Redirect URLS with 301 twice
-
Hello,
I had asked my client to ask her web developer to move to a more simplified URL structure. There was a folder called "home" after the root which served no purpose. I asked for the URLs to be redirected using 301 to the new URLs which did not have this structure. However, the web developer didn't agree and decided to just rename the "home" folder "p". I don't know why he did this.
We argued the case and he then created the URL structure we wanted. Initially he had 301 redirected the old URLS (the one with "Home") to his new version (the one with the "p"). When we asked for the more simplified URL after arguing, he just redirected all the "p" URLS to the PAGE NOT FOUND. However, remember, all the original URLs are now being redirected to the PAGE NOT FOUND as a result.
The problems I see are these unless he redirects again:
- The new simplified URLS have to start from scratch to rank
2)We have duplicated content - two URLs with the same content
- Customers clicking products in the SERPs will currently find that they are being redirect to the 404 page.
I understand that redirection has to occur but my questions are these:
-
Is it ok to redirect twice with 301 - so old URL to the "p" version then to final simplified version. Will link juice be lost doing this twice?
-
If he redirects from the original URLS to the final version missing out the "p" version, what should happen to the "p" version - they are currently indexed.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
-
This type of structure also fits in nicely with your analytics package. You can look at all the visits to /toyota/ to see how popular that is compared with all the visits to /ford/, for example.
-
If the p pages were only there for a small amount of time, then just forget them, as they wont have any links pointing to them.
don't worry about the SERPS they will go way soon.
but I would have renamed the HOME folder to a keyword. so that you get a keyword into your url.
is a better url than
-
Thank You Houses! Of course that is the soultion. I had been staring at the problem for too long that I couldn't see the wood for the trees!
What would I do without Moz helpers!
Thanks
-
Ideally you don't want a redirect chain. It's best to redirect the old page to the new, missing out the middle one.
Redirect the middle page to the new too.
Hope that helps
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
-
Can i do 301 redirect
So this is what im doing, 301 redirect to my site/allen-webdesign points to main domain Allen is the city i have a page called local-webdesign with all the cities. Will this improve my ranking or should i stop?
Technical SEO | | jsdfw0 -
Missing 301 redirects
I just had a developer friend call me in a panic, because they had gone live with a new site and found out (the hard way) that they had missed some pages on their 301 redirects. So the pages are appearing in Google but serving 404s. Ouch! So their question was: other than running a report for 404 errors in something like Screaming Frog, is there a way to hunt down ONLY pages serving 404s, then export to CSV so they can be redirected? Anyone got any tricks up their sleeve?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Problems with canonical urls / redirect (magento webshop)
Hi all, We're running a Magento webshop and we discover some strangs things regarding canonical urls and redirects after using the Amasty improved navigation extension. To clarify, please check these four urls. They contain the same content (the same product page). https://www.afwerkingshop.be/gyproc-gipskartonplaat-ak-2600x1200x9-5mm.html https://www.afwerkingshop.be/wanden/gyproc-gipskartonplaat-ak-2600x1200x9-5mm.html https://www.afwerkingshop.be/wanden/gipsplaten/gyproc-gipskartonplaat-ak-2600x1200x9-5mm.html https://www.afwerkingshop.be/wanden/gipsplaten/standaard/gyproc-gipskartonplaat-ak-2600x1200x9-5mm.html All these four pages have different canoncials (the page url). Obviously, that's not good. However, in Google (site:...) url (1) is the only one that's indexed. Thereby, if I visit the productpage by first going to a category page (fe. www.afwerkingshop.be/wanden.html), I'm redirected to url (1), but the canonical url is www.afwerkingshop.be/last_visited_category_name/product. So, the canonical seems dynamic depending on the last visited category. And still, only url (1) is indexed. Additionally, all aforementioned pages contain . Is anyone familiar with this issue? And more important, will it cause problems in future? Thanks in advance. Kind regards, Chendon
Technical SEO | | RBijsterveld0 -
301 Redirect domain with penalty
Wondering if I could get a few views on this please... I have added an affiliate store to a domain I own, however I forgot to noindex the product pages which were duplicate content of the merchants. Despite a good deal of backlink building the site will not do much in the engines at all, doesn't even come up on the first few pages for it's own name! This suggests to me that I have a duplicate content penalty. Try as I may I cannot get it removed so am thinking of cloning the domain to a new domain, however, I do not want to lose the links I collected so I am planning on 301ing them. While I will not get all the link power moved over, I should at least get credit for some of them which will kick start the new domain. Can anyone forsee any potential issues with doing this? Is there a danger of 301ing a site with a penalty that the penalty would be carried over? I know there is no penalty on the links, no WMT warnings etc, it is the content causing the issue. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
301 Redirects on Large Real Estate Website
Hi guys,We are about to move over to a new website and need advice on handling the 301 redirects.We have a large real estate website with around 12,000 pages, a lot of these are properties (about 10,000)On our old website, the url structure for each property is as follows -domainname.com/property/view?property=14863on our new site, the url structure isdomainname.com/properties/view/6137The property ID number is always different from old site to new. The way we see it, we have two options. a.) a manual redirect of each and every property url. A very very long jobb.) a folder level redirect, so redirect the 'property' folder on the old site into the 'properties' folder on new. The con with this one is we are not sure if this is the best route to take, if it is how we would go about it?Some advice would be really appreciated guys. I know there are some hyper intelligent SEO's in here and we need to make sure we handle this right!Many thanks in advance.Mark
Technical SEO | | Nextman0 -
301 Redirect & re-use
I have an old site which is being moved to a new tld due to re-branding. I understand I would do a series of 301 redirects from the pages of the old site to capture the authority and move to the new site. However, at some point in the future (probably 1-2 years) we may want to re-use the old site again for a different brand (it has a good brand, just not for what we're going after). Question is - can a redirected site be re-used at some point in the future? And if so, which site would new authority (links, etc.) go to?
Technical SEO | | uwaim20120 -
Does 301 redirecting a site multiple times keep the value of the original site?
Hi, All! If I 301 redirect site www.abc.com to www.def.com, it should pass (almost) all linkjuice, rank, trust, etc. What happens if I then redirect site www.def.com to www.ghi.com? Does the value of the original site pass indefinitely as long as you do the redirects correctly? Or does it start to be devalued at some point? If anyone's had experience redirecting a site more than once and they've seen reportable good/bad/neutral results, that would be very helpful. Thanks in advance! -Aviva B
Technical SEO | | debi_zyx0 -
Why is a 301 redirected url still getting indexed?
We recently fixed a redirect issue in a website, and although it appears that the redirection is working fine, the url in question keeps on getting crawled, indexed and cached by google. The redirect was done a month ago, and google shows cached version of it, even for a couple of days ago. Manual checking shows that its being redirected, and also a couple of online tools i checked report a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea why this could be happening? The website I'm talking about is www.hotelmajestic.gr and its being redirected to www.hotel-majestic.gr
Technical SEO | | dim_d0