New Site Launch - Redirecting Hundreds of Old Invalid URLs?
-
We have a client whose WMT shows a ton of "Not found" crawl errors after a new site launched. The URLs are largely a bunch of files that they had previously uploaded on their old site which have external links pointing at them.
What is their best course of action, if they don't have files on the new site that correspond with these old files? Redirect to the home page? Leave them 404ing? Customize 404 message?
(Note: They're mostly generic, non-human friendly URLs that are difficult to identify like /gallery3.php/ppage/3, g/interior.php/pid/3/sid/24, /uploads/1213196781.pdf)
-
Thanks Dirk, this is the direction we were leaning.
-
Thanks for the suggestions Patrick.
-
If the external links to these pages are ok in terms of quality, and you don't have a similar page on the new site, I would redirect these pages to the homepage. It would be a bit of a waste to loose good links to your site.
For the ones that have no (quality) incoming links - you could put a 404 (or in your case probably better a 410 - The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent) - see also this video of Matt Cutts on this topic. As Patrick indicates - a custom version is more user friendly compared to a standard one.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi there
If these files are no longer relevant and have no where to go on the new site - make sure these files and pages have a custom 404.
Here are some suggestions on what to put on your custom 404.
You can also list these pages in your robots.txt file.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you need anything else - good luck!
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
-
Reuse an old juicy URL or create a new with the best practices?
I'm optimizing a site with all new URL`s, categories, titles, descriptions. All URL's will change but I've old URLs with a lot of backlinks, SEO juice. What is better for SEO with them: 1 - Change those URLs and 301 redirect traffic to the new page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
2 - Keep the URL and work just on new title, description, etc. In option 1 I understand that I'll lose some SEO juice because of the redirect, but the new URL will be correct. In option 2 everything will be strong except from the URL that will make less sense than with option 1. It will not exactly match the product name, title. It`s a reuse of a strong URL.0 -
New site failing to rank - could this be why?
I have a new client site that is not appearing anywhere in the top 100 for its main keywords. ASSUMING that this is not an issue with optimization or link quality, I am wondering whether it might be the following... The client's company has a parent company whose website has decent authority. This website links to the new (client) website. In addition, the 2 press releases we have done include links to both companies, since one was an outgrowth of the other. This is all 100% natural, so my inclination is that this is not causing the issue. But does anyone have any experience to suggest otherwise? That having website A linking to website B, and 50+ press release websites linking to both, could be causing the algorithm to throttle website Bs ability to rank? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
Old URL showing up in SERPs 4 months after Re-direct
Hi guys, I did a full site redirect back in October to a new URL, SERPS eventually changed to the new URL and everything was fine. However recently i have started to see the old URL showing up? Anyone else seeing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_Harris0 -
Best time to choose a canonical URL & 301 redirect
I have taken on the task of getting a fairly huge eCommerce site more SEO friendly & have just realized that no URL has been chosen as our preferred domain. Should we designate a preferred domain now or wait until after the first of the year since we are hitting our busy period right now?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Winoman0 -
Removing hundreds of old product pages - Best process
Hi guys, I've got a site about discounts/specials etc. A few months ago we decided it might be useful to have shop specials in PDF documents "pulled" and put on the site individually so that people could find the specials easily. This resulted in over 2000 new pages being added to the site over a few weeks (there are lots of specials).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cashchampion
However, 2 things have happened: 1 - we have decided to go in another direction with the site and are no longer doing this
2 - the specials that were uploaded have now ended but the pages are still live Google has indexed these pages already. What would be the best way to "deal" with these pages? Do I just delete them, do I 301 them to the home page? PS the site is build on wordpress. Any ideas as I am at a complete loss. Thanks,
Marc0 -
URL for New Product
Hi, We are creating a section on our established existing website to display our new marketplace product & associated category pages. This marketplace will be a section of the site where our users can sell online training courses that they've created. It will be branded on our site as the Marketplace. Is it important to include 'marketplace' in the URL? Or would it be better to include a relevant keyword such as 'training-courses' instead? Or both? I've assumed I shouldn't use both as that would increase the length of the URLs and number of subfolders.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0 -
Clone sites at new company
I just came in house to our company for SEO. We have one main site and 182 that are exact duplicates and almost exact clones of the main site. It's no surprise that half of these clones are deindexed already. The meta tags are just the domain name URL. I want to add unique text on the home page to each site, fix the meta tags and switch them up so they aren't clones. Other than a huge rewrite of the code for each site, I'm not sure what else to do to prevent the rest from getting deindexed. Is there any way to prevent the rest from getting deindexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
301 Redirect To Corresponding Link No Matter The URL?
Hey guys I have hosting on Host Gator with I believe an apache web server. I need a code to put in the HT ACCESS to redirect all WWW URL's to their corresponding http URL. I haven't been able to get a code to work. For example, http://www.mysite.org/page1.html -> http://mysite.org/page1.html , without having to redirect hundreds of pages individually Here is the format my server uses in the HT ACCESS file for 301 redirects. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.org$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.org
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DustinX
$RewriteRule ^Electric-Pressure-Cookers.html$ "http://mysite.org/Pressure-Cookers.html" [R=301,L] Thanks0