Can new content be added to a url which has a 301 redirect?
-
I am working on a site which is currently being redesigned. The home page currently ranks highly for relevant search terms, although on the new site the content on this page will be removed.
The solution I was considering, to preserve rankings, was to move the content on the home page to a new url, and use a 301 redirect to help preserve rankings for that particular page.
The question I have therefore, is am I able to add new content to the home page, and have this page freshly indexed accordingly?
Any thoughts or suggestions would be most welcome.
Thanks,
Matt.
-
If mywebsite.com is 301'ed to some other page, then mywebsite.com will no longer be reached buy requests, so the content will never be read.
The content when talking about a 301is irrelevant, all a 301 does is redirect the request. when google follows a link to your old page it is redirected to the new page and the link juice will now fall on the new page. The content on the new page is read instead,
-
Hope I am not missing something obvious but if you are 301ing mywebsite.com then your visitors are not going to see the new homepage let alone the bots.... right?
If the phrases you are ranking for now are still relevant to the site then I would try to find a way to incorporate at least some of that content on the new homepage and then link to the full old homepage content (or a modified version of it if more suitable) from the new homepage - this new page is in effect becoming a landing page for these specific keywords (assuming that the new homepage does not manage to keep the rankings itself).
-
If you are considering 301'ing the existing homepage to a new url, I would not recommend it. In most sites, the longstanding homepage is the most authoritative page. 301ing it will not pass all of that authority to the new page.
If you like the content on the old homepage, then just put it on a different url and at some point Google will figure that out. If it doesn't or takes a while, you are no worse off. Remember, the content on the existing homepage will not perform as well on a new url. But, it sounds like you've already made the choice to make the homepage content different, so that is water under the bridge.
-
Moving the content over and 301ing the old URL will do that. You'll see a dip in ranking, then a recovery period (usually weeks as opposed to months). That's your best bet when you are forced to make a move like that. Ideally, you'd find a way to keep the content where it is, but if that's not possible, then the 301 will do.
-
Thanks for your response William.
It was more the second scenario I was referring to, but to clarify.
Content from mywebsite.com would be moved to mywebsite.com/new-url, with 301 redirect added to mywebsite.com
New content would be added to mywebsite.com
Thanks for your clarification that bots would henceforth ignore mywebsite.com; naturally this is really not what I want.
So, really just wondering if there is an effective alternative I can use. As mentioned, the current home page is ranking well, but the redesign necessarily involves removing the current content.
Essentially I'm looking for a way to preserve rankings...
Thanks, Matt.
-
If you are referring to adding new content to the new homepage after the old home page is redirected, than yes. You can add additional content to pages that have 301s redirecting to them and they will update in the index.
If you are referring to adding content on the old homepage that is 301'd and have it update on the new page, that will not work. Browsers and bots read the .htaccess and move on. Bots won't crawl that old URL anymore.
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
-
301 redirects for all urls - legal dispute
The website in question is a very high traffic website with substantial credibility in it's subject matter (sorry, can't share more details) that delivers an overwhelming majority of traffic from SEO, much of which is new visitors. A legal dispute has resulted in both parties agreeing to forward a percentage of the total URLs to alternative websites (only 1 website for each party). All URLs for the domain will be forwarded elsewhere. It does not make sense to me that the "sum of the parts" will be as strong once the redirects are implemented but I am looking for feedback. It is fair to say that the alternative domains of each party are no where near as strong as the domain being "parted out." Will the SEO juice be distributed to each domain in full? Will both parties lose out substantially? Feel free to ask for clarifications and I'll do the best I can given the legal parameters. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ReachMaineAgency0 -
What if my developers tell me they can only handle a certain amount of 301 redirects?
We recently launched a new site and I felt the need to redirect all of our old site URLs to the new site URLs. Our developers told me they would only be able to do about 1000 before it starts to bog down the site. Has anyone else came across this before? On top of that, with our new site structure, whenever our content team changes a title (which is more often than i had hoped), the URL changes. This means I'm finding i have many other redirects I need to put in place, but cant at the moment. Advice please??
Technical SEO | | CHECOM0 -
301 redirect relative or absolute path?
Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
Technical SEO | | Silviu
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
S.0 -
To 301 redirect or not...
Hi guys i'd like to get your opinion on this. We currently have two sites, site A is the old one with PA44 and DA33. Site B is the new one which is going to replace site A it currently has PA37 and DA24 Our plan for the future is to shut down site A and redirect all pages using 301 to the relevant pages on side B. Currently we have some links in place for a couple of keywords on site A to site B which seems to be working great for our ranking. Now i'm wondering if this is maybe a good option, to give back links from A to B or will i pass through more link juice when redirecting everything? (ps. both are e commerce sites hosted and registred with different companies)
Technical SEO | | Immanuel0 -
How to write 301 redirects in WordPress
I've successfully migrated new site to new domain (www.cmsearchmarketing.com) But I cannot get 301 redirects for pages and blog posts to redirect from the old domain (www.creativemindsearchmarketing.com). And it's my understanding I need to do a 301 for each page to maintain SEO. Here's what I've tried: RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^p=975$RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.cmsearchmarketing.com/top-5-questions-to-ask-an-seo-firm-before-signing-up/? [R=301,L] BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule># END WordPress #AND ALSO# Use PHP5 Single php.ini as defaultAddHandler application/x-httpd-php5s .php BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule># END WordPress redirect 301 /top-5-questions-to-ask-an-seo-firm-before-signing-up http://www.cmsearchmarketing.com/top-5-questions-to-ask-an-seo-firm-before-signing-up/ Any suggestions would be appreciated. _Cindy P.S. Maybe some other issues are in the way: --Old site is WP-Remix theme no longer supported, and latest WP version is 2.9.1 -- Old domain (www.creativemindsearchmarketing.com) is the primary account on BlueHost …and the new domain (www.cmsearchmarketing.com) is an addon, so the new domain's directory is within root of old domain. -- in root domain of old site there are other "handler files" that also have base file rewrites, if this is an issue: name of this file in root directory is:
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar
.htaccess.addHandlerBak -FrontPage- <limit get="" post="">order deny,allowdeny from allallow from all</limit><limit put="" delete="">order deny,allowdeny from all</limit>AuthUserFile /home/creatjo7/public_html/_vti_pvt/service.pwdAuthGroupFile /home/creatjo7/public_html/_vti_pvt/service.grp# BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPressAuthName creativemindsearchmarketing.comIndexIgnore .htaccess /.?? *~ *# /HEADER /README /_vti0 -
Redirect everything from a certain url
I have a new domain (www.newdomain.com) and and an old domain (www.olddomain.com). Currently both domains are pointing (via dns nameserves) at the new site. I want to 301 everything that comes from the www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com. I've used this htaccess code RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.newsite.com$
Technical SEO | | EclipseLegal
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] Which works fine and redirects if someone visits www.olddomain.com but I want it to cover everything from the old domain such as www.olddomain.com/archives/article1/ etc. So if any subpages etc are visited from the old domain its redirected to the new domain. Could someone point me in the right direction? Thanks0 -
Automatic redirect to external urls
Hi all, I'm developing a dynamic qr code service.. The service works in the following way: You create an account with an associated QR CODE pointing to a url like:
Technical SEO | | raulo79
- http://domain.me/username The user can change the target of this url.. he can:
- point to an external url ( his website for example)
- point to a vCard download page
- a mobile ready webpage ( no redirection in this case)... Visiting http://domain.me/username my company logo is displayed and we redirect the visitor with a: header("Refresh: 5;URL=http://userdomain.tld"); Google is indexing many user's URLs, this is good for those users pointing to the mobile ready webpage, in this case there is no redirection, but Google is indexing many urls that redirect to an external url and I don't know how to avoid this.. I can't do an header('Location: http://www.example.com/'); because I need to display our logo after redirection.. how can I do google friendly? Sorry for my english, I hope you can undestand the problem. Best regards.
Mauro.0 -
301-redirect
Hi My website is fairly new and i wasnt aware of the difference btw 'website.com' and 'www.website.com' when i started up. It doesnt matter which one i use as long as i am consistent right ? Most of my ingoing links are to mainpage on 'website.com'. I have som ingoing links to 'www.website.com' but also some to 'www.website.com/brandname'. is it enough to 301-redir 'www.website.com' to 'website.com' or does it need to be done on several levels ? I need to have someone do the redirect for me - how can i check its working when its done ? Dan Lærum
Technical SEO | | danlae0