301 Redirect Best Practices
-
Hi SEOs,
Question about ranking/redirects. If I have a particular page that is already ranking for a couple KWs in top SERPs, but know there are higher volume KWs I can optimize for should I just leave it as is or change the URL key and redirect for the time being until Google re-indexes.
Example:
current URL: www.example.com/action/best-movies
new URL: www.example.com/action/best-action-movies
(the current would be ranking for "best action moves" whereas the new would include the actual "best action movies" KW)Let me know if I can clarify, thank you!
-
Hey Paul, that makes complete sense. Thanks for your help.
-
It would seem I put the wrong link - the link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw however I would still stick to my point and get the URL you are happy to rank for and then sort out the content on the page. While the URL may only be a small factor in google algorithm.
But if your unhappy with your url structure now, no matter what happens Ive found that in a year or so you will wish you had changed the url.
So I always recommend changing the url to something you are happy with, then work on content, link building and improving the page, but I would still argue that the little bit of page rank lost (and without knowing the page its going to be hard to know exactly the implications), its worth it to get the URL structure you are happy with and then work on the content.
What I wouldn't recommend is 301 a page, to another page which then 301 to another page - this is seen as bad and you will lose a lot of link power, google may follow 2 or 3 stacked 301s but after that they wont http://www.jamesburton.net/chained-301-redirects-google-search-impact/. So doing a 301 wont hurt your ranking if you have decent content and links built in, just don't start stacking 301s
-
Did you even read the article you quote, Andrew? It clearly states that 301s definitely DO dissipate Pagerank. That's even the title of the article! And Matt Cutts' direct quote is
The amount of PageRank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a link. [emphasis mine]
Clearly what he is saying is that the redirect doesn't reduce the flow more than a regular link, but does reduce it by the same amount. (which many estimate to be as high as 15%). This whole discussion was in context of not using convoluted linking methods in order to avoid using a 301 redirect which was at first thought to reduce PR flow more than a regular link did.
So the bottom line message is "use a 301 when that is the best solution". But you still shouldn't use them unnecessarily as they do "waste" flow of PageRank.
Paul
Paul
-
Having the target keyword in the URL is only one of many ranking signals, Reed, and in my experience a fairly small one. In addition, contrary to Ahalliday's claim, 301 redirects DO in fact dilute "link juice" by the same amount as regular links would (some estimate by up to 15%).
So in my opinion, you'd be on a fool's errand. Whatever you gained from having the keyword in the URL would be lost by passing through a juice-reducing redirect. I'd say you could find much more productive ways to spend your optimisation time. That's not to say you can't still tune up your other on-page factors for the "better" terms, especially If you're already ranking for the higher-volume term with that page. Even better - invest a little time getting some off-page boosts, like earning a few good links. Maybe add some additional quality content like images, video, comparison charts, etc. That'll have far greater effect.
Does that make sense?
Paul
-
According to Matt Cutts you don't lose that much page rank for 301's.
http://www.seroundtable.com/redirects-links-pagerank-16419.html
I would probably recommend changing your url for the higher volume keywords and putting 301s in place and in theory you shouldn't lose ranking for your current rankings
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
-
Old Content after 301 Redirect Success
Hi, I want to ask what need I do to the old content after my 301 redirect to the new domain with the same content success? Do I need to remove that old content? Nothing bad happen right? Thanks
Technical SEO | | matthewparkman0 -
What is SEO best practice to implement a site logo as an SVG?
What is SEO best practice to implement a site logo as an SVG?
Technical SEO | | twisme
Since it is possible to implement a description for SVGs it seems that it would be possible to use that for the site name. <desc>sitename</desc>
{{ STUFF }} There is also a title tag for SVGs. I’ve read in a thread from 2015 that sometimes it gets confused with the title tag in the header (at least by Moz crawler) which might cause trouble. What is state of the art here? Any experiences and/or case studies with using either method? <title>sitename</title>
{{ STUFF }} However, to me it seems either way that best practice in terms of search engines being able to crawl is to load the SVG and implement a proper alt tag: What is your opinion about this? Thanks in advance.1 -
301 Redirects Relating to Your XML Sitemap
Lets say you've got a website and it had quite a few pages that for lack of a better term were like an infomercial, 6-8 pages of slightly different topics all essentially saying the same thing. You could all but call it spam. www.site.com/page-1 www.site.com/page-2 www.site.com/page-3 www.site.com/page-4 www.site.com/page-5 www.site.com/page-6 Now you decided to consolidate all of that information into one well written page, and while the previous pages may have been a bit spammy they did indeed have SOME juice to pass through. Your new page is: www.site.com/not-spammy-page You then 301 redirect the previous 'spammy' pages to the new page. Now the question, do I immediately re-submit an updated xml sitemap to Google, which would NOT contain all of the old URL's, thus making me assume Google would miss the 301 redirect/seo juice. Or do I wait a week or two, allow Google to re-crawl the site and see the existing 301's and once they've taken notice of the changes submit an updated sitemap? Probably a stupid question I understand, but I want to ensure I'm following the best practices given the situation, thanks guys and girls!
Technical SEO | | Emory_Peterson0 -
I have an eCommerce store with a lot of 301 redirects. Would that hurt my rankings?
I use BigCommerce, and they have a system where all the URLs are dynamically generated from the name of each product. So if I named a product "widget x y z" the url would be /widget-x-y-z/, and if I changed that to "blue widget x y z", it would change to /blue-widget-x-y-z/ and automatically redirect the old one to the new one. As a result, in 6 months, because of a lot of tweaking and experimenting, I've ended up with a hefty list of 400 redirects. Some of them are very old, and some are recent. So my question is in two parts: a) does having all of these redirects hurt my rankings? b) if so, would deleting them help?
Technical SEO | | shabbirun0 -
Hi, I am little bit confused in 301 redirect
Hi, I am little bit confused I have set my preferred domain to www but anyone can access my site via both www and non www domains, do I need to 301 redirect all non www to www or not , If yes then I want to know Why and If no then also I want to Why.
Technical SEO | | amarjitkapur0 -
301 help, whats the best way
Hi all right now i have 301 redirects setup in my htaccess file i recently redesigned our site so i have been redirecting all the old urls to the new ones. I saw a post about having all your urls the same format, so i updated my htaccess file to redirect all urls from http://www.mysite.com/food to http://www.mysite.com/food/ (added a forward slash). Now on my latest seo crawl i see all my site urls, redirecting to the forward slash url. am i doing this right, thanks will
Technical SEO | | Will_Craig0 -
How long should I keep 301 redirects?
I have modified a the URL structure of a whole section of a website and used mod_rewrite 301 redirect to match the new structure. Now that was around 3 months ago and I was wondering how long should I keep this redirect for? As it is a new website I am quite sure that there are no links around with the old URL structure but still I can see the google bot trying from time to time to access the old URL structure. Shouldn't the google bot learn from this 301 redirect and not go anymore for the old URL?
Technical SEO | | socialtowards0 -
How best to redirect URL from expired classified ads?
We have problem because our content are classifieds. Every ad expired after one or two mounts and then ad becomes inactive and we keep his page for one mount latter like a same page but we ad a notice that ad is inactive. After that we delete the ad and his page but need to redirect that URL to search results page which contains similar ads because we don't want to lose the traffic form that pages. How is the best way to redirect ad URL? Our thinking was to redirect internal without 301 redirection because the httacces file will be very big after a while and we are thinking to try a canonicalization because we don't want engine to think that we have to much duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | Donaab0