Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice
-
I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to:
-
keep each page’s content exactly the same
-
keep the same domain name
-
301 redirect all of the pages to their new url
The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content.
The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls.
I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.”
Here’s my question:
1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic?
2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url?
3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months?
Thanks.
-
-
Hi,
I had and experience for moving not only the file structure, but also the whole domain (domain name change). We have created the 301 redirect from the old site to the new one (from every single old page to the new one). It's not the same as your case, but the general approach is exactly the same.
So it looked like
olddomainname.com/aaa > 301 >newdomainname.com/aaa
in your case it going to be as yourdomainname.com/aaaa >301> yourdomainname.com/site-collection/aaaa
Google reindexed all our new pages (about 1500 000 pages) within about 6-8 months, but we still (after more than 18 month) have old domain pages being indexed by Google (about 10 000 pages).
Once the domain name was changed, we had started to monitor all our backlinks to be sure they all are still alive, and we've been checking them every week. This part was the hardest to deal with, coz in spite of setting the 301 redirect, some links were lost. The problem was not connected to the re-direction from oldsite.com/aaa to newsite.com/aaa, but to the problem that end-pages were out-dated (products out of stock etc). When we discovered this problem (shame on us!!), we had started to monitor back links more heavily. Now we do it every week to be sure we are not losing traffic due to this stupid problem.
As far as I know, there are some free apps for Shopify, dealing with 301 redirects, e.g. https://apps.shopify.com/atomseo-404-error-broken-link-checker, https://apps.shopify.com/redirectify
good luck!
-
Great answer. A good tool to use for testing the 301s in bulk is Screaming Frog. Save a CSV list of your old URLs before you migrate. When you update sites, set Screaming Frog in list mode and it will show you where all the old URLs 301 to. Makes it really easy to test.
If you do have any sort of staging site to do this with, that would be optimal before you go live. If you do go live, I would make this the first thing you do to check those 301s. Screaming frog will quickly check a ton of them and give you some peace of mind.
Side note, the only way link juice is lost in a 301 is if you 301 to a page that does not have semantically related content to the original page. i.e. if you have a page on Red Widgets and you 301 it to a page on Blue Bangles, Google will not pass the juice as it sees you trying to manipulate the link juice. As you are using 301 redirect to a new URL with the exact same content, you should be fine, assuming the other points that Dirk mentions.
-
I have migrated several sites - including changes of urls (and even domains). If done well (meaning that all pages are properly redirected from the old to the new url) there should not a be an issue. In 80% of the migrations, you couldn't even notice that there had been a migration if you looked at the search engine traffic. In the 20% where traffic was lost, it wasn't related to link juice but to other issues:
- if you change the look & feel of your pages this can have an impact on your visitors (both positive and negative - check bounce rate, time on page, avg. pages/visit) - if it's negative you can quite easily loose positions in search (resulting in lower search traffic). If your pages stay exactly the same - this shouldn't be an issue.
-
Same goes with performance - if the performance of the new platform is worse than the old one - it could again have a negative impact on your users, and as a result on your position in the SERP's.
-
if you change your site structure - take care of you site depth. Sometimes changing you site can push important content deeper or cause less internal links to these pages, again having a negative impact on the site's performance in the SERP's.
Nobody will be able to give you a definitive answer on your question, but as far as I know, link juice doesn't get lost with 301's, but a lot of other factors can have a severe impact.
If you loose traffic, recovery can take a long time (up to 6 months) provided you find the root cause of the problem (and it won't be the link juice). If you don't - that traffic is gone.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
-
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
-
Backlink is good or bad? All of the website links were of the same type.
Backlink is good or bad? All of the website links were of the same type. Website niche - Animation and 3D Rendering Studios Backlink from - http://www.adamfrisby.com/create-home-design-and-interior-decor-in-2d-3d.html the anchor tag is image URL from one of the many images in that post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | varunrupal0 -
How do I redirect my old PHP website to my new Java website?
Please could you help? My old website is written in php. I've created a new design of the website in Java. I'll be using the same domain name though. example.com and I'd like to pass my link juice to my new redesigned website. When I turn the domain name to point to my new website how do I make sure pages that are ranked in google that don't exist on my new website transfer 301 from my old website to a similar page on my new website. Old Website Example example.com/bootcampuk.php New Website Example example.com/bootcamps.jsp Many Thanks, Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | puamethod0 -
Should I remove pages to concentrate link juice?
So our site is database powered and used to have up to 50K pages in google index 3 years ago. After re-design that number was brought down to about 12K currently. Legacy URLs that are now generating 404 have mostly been redirected to appropriate pages (some 13K 301 redirects currently). Trafficked content accounts for about 2K URLs in the end so my question is should I in context of concentrating link juice to most valuable pages: remove non-important / least trafficked pages from site and just have them show 404 no-index non-important / least trafficked pages from site but still have them visible 1 or 2 above plus remove from index via Webmaster Tools none of the above but rather something else? Thanks for any insights/advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StratosJets0 -
Client would like to 301 redirect the homepage to a category page
Hello MOZ Community!!! I would like your expert opinions on a scenario, please! My client is an ecommerce company, and currently has one of its category pages outranking its homepage for a few key phrases. The homepage, however, has a better conversion rate. So, the client is asking that we make the homepage the category URL, so http://www.theirsite.com/blue-clothes. The existing homepage URL - http://www.theirsite.com - would 301 REDIRECT to the category page - which would render the current version of the homepage. Therefore, there would be nothing, ZERO content, on the MAIN URL: http://www.theirsite.com Has anyone ever done this before? What are the pros and the cons of this practice? Here is my same client, for reference: https://moz.com/community/q/issue-with-category-ranking-on-page-1-vs-homepage-ranking-on-page-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Do I eventually 301 a page on our site that "expires," to a page that's related, but never expires, just to utilize the inbound link juice?
Our company gets inbound links from news websites that write stories about upcoming sporting events. The links we get are pointing to our event / ticket inventory pages on our commerce site. Once the event has passed, that event page is basically a dead page that shows no ticket inventory, and has no content. Also, each “event” page on our site has a unique url, since it’s an event that will eventually expire, as the game gets played, or the event has passed. Example of a url that a news site would link to: mysite.com/tickets/soldier-field/t7493325/nfc-divisional-home-game-chicago bears-vs-tbd-tickets.aspx Would there be any negative ramifications if I set up a 301 from the dead event page to another page on our site, one that is still somewhat related to the product in question, a landing page with content related to the team that just played, or venue they play in all season. Example, I would 301 to: mysite.com/venue/soldier-field tickets.aspx (This would be a live page that never expires.) I don’t know if that’s manipulating things a bit too much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ticket_King1 -
Too many 301 redirects?
Hey, My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website. These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic. I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website? If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content? For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site: 1099softwarepro.com 1099softwarepro.info 1099softwarepro.net 1099softwarepro.biz 1099softwareprofessionals.com 1099softwareprofessionals.info ...you get the point
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
Transfer link juice from old to new site
Hi seomozzers, The design team is building a new website for one of our clients. My role is to make sure all the link juice is kept. My first question is, should I just make 301s or is there another technique to preserve all the link juice from the old to new site that I should be focusing on? Second Question is that ok to transfer link juice using dev urls like www.dev2.example.com (new site) or 182.3456.2333? or should I wait the creation of real urls to do link juice transfer? Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Best way to consolidate link juice
I've got a conundrum I would appreciate your thoughts on. I have a main container page listing a group of products, linking out to individual product pages. The problem I have is the all the product pages target exactly the same keywords as the main product page listing all the products. Initially all my product pages were ranking much higher then the container page, as there was little individual text on the container page, and it was being hit with a duplicate content penality I believe. To get round this, on the container page, I have incorporated a chunk of text from each product listed on the page. However, that now means "most" of the content on an individual product page is also now on the container page - therefore I am worried that i will get a duplicate content penality on the product pages, as the same content (or most of it) is on the container page. Effectively I want to consolidate the link juice of the product pages back to the container page, but i am not sure how best to do this. Would it be wise to rel=canonical all the product pages back to the container page? Rel=nofollow all the links to the product pages? - or possibly some other method? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770