Should I stop redirectin 301, sometime?
-
Dear All,
I work for a southamerican ecommerce, I would like to know if you can help me out with the following.
This site is full of 404, more than 45K, so we are doing 301 to corresponding pages. The development team is asking me if we could stop doing the 301 in some time...In order to do this search engines should index only the url we are redirecting to, and not the one that is redirecting to the new one.
Currently they are redirecting in the HTML no by htaccess, so this means they have one page for each URL that needs to be redirected, and this is not efficient.
Bests,
Pablo
-
I would just setup wild card 301 redirects via htaccess. Allows you to establish rules to redirect whole directories to new pages: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6877486/how-can-i-use-htaccess-to-redirect-paths-with-a-wildcard-character
-
Meta noindex + the URL Removal Tool would work to get rid of them. I would also try and make sure any old links internally on your site that may point to these pages get removed, if that is the step you are going to take. What will the user see when they land on these old URLs?
-
Hi Jazom,
Errors are hard 404. I like what you say, but I would like to know if it would be better to erase indexed pages from index.
Bests,
Pablo López Carrara
Cinepapaya
-
Hi Russ,
Tnks, I like this kind of segmentation by inbound links and traffic, let me quote you
"Chances are, most of those pages neither receive traffic nor have inbound links. Go ahead and drop the 301 redirect for all of those" I think you mean (Im Argentine) I should use redirect for these URLs. which I dont think it make much sense since these are not the most valuable pages. I got your general idea, but let me know if you made I mistake when you wrote it.
I like what you said in general, but I wouldn´t like leaving 404 (even though they got no traffic or links) with out treating. So...questions...Meta no-index, does it work for already indexed pages? What do you think about using no-index + deleting these urls from index using webmaster tools.
Bests,
Pablo López Carrara
Cinepapaya
-
Hi Pablo,
What report are you using to find the 404 pages? Are they soft 404 or hard 404s? A lot of reports may return a 404 response for something like a failed file request which does not really impact usability.
If you have a consistent page name for your 404 pages, look under Analytics site content and filter by page title then search for your 404 page title - this will give you the actual failed page requests, you can then narrow down if they are internal page links or external.
It may be worthwhile checking what links are pointing to your 301 redirects and if there are links you want to keep, dropping them could have a negative impact on your site.
Regards,
Jason
-
This is a good and common question. There are two reasons why you would want to keep the 301 redirect in place
- Usability: Users are still trying to reach this now defunct page
- Inbound Links: There are external links that are pointing to this page.
The best thing to do is first narrow down the pages for which you have no reason to keep 301s in place. Open up your analytics platform and look to see which of those 45K pages have received no traffic in the last 30 days. Then use a tool like Open Site Explorer or Google Search Console to see if any of those 45K pages have inbound links. Chances are, most of those pages neither receive traffic nor have inbound links. Go ahead and drop the 301 redirect for all of those.
Then, prioritize the remaining pages. The ones with the most links and most traffic should probably retain a 301 redirect for the long run. Those near the bottom you might choose to drop.
Finally, with that many 404s, make sure that your 404 page is useful. Create a custom 404 page that helps direct users to their correct location or provides an easy search mechanism to find it themselves.
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
-
Suggested approach (support) for 301 redirects in event of an acquisition
If an agency has recently been acquired by a new organisation, it will need to be redirected to the new organisation's website as soon as possible. We are aware of the need to 301 redirect all pages (domain authority) across to the current domain of the new organisation's website. The new organisation has less pages than our Agency site however, so we cannot point 301 redirects at page level. Would you therefore advise, A, B or C?: A) Redirecting all pages including all blog posts/services pages etc across from the agency site to the new organisation's domain? * new organisation does not have /blog or /services pages. -Will we lose authority if redirecting from pages of our agency site to the new organisation's top level domain? B) Ensure that the new organisation secures hosting of the agency website, and place a holding page on the Agency website directing visitors through to the new organisation for the interim, until we have a /blog, /services page on the new organisation's site? C) Place 301 redirects from agency across to new organisation, and look moving forward (when pages have been put in place on new organisation website) to retrospectively repoint 301 redirects from top level domain of new organisation's site to the new pages which have just been created on the new organisation's site? Any pointers here would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tangent0 -
301 redirects Ruby on Rails
Can anyone point me to the best way to implement 301 redirects on a Ruby on Rails website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
301 Redirects... Redirect all content at once or in increments?
Hello, I have been reading a lot about site migration and 301s and sometimes get confused with conflicting suggestions from different sources... So, in a site migration. Should I 301 redirect all old URLs to the news at once or little by little? I've see this Google handout that suggests doing it all at once (minute 13)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Koki.Mourao
https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cfco632lor7bl55j3tg1g8332l0 But also have read the opposite in other forums...0 -
Site Merge Strategy: Choosing Target Pages for 301 Redirects
I am going to be merging two sites. One is a niche site, and it is being merged with the main site. I am going to be doing 301 redirects to the main site. My question is, what is the best way of redirecting section/category pages in order to maximize SEO benefits. I will be redirecting product to product pages. The questions only concerns sections/categories. Option 1: Direct each section/category to the most closely matched category on the main site. For example, vintage-t-shirts would go to vintage-t-shirt on main site. Option 2: Point as many section/category pages to larger category on main site with selected filters. We have filtered navigation on our site. So if you wanted to see vintage t-shirts, you could go to the vintage t-shirt category, OR you could go to t-shirts and select "vintage" under style filter. In the example above, the vintage-t-shirt section from the niche site would point to t-shirts page with vintage filter selected (something like t-shirts/#/?_=1&filter.style=vintage). With option 2, I would be pointing more links to a main category page on the main site. I would likely have that page rank higher, because more links are pointing to it. I may have a better overall user experience, because if the customer decides to browse another style of t-shirt, they can simply unselect the filter and make other selections. Questions: Which of these options is better as far as: (1) SEO, (2) User experience If I go with option 2, the drawback is that the page titles will all be the same (i.e vintage-t-shirts pointing to the page with filter selected would have "t-shirts" as page title instead of a more targeted page with page title "vintage t-shirts." I believe a workaround would be to pull filter values from the URL and append them to the page title. That way page title for URL t-shirts/#/?=1&filter.style=vintage_ would be something like "vintage, t-shirts." Is this the appropriate way to deal with it? Any thoughts, suggestions, shared experiences would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Domain forward or 301 redirect
My company recently acquired another company including their web presence. We are soon ending their website and will be either 301 redirecting their domain to our domain or pointing their domain to our nameservers. Their domain authority is only 25 while our domain authority is 32. Their domain was created in 1998 while ours was created in 1999. So to keep our domain authority up or enhance it, should we do a 301 redirect or a domain forward. And that is if there is any difference? Thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | topsailislander0 -
Penalty after 301 redirect?
We run a training center. We had 1 main website and 2 dedicated websites to certain themes. The 2 dedicated websites are older and the main website is about 6 months old. The 2 dedicated websites had a top 5 ranking for their most important keywords. 2 weeks ago we imported all the content from the dedicated websites into the main website. Then immediately after we did a perfect 301 redirect of these websites to the main website. 2 SEO companies checked it for us and so I'm very sure this is done right. Google immediately caught this up and gave the main website a boost. We where in the top 10 for many important keywords for 1 week. The next week all our rankings dropped. We only have a top 50 ranking for 10 keywords. Before it was 75 keywords in the top 20. Do you know what could have caused this? Any suggestion, thought, ... is welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
Do I need to use canonicals if I will be using 301's?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" /> With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
Multiple 301 redirects considered a redirection chain?
I need to redirect a ton of duplicate content, so I want to try redirect 301 /store/index.php /store redirect 301 /store/product-old /store/product-new redirect 301 /store/product-old1 /store/product-new1 redirect 301 /store/product-old2 /store/product-new2 redirect 301 /store/product-old3 /store/product-new3 redirect 301 /store/product-old4/file.html /store/product-old4/new4/file.html and then a whole bunch of old dead links to homepage. So we've had /index.php redirected to / on other parts of the site for awhile, and for the most part /store is a friendly URL, but then we have tons of dup content and work arounds that preceded my job here. I'm wondering if those redirects above would be considered a redirection chain? Since the all the redirects below the /index.php -> /store count on that one redirect. Thanks for any insight you may be able to give!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hondaspeder1