Will these 301's get me penalized?
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Hey everyone,
We're redesigning parts of our site and I have a tricky question that I was hoping to get some sound advice about. We have a blog (magazine) with subcategory pages that are quite thin. We are going to restructure the blog (magazine) and feature different concert and have new subcategories. So we are trying to decide where to redirect the existing subcategory pages, e.g. Entertainment, Music, Sports, etc.
Our new ticket category pages ( Concert Tickets, NY Yankees Tickets, OKC Thunder Tickets, etc) are going to feature a tab called 'Latest News' where we are thinking of 301 redirecting the old magazine subcategory pages. So Sports News from the blog would 301 to Sports Tickets (# Latest News tab). See screenshot below for example.
So my question is: Will this look bad in the eyes of the GOOG? Are these closely related enough to redirect? Are there any blatant pitfalls that I'm not seeing? It seems like a win/win because we are making a rich Performer page with News, Bio, Tickets and Schedule and getting to reallocate the link juice that was being wasted in an pretty much useless page that was allowed to become to powerful. Gotta keep those pages in check!
Thoughts appreciated.
Luke
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Yea I guess we'll see. Thanks for the input.
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tough call indeed. There is a lot of boiler plate and diffrent content so they might be consider un-related - I can't say though. You will see them in WMT as soft 404 and you can roll back if needed - I would say it's a common practice.
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Thanks Eyepaq,
In your opinion, do you think that those pages are closely related enough for Google to pass on link equity? After all, it's a Sports News page redirecting to the Latest News section of a Sports Tickets page. Our assumption is that they will be see as sufficiently related, but it's a tough call.
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Hi Luke,
You can redirect as many pages as you like. There is no filter or penalty from google related with redirects. I've seen millions of redirects tat didn't make sense on a single web site and nothing happened. Google also went on record on Web master central channel and said there is no limit for redirections.
The worst thing that can happen is that if the content is not similar or "connected" in any way - from Google's perspective - they will not pass any link equity with the redirects and they will treat the old pages as soft 404s - so the value that those pages used to hold will be lost - but again - there is no risk in getting hurt here.
Cheers.
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