Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I Keep adding 301s or use a noindex,follow/canonical or a 404 in this situation?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I feel I am facing a double edge sword situation. I am in the process of migrating 4 domains into one. I am in the process of creating URL redirect mapping
The pages I am having the most issues are the event pages that are past due but carry some value as they generally have one external followed link.
www.example.com/event-2008 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016
www.example.com/event-2007 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016
www.example.com/event-2006 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016
Again these old events aren't necessarily important in terms of link equity but do carry some and at the same time keep adding multiple 301s pointing to the same page may not be a good ideas as it will increase the page speed load time which will affect the new site's performance. If i add a 404 I will lose the bit of equity in those. No index,follow may work since it won't index the old domain nor the page itself but still not 100% sure about it. I am not sure how a canonical would work since it would keep the old domain live. At this point I am not sure which direction I should follow?
Thanks for your answers!
-
Before deciding not to do a 301 redirect you may want to check how much traffic volume you get from these pages. If it's not significant and for some reason you're unwilling to do a 301 redirect, I would suggest trying to get the actual links going to those pages changed to your new events page. Also you should submit your new events page to those who linked to your old events page to see if you can get link equity flowing to your new page.
-
Thanks Everyone!
If I decide to not 301 what should be the best alternative for these old events?
-
Regarding the speed issue, a single rewrite rule using regex with a wildcard could handle redirecting all of those old event URLs to the new event calendar directory, as it appears you wish to do. Saves a huge amount of work and cuts way down on the 301 redirects that have be parsed on each page load.
Paul
-
If the pages are worth the effort of 301'ing them, I wouldn't worry about page speed for them. Besides link authority from those old pages, you should also look for traffic, since 301s are actually more about seamless experience for the people coming to your site.
-
The first thing that comes to my mind is "How much link equity do these pages bring in?". I know we SEO people hate to throw away any kind of link equity but at the end of the day we're not here to make SEO awesome for it's sake alone. We want results! We want to drive those heavenly KPI's we look at everyday. If these pages have really been a thorn in your side and are taking up your time I would suggest analyzing how much you'd lose if you just left these pages out of your new domain. I'd probably just cut them loose and make your life simple. If they're worth it though do the 301 redirect and see what kind of link equity you can get passed on.
Another option is just change the source link, if you can get in contact with the website that's linking and let them know what's going on that might be a good option. That being said these events are forever old so it might be met with a "That's not worth our time, besides the event is already past." when you ask for them to be changed.
Again I think unless these pages are bringing in some great link equity vital to your website to rank for keywords that are driving results... forget about them and spend your time working on something more valuable.
-Jacob
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
-
Canonical Chain
This is quite advanced so maybe Rand can give me an answer? I often have seen questions surrounding a 301 chain where only 85% of the link juice is passed on to the first target and 85% of that to the next one, up to three targets. But how about a canonical chain? What do I mean by this:? I have a client who sells lighting so I will use a real example (sans domain) I don't want 'new-product' pages appearing in SERPS. They dilute link equity for the categories they replicate and often contain identical products to the main categories and subcategories. I don't want to no index them all together I'd rather tell Google they are the same as the higher category/sub category. (discussion whether a noindex/follow tag would be better?) If I canonicalize new-products/ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17/kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217 to /ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17/kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217 I then subsequently discover that everything in kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217 is already in /kitchen-lighting-c17 and I decide to canonicalize those two - so I place a /kitchen-lighting-c17 canonical on /kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217. Then what happens to the new-products canonical? Is it the same rule - does it pass 85% of link equity back to the non new-product URL and 85% of that back to the category? does it just not work? or should I do noindexi/follow Now before you jump in: Let's assume these are done over a period of time because the obvious answer is: Canonicalize both back to /ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17 I know that and that is not what I am asking. What if they are done in a sequence what is the real result? I don't want to patronise anyone but please read this carefully before giving an answer. Regards Nigel Carousel Projects.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nigel_Carr0 -
[Very Urgent] More 100 "/search/adult-site-keywords" Crawl errors under Search Console
I just opened my G Search Console and was shocked to see more than 150 Not Found errors under Crawl errors. Mine is a Wordpress site (it's consistently updated too): Here's how they show up: Example 1: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html/feed/rss2 Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html Example 2 (this surprised me the most when I looked at the linked from data): URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/3/ Linked From: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/2/ (this is showing as if it's from our own site) http://a-spammy-adult-site.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html Example 3: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html How do I address this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmehta10 -
Marking Ads As Ads
In marking paid ads as "advertisement" for the sake of Google organic, if you have a block of small ads, do you have to mark each and every one as an advertisement? For instance, let's say you have a block of small ads in the right column... mark each one or just at the top or what? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Change url structure and keeping the social media likes/shares
Hi guys, We're thinking of changing the url structure of the tutorials (we call it knowledgebase) section on our website. We want to make it shorter URL so it be closer to the TLD. So, for the convenience we'll call them old page (www.domain.com/profiles/profile_id/kb/article_title) and new page (www.domain.com/kb/article_title) What I'm looking to do is change the url structure but keep the likes/shares we got from facebook. I thought of two ways to do it and would love to hear what the community members thinks is better. 1. Use rel=canonical I thought we might do a rel=canonical to the new page and add a "noindex" tag to the old page. In that way, the users will still be able to reach the old page, but the juice will still link to the new page and the old pages will disappear from Google SERP and the new pages will start to appear. I understand it will be pretty long process. But that's the only way likes will stay 2. Play with the og:url property Do the 301 redirect to the new page, but changing the og:url property inside that page to the old page url. It's a bit more tricky but might work. What do you think? Which way is better, or maybe there is a better way I'm not familiar with yet? Thanks so much for your help! Shaqd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShaqD0 -
[E-commerce] Duplicate content due to color variations (canonical/indexing)
Hello, We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content. What we have done so far: Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product") Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL) In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do? Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change) Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyLounge0 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0 -
Meta Keywords: Should we use them or not?
I am working through our site and see that meta keywords are being used heavily and unnecessarily. Each of our info pages will have 2 or 3 keyword phrases built into them. Should we just duplicate the keyword phrases into the meta keyword field, should put in additional keywords beyond or not use it at all? Thoughts and opinions appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus1 -
External 404 vs Internal 404
Which one is bad? External - when someone adds an incorrect link to your site, maybe does a typo when linking to an inner page. This page never existed on your site, google shows this as a 404 in Webmaster tools. Internal - a page existed, google indexed it, and you deleted it and didnt add a 301. Internal ones are in the webmaster's control, and i can understand if google gets upset if it sees a 404 for a URL that existed before, however surely "externally created" 404 shoudnt cause any harm cause that page never existed. And someone has inserted an incorrect link to your site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0