To redirect or not to redirect...That is the question
-
We have old product data that is being updated (approx 30k sku's). Most of the old pages have been indexed and drive the majority of our online sales. But, the updated products have different titles, H1's, etc and have been re-formatted for the better in terms of usability.
So, should we redirect thousands of pages to the new pages? Will Google be ok with that?...or should we reformat the current url's with the new data? And, if we reformat current url's with new data...the fear is that the on-page elements that the pages are being pick up for will get wiped out, (be it the H1 in some cases or the title or alt tag for another, etc) because it's simply too much to retain them during the import.
Please share
-
This sounds a little risky.
I would avoid doing redirects if possible.
If this was my site, I would get into my analytics and find out which 100 pages are pulling in most of the sales from people who enter from search. I would then spend whatever time it takes to recode about five pages by hand, using the best SEO practices within my ability.
I want to make them into something kickass.
After I did the first five of those pages, I would get in touch with a consultant, show her those pages (before and after shots), tell her the goal and have her give opinion on what might be done better. When I do something big like this I always get second opinion from someone who does more SEO than me and who is smarter about it than I am. I might ask a question on Moz or get a friend to look at something. I always get advice from people I trust when doing this. I don't worry about cost. One taken opportunity can be worth literally a million dollars in the long term. One screw up can cost many thousands of dollars immediately and millions over time.
So, after these consults I would launch a few dozen hand-crafted pages and see what happens. A couple weeks later I would launch more if the results were good.
The higher the value of these pages the more that I would do by hand. Once I thought that I had things under control then I would write or have written a program to do the rest of the job automatically.
I am never in a hurry on a high value job like this.
-
My vote is redirect them to the new sku data; you will probably drop in the rankings for a while, but I would imagine in a few months you will come back.
The biggest reason to redirect is just business related - ultimately you want your customers to have a good experience and part of that is making sure they are getting what they need. Once they get to your site, you have to wow them and do a good job fulfilling the order. Just getting them to the site is just the start of the whole process.
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
-
Schema Question
I had ratings stars appearing on my site and recently started using the sale event schema, but the two won't show up at the same time, so the rating stars have now disappeared and have been replaced by sale event data. When looking around for more info I found the attached example which shows both appearing at the same time - however upon trying to replicate this myself with that same site I can't get both to appear. Does anyone know if it's possible for both schema data properties to appear in the results at the same time? save.png
On-Page Optimization | | meqdiw46ao0 -
How to 301 redirect, without access to .htaccess and to a new domain
There are few ways to do this and I would like to ask other Mozzers if they have found the best way. We have a site .co.uk and are moving it back to .com. However we do not have any access to the site folders for .co.uk. (We have to move it anyway as our provider is withdrawing their service). We have built our URL 301 redirect file and it is ready to go, but how to impliment it? We can repoint .co.uk to another site, and then redirect all traffic for each URL but this is quite messy, or just forget trying to 301 each page and just rediect the whole site.
On-Page Optimization | | BruceA
the .com has more authority already, but we ready do not want to frustrate visitors who are using a link to reach a product, only to find they hit our homepage and not the product. Your thoughts would be very welcome or other ideas Bruce0 -
Will changing a site from https to normal http have any SEO impact if we do automatic redirects?
We currently have a site which uses https and want to change to normal http only (for reasons unrelated to SEO). We were planning to do this with a change in our server configuration (we use Nginx, and can automatically redirect https to http). Our site has been around for approx 1 year, so there are links floating around in the Internet which will still be using https. These will be automatically redirected to http. What will be the impact on our SEO? I understand that our webmaster tools account may need to change...
On-Page Optimization | | michaelcho0 -
Should old pages that have being 301 redirected but have no/mimimal traffic be deleted?
In other words, I have pages from years ago that are redirected but how can I tell if traffic still flows through them? And if there is no or minimal traffic should the 301 be deleted? Linck
On-Page Optimization | | LinckB0 -
Internal Linking Question(s)
Is it unwise to link internally to a page more than once on the homepage. I am reading that it is considered spammy. I am also reading that it passes PR twice to the internal page instead of just once... Which is it? Is there a way to stop passing PR to the "contact us" page. I watched an older video that Matt Cutts suggested a nofollow. Now I read that this strategy is a no no? Which is it? Thanks! 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | JML11790 -
301 redirects / clean urls
hello everyone, we moved our site to a new platform that has url rewrite feature. we are building out a spreadsheet of the old aspx urls and the corresponding page on the new site. my dev tells me that its not important to redirect the old page to the new "clean url" page which sounds a bit odd to me ..example below. okay. so he says its the same difference to 301 redirect this url: http://72.3.181.97/catalog/DesignerDogBeds.aspx to this urls: https://www.k9electronics.com/product.php?productid=3474 instead of this clean url: http://www.k9electronics.com/designer-dog-beds/ can anyone give me any feedback on this? thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | k9byron0 -
Link juice question
In theory: If i have a page with only two outgoing, do-follow links,
On-Page Optimization | | elgoog
and both have the same target,
only the first one will be counted.. right? Will that link pass 100% or 50% of the link juice? (if the anchor text is the same or different does not make any difference i think)0 -
Too many 301 redirects to home page - is this possible?
If a site has a bunch of 404’s that are basically old URL’s that no longer work and point to pages or documents that don’t exist anymore - Can someone clarify if it’s a problem when fixing a bunch of these 404’s to point them all to the home page? so if there is not really anywhere else that is applicable for the old broken URL, is it really a problem to 301 old pages to the site home page? I have read some different things on this recently on some different sites, so I just wondered what the latest thinking on this was….thanks...
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0