Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO
-
I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts?
Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages.
Thanks,
Satish
-
Hi Dirk,
You got it right. All the pages we redirected were pointing to similar pages once, so probably they should be okay as u said.
Regarding disavow; what are the metrics to decide on a link? Some links might be good looking with decent DA and might be hurting us. What's the best way to findout actual back-links dropping us down. Disavow comes with risk as there are chances we may reject good links, so it's better to make sure about the links.
Thanks,
Satish
-
Hi Satish,
Not sure if I fully understand your answer.
Google will consider a redirect as a soft 404 if you redirect pages to non-related pages. Example: if you redirect a page about "shirts" to a page about "pants" or if you redirect this page to your homepage. If the pages are similar (example "green shirts" to "shirts") it's not considered as a soft 404. I understand that you are redirecting to similar pages - so that should be ok.
If you have pages with low quality incoming links (or a mix of high/low quality links) you can still redirect them - but in case of low quality links it's probably a good idea to disavow them (using the search console) - check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
Hope this helps,
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
Thanks for the response with a detailed answer. Very informative. We have decent number of redirects from homepage and top tier pages too. So I decided for this activity.
Regarding "auto redirects", we have redirected tens of links these days in the process of link reclamation to increase the back-links and pagerank/da. But we have significantly dropped post such redirects even though we have cross examined to make sure the incoming links are relevant to current pages we are linking. However, those external links were pointing to our pages in past. But as we deleted many pages in process of website redesign and content update, we replaced such pages. Why actually they consider such as soft 404 even we redirect non-existing pages to almost same pages with high relevancy? I think some of the links we reclaimed are kind of spammy and pushed us down. What's your idea on this. Thank you.
-Satish
-
The crawl by Googlebot will be more efficient if it can go directly to the destination page rather than having to go trough a redirection.
There is some discussion whether 3xx redirections do have an impact on page rank / page authority - Google official point of view is that it doesn't.
Redirects do however indicate have an impact on speed (check here: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/mobile: "we strongly encourage webmasters to minimize the number, and ideally eliminate redirects entirely" - context is mobile but is applicable on all redirects) - but again for most sites this won't make a huge difference on total load time.
I doubt that simply cleaning your site and removing the 301 will give a boost to your search traffic, but it just something you need to from time to time (idem for internal 4xx errors) to improve the general health of your site.
Dirk
PS I am a bit puzzled about the remark "auto redirects" - you must make sure if you redirect that you redirect to a page which is similar to the page that has disappeared. Google considers most other type of redirects as "soft 404". If the page never existed - like domain.com/kklfjklgjkldfjg - it should return 404 and not be redirect.
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
-
Looking for SEO Help- Magento Temporary Redirects
We recently launched a new site (www.CanyonOS.com) on Magento Enterprise. We have run several crawl tests with Moz and keep receiving 302 redirect errors. We've used the admin console for our site to apply 301 redirects in every area that we could but have had no success. (Last audit was completed on August 14) We are receiving 301 redirects on the following types of pages totaling 43k issues 😞 A majority of these issues are when adding and comparing products to the following types of urls. domain.com**/catalog/**product_compare/ domain.com**/wishlist/**index/add/product/ domain.com**/checkout/**cart/add/ Any suggestions from any SEO gurus? Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CanyonOS0 -
Tags: 301 Redirect, Rel Canonical, or Leave Them Alone?
The title is pretty self explanatory ... we have cornerstone pages ( such as a page for "Widget A") that rank for a certain keyword and then relevant articles that all link to that particular cornerstone page. Each of those articles has the same tag ("Widget A") to tie them together. If you click on that tag, it creates a list of all articles with that tag. We think that this may be siphoning off some of that keyword Google Juice from our Widget A cornerstone page. Our question is, should we 301 redirect that tag to point to the Widget A cornerstone page, use a rel canonical pointing to the Widget A cornerstone page, or just leave it alone like we are doing now? Our goal is to have the Widget A cornerstone page receive the most Google Juice possible and not be diminished by the tags. Note* - We don't want to stop Google from crawling the tags because some of our tags rank highly for other keywords. Also, we tried 301 redirecting the tags before and our ranking dropped significantly ... however, we made a lot of site changes at the same time so we are not sure if the drop in rank was due to redirecting the tags or the site changes. Help please ... thanks in advance 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Humanovation0 -
301 redirect from one domain to other domain, How To?
Hi, I need to redirect 150 products pages from http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ to http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/ How can I do this? Is there a tool or anything I can do to do 301 from one domain to another one? Can I use Google Webmaster Tool? Thank you, BigBlaze
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
301 redirect
I have 2 websites, lets call them Website A and Website B. Website A is a commercial website, website B is a 7 years old blog. Website B has many natural, high quality BL, including some from Nytimes, etc. I want to integrate the blog (B) into the commercial website (A). The idea behind this thought is to compress the two websites, it is easier to have everything in one place. I will do this with 301 redirect via Webmaster tools, htaccess etc. The uRL structure will remain the same: eg: websiteB/post-title/ -> websiteA/post title What will happen with my quality BLs? Is there any chance to be penalized by Google? What will happen with the PR of the 2 sites? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasmin281 -
Could Temporarily Linking New Directory Pages to my Homepage Help SEO?
Within my website we maintain a nationwide directory of auto repair shops. When we add or significantly update / modify a particular listing, would it help improve the individual search engine rankings, Google PageRank, and / or Page Authority of the new auto shop page if we linked these pages to an area on the home page for "Our Newest Featured Shops" or "Latest Member Additions" or something of the nature? Each new shop profile would then be linked directly from the homepage for a period of time. I assume that it might be crawled and added to the indexes quicker, but would there be other benefits? If so, would those benefits only be temporary if eventually the new shop no longer linked to the homepage? Would keeping all featured shops in rotational display on the homepage make any difference? Any input is appreciated. Thanks. Kelly Vaught
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kelly_vaught0 -
Corporate pages and SEO help
We own and operate more than two dozen educational related sites. The business team is attempting to standardize some parts of our site hierarchy so that our sitemap.php, about.php, privacy.php and contact.php are all at the root directory. Our sitemap.php is generated by our sitemap.xml files, which are generated from our URLlist.txt files. I need to provide some feedback on this initiative. I'm worried about adding more stand-alone pages to our root directory and as part of a separate optimization in the future I was planning to suggest we group the "privacy", "about" and "contact" pages in a separate folder. We generally try to put our most important pages/directories for SEO in the root as our homepages pass a lot of link juice and have high authority. We do not invest SEO time into optimizing these pages as they're not pages we're trying to rank for, and I've already been looking into even no-following all links to them from our footer, sitemap, etc. I know that adding these "corporate" pages to a site are usually a standard part of the design process but is there any SEO benefit to having them at the root? And along the same lines, is there any SEO harm to having unimportant pages at the root? What do you guys think out there in Moz land?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_edvisors0 -
301 a page and then remove the 301
I have a real estate website that has a city hub page. All the homes for sale within a city are linked to from this hub page. Certain small cities may have one home on the market for a month and then not have any homes on the market for months or years. I call them "Ghost Cities". This problem happens across many cities at any point in time. The resulting city hub pages are left with little to no content. We are throwing around the idea of 301 redirecting these "Ghost City" pages to a page higher up in the hierarchy (Think state or county) until we get new homes for sale in the city. At that point we would remove the 301. Any thoughts on this strategy? Is it bad to turn 301s on and off like that? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisKolmar0 -
Redirect a subdomain to a subdirectory for SEO purposes.
Hi, I have a site on wordpress and I want to add eCommerce to it. We want to go with Shopify but Shopify only allows to host their platform on a subdomain. I like to have it on a subdorectory, so my question is: Would it make sense to redirect the whole subdomain to a subdirectory (move everything from shop.domain.com to domain.com/shop) for SEO purposes? Would Google see these pages as if they were part of the main domain? Thanks! Julien
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julienraby0