Tricky 301 question
-
A friend has relaunched a website but his web guys (he didn't consult me!) didn't do any 301s and now traffic unsurprisingly has tanked.
The old site and database no longer exists and there are now 2000+ 404's.
Any ideas how to do the 301s from old urls to new product urls WITHOUT it being a massive manual job?
-
That's my point, you only need to worry about the pages that had external links
Thanks -
Thanks
-
Pages dont just get equity from external links of course. If a category page has 10 links to it the product pages linked to on that page benefit. The wholesale drop in rankings isn't because every page had an external link to it.
-
I don't know what you mean about link equity, if there is no link pointing to the page then there is nothing lost.
As for search engines finding a lot of 404s, they will remove them from the index after a while, no problem there, you are returning the correct status code, that's what they want. This will allow them to clean up there index and stop crawling the pages. -
If the majority of URLs have no logic, then it makes things a bit tricky in regards to minimizing the amount of work.
I once had a very active and large website with about 500-1000 single lines of rewrite code (1 for each URL) in my htaccess. Surprisingly, it did not slow the server down at any noticeable rate, unless you are very sensitive to milliseconds and even then, one trial to the next could easily differ from regular internet congestion. My point is, nobody ever noticed.
Here's a few ways that I would handle this job to get through it as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
The more aggressive and time consuming approach:
I would output all the URLs that were changed from phpmyadmin or whatever mysql administration tool you might use to a spreadsheet. From that spreadsheet, I would add the original URL.
Then with the old URL (A1) and new URL (A2) I would write a formula to output the correct rewrite (A3.) Then simply copy and paste that formula down all the rows that it applies to. You might need to break up the URLs to grab the right pieces for your formula.Of course use, regex where you can, and keep your .htaccess rewrites to a minimum.
If that is still too much work, hire someone to do it through elance.com
The somewhat sloppy pace-yourself-approach:
Another approach you could take is to just monitor google webmaster tools for all the page not found errors. And once a day or once a week, grab those URLS, create the rewrite, and mark it as fixed in webmaster tools.
The reason I say this is somewhat sloppy is because, you might find that you could have used regex in a lot of instances to better handle all those missing URLs.
But it may be a good way of staying on track with google, and handling the issues only as they arise so it does not feel like such a mammoth task.
-
Thanks Alan, yes they have good external links to many pages. They retail a very niche product and have a lot of forum, review, social type links. It might be though if need be they just have to focus mostly on 301s for the pages with those links. As best practise I am in favour of 301'ing regardless of external links as the link equity gets messed up and causes ranking issues, as in this case, as well as sending a signal to the engines about the amount of wasted resource they will use crawling a site with 1000s of 404s.
-
Thanks Donna & Luis. Luis is right i'm looking for a way for this not to be a mammoth manual task for their developer.
-
Thanks, the regex is a good idea and might be part of the solution for some urls at least but there seems to be some discrepancies in logic between old and new product urls and some of the new product urls are actually still the same as the old (which of course is fine).
-
Thanks Luis, unfortunately neither 1 or 2 are ideal.
1. I don't think there is much logic in the change of url structure between old and new product urls which makes that idea impossible.
2. Thats going to be a last resort
Andy
-
do you know if they had any external links?
If they don't have external links then I would just let them 404.
some people have some wired thoughts of what 301's do. They simply redirect a request, so a request o A is told to remake the request to to B, so the crawler will follow it that way and award the pagerank to the new page with a small loss on each request.If no external links what is there to gain? don't complicate your site with unnesasary redirects, there is a small argument that the pages may have been bookmarked at old url, but I think that argument is so weak I would not bother
-
Yeah. I heard him. I guess I'm saying "probably not".
I like how you're keeping us honest though Luis. I don't like it when people respond with what they want to say rather than with an answer to the specific question.
-
Donna,
Andy has been very specific about this: "WITHOUT it being a massive manual job" hehe thanks for supporting my answer.
Luis
-
It really depends on the nature, link and traffic patterns of your site Andy. If the vast majority of those 2,000+ 404's are coming from pages that should never have been indexed in the first place, you can probably get away with Luis's 2nd suggestion. If they're differentiated, valuable, and show evidence of incoming links and traffic, you've got some work ahead of you.
You might be able to streamline the process by inventorying and grouping like pages, then doing group redirects. But I suggest you do some analysis first to determine whether the effort is warranted.
-
2000+ is a lot of URLs to work through. But you can most likely get through them quickly with a few good regular expression 301 redirects in your .htaccess
If you have a pretty consistent form from the old url to the new one, this will be a piece of cake.
ex:
old URL: this/was/coolnew URL: this/is/cool
However, if there is really no rhyme and reason to the newly formed URLs, this could end up taking a considerate amount of time.
I would look into writing 301 redirects with regular expressions in .htaccess (I'm assuming your server is and uses .htaccess)
There are a number of resources for doing this, and even one here at moz.com
https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection -
Hello Andy,
1. Try this: http://webdesign.about.com/od/htaccess/ht/redirect-an-entire-site-using-htaccess.htm
2. Second/faster solution. You could add this line of code to your .htacess file (and all the current "404's users" will go to the homepage):
ErrorDocument 404 /
But pay attention... 404's are perfectly normal if the page no longer exists, for user experience you should only ever use a 301 redirect if the page that no longer exists is going to a equal page.. i.e about cars to cars, about rabbits to rabbits. Maybe the only solution is creating a 404 specific landing page for this (with links to different sections of your site)
Hope this helps,
Luis
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
-
Do bulk 301 redirects hurt seo value?
We are working with a content based startup that needs to 301 redirect a lot of its pages to other websites. Will give you an example to help you understand. If we assume this is the startups domain and URL structure www.ourcompany.com/brand1/article What they want to do is do a 301 redirect of www.ourcompany.com/brand1/ to www.brand1.com I have never seen 301 as a problem to SEO or link juice. But in this case where all the major URLs are getting redirected to other sites i was wondering if it would have a negative effect. Right now they have just 20-30 brands but they are planning to hit a couple of hundreds this year.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aaronfernandez0 -
Google Is Indexing my 301 Redirects to Other sites
Long story but now i have a few links from my site 301 redirecting to youtube videos or eCommerce stores. They carry a considerable amount of traffic that i benefit from so i can't take them down, and that traffic is people from other websites, so basically i have backlinks from places that i don't own, to my redirect urls (Ex. http://example.com/redirect) My problem is that google is indexing them and doesn't let them go, i have tried blocking that url from robots.txt but google is still indexing it uncrawled, i have also tried allowing google to crawl it and adding noindex from robots.txt, i have tried removing it from GWT but it pops back again after a few days. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cuarto7150 -
Clarification around 301 redirects.
I’ve come across numerous blogs recently that suggest that SEOs should NOT do bulk re-directs to a category page. This has come as something of a surprise (doh!!) and I feel like I should already know this. It does seem like there is lots disagreement here so I thought that I’d ask what people’s opinions were to make sure that I get my thinking straight. I've read all the main Moz blog posts on this topic and, although really useful, they've left me none the wiser around a few specific questions. Here’s some more detail about the situation. We’re currently consolidating a lot of content into a main blog, which will be the focal point of new blogs posts that are created. This is different to the past, where we tended to create separate blogs for different products on separate domains. I’m currently considering how we move content across from one the older blogs to this new blog (which will soon sit on a subfolder of our main domain). I have three (!) questions: 1) Could you confirm that doing bulk re-directs a category page is bad? I already know that doing them all to the homepage is an error. 2) Should I re-direct the home page of the old blog on a separate domain to the relevant category page on the new site? The category page is related, but does not cover the EXACT topic. The category page covers our replacement product offering. It I shouldn't do this, where should I re-direct the old blog domain to? 3) I’ve recommended that we set up 301 redirects on a one-to-one basis, redirecting each piece of content to its new location on the old site. What about content that has been earmarked for removal and for which there is no obvious alternative? My previous recommendation has been to re-direct these pages to the most relevant category page on the new blog. Would it be better to let this 404 or, as an alternative, create a custom 404 for the users on the new blog highlighting the new content that we offer? Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Backlink Questions
Hey Mozzers, I have spent some time researching proper backlink analysis, and then I have been going through some of the steps. Here are a few questions that I have had in the process. Why would backlink tools like OSE and Ahrefs return different results for (say): "www.domain.com" vs "domain.com"? I noticed that competitors have almost 6x the backlinks as I do, but when I look at where those links are coming from, they are coming from old sites with moderate DA (under 10-30), but many are not current. I also noticed that many of these sites have links placed site-wide so that there are maybe 6+ referring pages per domain. So I guess my question is, how powerful are these links? Am I better off building relationships with bloggers, even though they only offer one link per page? Ultimately it will take me a long time to build the same quantity of links, but it seems like many of these competitors' links are old fashioned, but still moderately effective. Any help is appreciated, you guys have always been so helpful!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
Question about optimising an inner pages apposed to the homepage
Hi Everyone, I'm currently looking to optimise the inner page of a website opposed to the homepage itself. I was wondering if I should stick to some kind of link distribution? For instance, say my website is about widgets and the url is http://www.widgets.com, I want to optimise for a much easier "blue widgets" term on an inner page with the url: http://www.widgets.com/blue-widgets. Does google discriminate against a website with a higher number of links pointing to an inner page than the homepage? If so, what would you recommend a safe distribution between the two? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated, Peter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoyalBlueCoffee0 -
301 redirect
Hi there, I have some good links pointing to one of my web pages at the moment, however we are just about to launch a new design with new URL structure and I am clear that I need to do a 301 redirect on the URL to the new URL. However, do I keep the old URL live forever? or can I remove it after a while? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Keyword Question: How to Target my Niche
Hello, I'm a health coach helping people with multiple sclerosis. Here's my website: bobweikel(dot)com What do you think the top 4 local keywords would be for my niche? I'm in Boise ID. I'm thinking MS Boise MS Boise Idaho Multiple Sclerosis Boise Multiple Sclerosis Boise Idaho With your intuition, do you think these are valuable keywords for a coaching site? Also, can you think of any other keywords? I want this 100% white hat.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Canonical / 301 Redundancy
Suppose I have two dynamic URLs that lead to the identical page: www.example.com/product.php?x=1&y=1 and www.example.com/product.php?y=1 The x=1 parameter had some historical meaning, but is now unused. All references to the x=1 parameter have been removed from internal links and sitemaps. I have implemented two solutions: First, the header of www.example.com/product.php?x=1&y=1 includes: Second, the .htaccess file includes the following: Redirect permanent /product.php?x=1&y=1 http://www.example.com/product.php?y=1 Questions: 1. I assume that since canonical is still relatively new, it's best to play it safe and implement both solutions. Is this correct? 2. When I point my browser to www.example.com/product.php?x=1&y=1, it does NOT redirect to www.example.com/product.php?y=1. The address bar continues to show the non-canonical URL. Is this because the canonical tag somehow takes precedence over the 301 redirect? 3. How long will Google Webmaster Tools continue to show these as duplicates, even though I've implemeted BOTH canonical and 301? It's been a few weeks and I thought it would have rolled off by now. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahirai0