSS from the Mollio theme) and get it to center. Does anyone have a fairly simple solution that can make the navigation bar look good on osCommerce? Either the above of making everything left aligned, or some other solution simple we haven't thought of? Thanks!
Web Design | | KeriMorgret0 -
Is my sitemap going to help me attract more visitors?
Hi, As I await my sitemap to go live, can someone tell me the main benefits of it? A Google sitemap that is .xml one. I have a images sitemap also as the site is an e-commerce store. Should I be expecting to see an increase in visitors when I implement it initially? Thanks Will
Web Design | | WillBlackburn0 -
Footer Links for Design Shops - Do They Help or Hurt?
I work on SEO for a number of clients at our agency, including our in-house SEO for our own website. I use Open Site Explorer all the time to analyze my competition in the SERPs and try to gain links from this insight. However, I've noticed a number of agencies and design shops that place a link in the footer of websites they've designed and created. For example "Site design by ABC Agency (hyperlinked to the agency's home page). Or I've seen small logos or graphics that link to the designer's site and use the "alt tag" to get stronger anchor text. From a design perspective, I don't care for this, but as a SEO...I can see why. We've designed a number of websites and have more in the pipeline, but have not used this tactic before. It seems like an irrelevant link from a content/user standpoint, however, it seems to work for a lot of agencies and design shops. Any input from the SEOmoz community would be great. Is it a short-lived strategy? Does it help or hurt your link-building and "rapport" with Google, Bing, Yahoo? Thanks everyone.
Web Design | | PHDL0