How to handle potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following a major site replacement
-
We are looking for the very best way of handling potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following
a major site replacement and I mean total replacement.Things you should know
Existing domain has 17 years history with Google but rankings have suffered over the past year and yes we know why. (and the bitch is we paid a good sized SEO company for that ineffective and destructive work)
The URL structure of the new site is completely different and SEO friendly URL's rule. This means that there will be many thousands of historical URL's (mainly dynamic ones) that will attract 404 errors as they will not exist anymore. Most are product profile pages and the God Google has indexed them all. There are also many links to them out there.
The new site is fully SEO optimised and is passing all tests so far - however there is a way to go yet.So here are my thoughts on the possible ways of meeting our need,
1: Create 301 redirects for each an every page in the .htaccess file that would be one huge .htaccess file 50,000 lines plus - I am worried about effect on site speed.
2: Create 301 redirects for each and every unused folder, and wildcard the file names, this would be a single redirect for each file in each folder to a single redirect page
so the 404 issue is overcome but the user doesn't open the precise page they are after.
3: Write some code to create a hard copy 301 index.php file for each and every folder that is to be replaced.
4: Write code to create a hard copy 301 .php file for each and every page that is to be replaced.
5: We could just let the pages all die and list them with Google to advise of their death.
6: We could have the redirect managed by a database rather than .htaccess or single redirect files. Probably the most challenging thing will be to load the data in the first place, but I assume this could be done programatically - especially if the new URL can be inferred from the old.Many be I am missing another, simpler approach - please discuss
-
Sorry to hear of your woes.
Depending on the structure of the URLS you could create some simple pattern matches rules within .htaccess? If you could a few dozen rules could handle many thousands of redirects. If there isn't any easily identifiable pattern to match then a DB will, indeed, be your best option.
One of the web devs I used to work with (who was considerably smarter than me) faced a similar issue (with a 'mere' 10k+ redirects) and used some Ruby on Rails middleware as a redirector: This may have been the solution he used:
https://github.com/vigetlabs/redirector
I hope that helps.
I hope you're able to get this sorted without too much pain. Good Luck!
-
Thank for the very quick response - you have picked my favourite solution. It will be interesting to hear other views and comments.
-
Hi,
1. Usually won't work and with 50k extra rules in your htaccess file it will for sure slow down the site as for every request to your server it has to go through the htaccess file.
For now I would recommend going with 6. with the information that you've provided. By doing it like this you can do a very quick check on your database and also in the request have the user send to the right page.
Martijn.
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
-
Is there any benefit to changing 303 redirects to 301?
A year ago I moved my marketplace website from http to https. I implemented some design changes at the same time, and saw a huge drop in traffic that we have not recovered from. I've been searching for reasons for the organic traffic decline and have noticed that the redirects from http to https URLs are 303 redirects. There's little information available about 303 redirects but most articles say they don't pass link juice. Is it worth changing them to 301 redirects now? Are there risks in making such a change a year later, and is it likely to have any benefits for rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAdeit0 -
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 -
Best strategy to follow for a single service site
Can anyone share what they feel is the best strategy to follow for a single service site? Would you optimise and target the homepage for the primary service they offer or target a page one level lower and leave the homepage to target the Brand name? Links to any references or case studies would also be greatly appreciated, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Should I just redirect all my sites to my main site.
Hi, Over the last few years I have built many sites and own a lot of domain names. Some have high page rank some have high domain authority and some have many back links. I'm finding it very difficult to keep up with all the links and being able to provide quality content for everything. Should I just redirect everything to my one site that make the most money as all sites are for the same industry, but in different categories of that industry. So I could 301 redirect all the sites to the relevant page on my money site. Would it be a problem is 1000's if not 10,000's of links all of a sudden pointed in to one site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cibble030 -
301 redirect subdirectory to new domain
I'm planning on using 301 redirects to spin out a subdirectory of my current website to be its own separate domain. For instance, I currently have a website www.website.com and my writers write tech news at www.website.com/news. Now I want to 301 redirect www.website.com/news to www.technews.com. Will this have any negative impact on SEO? What are some steps that I can take to minimize these impacts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Bishop1 -
Organic keywords have dropped significantly in a short time period when relaunching site, but all 301 redirects are working properly.
We redesigned a site and relaunched it on the same domain. All 301 redirects were completed and are working properly. Around the same time, they fired an seo company who was published inbound links to their site on spammy directories (and this was during the same time period that Google's Hummingbird algorithm change took place). After the website relaunch, their keyword rankings fell off dramatically; and in all of our research, we're not seeing what has caused this issue. I'm not seeing any red flags in their moz reports or even in their google analytics traffic; but organic keywords are way down, and now leads from organic traffic are also way down. Help??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
301 redirect Actinic HTML pages to ASP. Achievable?
Hi - I'm hoping someone can help me resolve an issue in relation to setting up 301 redirects. The client to whom I provide SEO services is being told by his developers that setting up 301 redirects is not achievable from old HTML pages to his new site running on a Windows server. My feeling is that it should be fine, and I have found documentation online that seems to support this, however I'm no developer, certainly no server admin, so I was wondering if anyone could advise me? Is it feasible to set up 301 redirects from Actinic sites (HTML pages) to a new site in NOP commerce running on a Windows server (ASP pages). Thank you for your help! Iain
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wynyard0 -
301 Redirects After Company Acquisition
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt1