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.
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
-
I need help in doing Local SEO
Hey guys I hope everyone is doing well. I am new to SEO world and I want to do local SEO for one of my clients. The issue is I do not know how to do Local SEO at all or where to even start. I would appreciate it if anyone could help me or give me an article or a course to learn how to do it. Main question The thing that I want to do is that, I want my website to show up in top 3 google map results for different locations(which there is one actual location). For example I want to show up for
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seopack.org.ofici3
online clothing store in new york
online clothing store in los angeles or... Let's assume that we can ship our product to every other cities. So I hope I could deliver what I mean. I'd appreciate it if you could answer me with practical solutions.0 -
301 Redirect - Rank Recovery Examples?
Hi All, I recently did a 301 redirect. Page to Page and the notified google via its console. Its been 6 days since. The home page and one other high traffic page swopped out with the new domain on google search index with 3-4 drops in ranking for each. The rest of the sites pages have been indexed but still reflect the old domain when searched. Recently today my home page dropped even further to the second page of google index for the specific keyword. Can you share similar experiences and how long it took you to recover rank fully? and how long for all pages to swop out on google search's index? Regards Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeBlue10 -
301 Redirect from query string to new static page
If i want to create a redirect from a page where the slug ends like this "/?i=4839&mid=1000&id=41537" to a static, more SEO friendly slug like "/contact-us/", will a standard 301 redirect suffice? Thanks, Nails
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matt.nails0 -
Same content, different languages. Duplicate content issue? | international SEO
Hi, If the "content" is the same, but is written in different languages, will Google see the articles as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chalet
If google won't see it as duplicate content. What is the profit of implementing the alternate lang tag?Kind regards,Jeroen0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Setting up 301 Redirects after acquisition?
Hello! The company that I work for has recently acquired two other companies. I was wondering what the best strategy would be as it relates to redirects / authority. Please help! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colin.Accela0 -
301 Redirection and apostrophes in URLs
Hi I am experiencing trouble getting any redirects with apostrophes in the URLs to 301 redirect in order to eliminate 404 errors. I have tried replacing the instance of the apostrophe in the source URL field to %27 and variations of this but to no avail. The site is a wordpress site (the old URLS are legacies from the old Business Catalyst site) and I am using the redirection plug in. I have gone into some detail with a helpful soul here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-deal-with-apostrophes-in-source-url but unfortunately to no result. If anyone has any idea how to solve this puzzle I would be grateful for the help. Example: http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1%E2%80%93_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seamoose0 -
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0