Missing 301 redirects
-
I just had a developer friend call me in a panic, because they had gone live with a new site and found out (the hard way) that they had missed some pages on their 301 redirects. So the pages are appearing in Google but serving 404s. Ouch!
So their question was: other than running a report for 404 errors in something like Screaming Frog, is there a way to hunt down ONLY pages serving 404s, then export to CSV so they can be redirected?
Anyone got any tricks up their sleeve?
-
Thanks Sean,
It's a Shopify site, so I don't think the dev has access to server logs.
I think the alternative approach might work though. I'm not sure if they have a URL export, but if they do I'll suggest they use the list function.
Thx again.
-
Don't know. That's the problem. The dev doesn't actually know how many pages she might have missed. She's looking for a way to identify exactly how many there are and what they are.
-
Hi there,
I would check your server logs for pages that have been serving up 404 errors when accessed via Google Search.
You can then add in the necessary 301s for these and you'll be good as new!
Alternatively, if you want a catch-all approach, you can use screaming frog to identify the 404 pages on the site. If you have a URL export from your old site, run these URLs through using the 'upload list' function on screaming frog to check their response codes individually.
All the best,
Sean
-
Not that I know of, running a live crawl of the site is the only way, tool-agnostic.
How large of a mess is this, how many missing 301s? how many pages in total? Just curious.
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
-
After you remove a 301 redirect that Google has processed, will the new URL retain any of the link equity from the old URL?
Lets say you 301 redirect URL A to URL B, and URL A has some backlinks from other sites. Say you left the 301 redirect in place for a year, and Google had already replaced the old URL with the new URL in the SERPs, would the new URL (B) retain some of the link equity from URL A after the 301 redirect was removed, or does the redirect have to remain in place forever?
Technical SEO | | johnwalkersmith0 -
HTacess 301 redirect with special characters
Hello moz community ! I would to make a special 301 redirection through my htaccess file. I am a total noob concerning regexp and 301 redirection. I would like to redirect(301) this url : http://www.legipermis.com/stages-points/">http://www.legipermis.com/stages-points/</a></p>; yes yes it's in the index of google, this strange url includes the last ; to http://www.legipermis.com/stages-points/ I have already include a canonical tag by security, i would like to remove url with a 301 redirection and by remove this url through GWT (but the removal tool can't "eat' this kind of URL) Please consider the fact that i am not an expert about 301 redirections and regexps. No 301 redirect generator works properly for such a strange URL (which triggers content duplication corrected anyway with canonical tag). Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | LegiPermis0 -
Switching forum software - 301 redirects?
Hi everyone I'm working on a successful Wordpress site that also has a forum attached. The forum currently uses YAF forum software, which requires Windows hosting. The site owner wants to switch to Linux hosting. This is not a problem for WP, but it does mean that we'll need to transfer the forum to Xenforo or something similar that runs on Linux. We're OK with the technical side of this, but we're worried about the SEO implications. The URL for every forum post (more than 50,000 of them) is going to change during this transfer. It seems completely impractical to 301 each of those, so should I just 301 the URLs that have inbound links? Also, what is google's algo going to think when we suddenly have ~50,000 404s? Many thanks in advance! J
Technical SEO | | van280 -
Page has a 301 redirect, now we want to move it back to it's original place
Hi - This is the first time I've asked a question! My site, www.turnkeylandlords.co.uk is going through a bit of a redesign (for the 2nd time since it launched in July 2012...) First redesign meant we needed to move a page (https://www.turnkeylandlords.co.uk/about-turnkey-mortgages/conveyancing/) from the root to the 'about-us' section. We implemented a 301 redirect and everything went fine. I found out yesterday that the plan is to move this page (and another one as well, but it's the same issue so no point in sharing the URL) back to the root. What do I do? A new 301? Wouldn't this create a loop? Or just delete the original 301? Thanks in advance, Amelia
Technical SEO | | CommT0 -
Two companies merge: website A redirect 301 to website B. Problems?
Hi, last december the company I work for and another company merged. The website of company A was taken offline and the home page was 302 redirected to a page on website B. This page had information about the merger and the consequences for customers. The deeper pages of website A were 301 redirected to similar pages on website B. After a while, the traffic from the redirected home page decreased and we thought it was time to change the redirect from a 302 into a 301 redirect to the home page. Because there are still a lot of links to the home page of website A and we wanted to preserve the link juice. Two weeks ago we changed the 302 redirect from website A into a 301 redirect to the home page of website B. Last week the Google webmaster tools account of website B showed the links from the 301 redirected website A. The total amount of links doubled and the top anchor text is the name of company A instead of company B. This, off course, could trigger an alarm at Google. Because we got a lot of new links with a different anchor text. A tactic used by spammers/black-hats. I am a bit worried that our change will be penalized by Google. But our change is legit. It is to the advantage of our customers to find us if they search for the name of company A or click on a link to website A. We didn´t change the change of address of domain A in Google webmaster tools yet. Is it a good idea to change the change of address of domain A into domain B? Are there other precautions we can take?
Technical SEO | | NN-online0 -
Should I change a 301 redirect?
I recently moved all the content from an old site to a new site on a new domain. I lost a significant amount of traffic as a result. There are 301 redirects for every page on the old site. Generally, these point to the same content as was on the relevant page of the old site. However, the 301 redirect for the homepage on the old site points to the homepage on the new site, not to the content from the old site homepage. I'm wondering whether to change the 301 to point at the content from the old site homepage. Any advice would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | seqal0 -
Mobile redirection
Hi, What would be the best practice for mobile detection: Best practice for redirections Best practice for detection and inclusion of a front-end element inviting to a mobile version of the site I found this on www.W3C.org but it's from 2008 and I was wondering if any of you tried different approaches concerning mobile detection. Thanks! GaB
Technical SEO | | Pherogab0 -
Google , 301 redirects, and multiple domains pointing to the same content.
Google, 301 redirects, and multiple domains pointing to the same content. This is my first post here. I would like to begin by thanking anyone in advance for their help. It is much appreciated. Secondly, I'm posting in the wrong place or something please forgive me simply point me in the right direction I'm a quick learner. I think I'm battling a redirect problem but I want to be sure before I make changes. In order to accurately assess the situation a little background is necessary. I have had a site called tx-laws.com for about 15 years. It was a site that was used primarily by private resource and as such was never SEO'd. The site itself was in fact quite Seo unfriendly. despite a complete lack of marketing or SEO efforts, over time, SEO aside, this domain eventually made it to page one of Google Yahoo and Bing under the keywords Texas laws. About six months ago I decided to revamp the site and create a new resource aimed at a public market. A good deal of effort was made to re-work the SEO. The new site was developed at a different domain name: easylawlook up.com. Within a few months this domain name surpassed tx-laws in Google and was holding its place in position number eight out of 190 million results. Note that at this point no marketing has been done, that is to say there has been no social networking, no e-mail campaigns, no blogs, -- nothing but content. All was well until a few weeks ago I decided to upgrade our network and our servers. During this period there was some downtime unfortunately. When the upgrade was complete everything seemed fine until a week or so later when our primary domain easy law look up vanished off Google. At first I thought it was downtime but now I'm not so sure. The current configuration reroutes traffic from tx-laws to easylawlookup in IIS by pointing both domains to the same root directory. Everything else was handled through scripting. As far as I know this is how it was always set up. At present there is no 301 Redirect in place for tx-laws (as I'm sure there probably should be). Interestingly enough the back links to easylaw also went away. Even more telling however is that now when I visit link: easylawlookup.com there is only one link, and that link is to a domain which references tx-laws not easy law. So it would appear that I have confused Google with regards to my actual intentions. My question is this. Right now my rankings for tx-laws remain unchanged. The last thing I want to have happen is to see those disappear as well. If easy law has somehow been penalized and I redirect tx-laws to easy through a 301 will I screw up my rankings for this domain as well? Any comments or input on the situation are welcome. I just want to think it through before I start making more changes which might make things worse instead of better. Ultimately though, there is no reason that the old domain can't be redirected to the new domain at this point unless it would mean that I run the risk of losing my listings for tx-laws, ending up with nothing instead of transferring any link juice and traffic to easy law. With regards to the down time, it was substantial over a couple of weeks with many hours off-line. However this downtime would have affected both domains the only difference being that the one domain had been in existence for 15 years as opposed to six months for the other. So is my problem downtime, lack of proper 301 redirect, or something else? and if I implement a 301 at this point do I risk damaging the remaining domain which is operational? Thanks again for any help.
Technical SEO | | Steviebone0