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
-
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 -
A Really Specific Question about 301 Redirect Strategies
Hi there: As part of a site redesign project, we've been doing a lot of 301 redirects, as we retire old URLs or rename them. My question is: is it necessary to redirect ALL old URLS? What about URLs with no links and low authority? Are these really necessary to redirect, since they're not referenced on the web and there's obviously a global redirect happening at the level of the root domain? Just curious; I'm not sure I've ever really understood this...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
ECommerce website with link to manufactures site for ordering - Should these links be follow or no follow?
Dear Mozzers, I have a couple of questions regarding link juice and whether I should have do follow or no follow links ? We have an affiliate eCommerce website and on our product pages we have a "Order online " button which will go our subdomain on the manufactures site in order for the user to complete the online ordering process So it's - www.ourcompany.co.uk - "Order Online Button" - www.manufactuer.ourcompany.co.uk Should this " Order online Button" be a Follow or No Follow link ? I ask this as currently from looking at Majestic seo , these "order online " buttons on my product pages seems to be Follow links so am I losing potential link juice by sending it externally ? Am I correct in assuming by changing it to be no follows, I would increase the link juice going elsewhere internally? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
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 -
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 -
How important is having a 301 redirect?
Is having a 301 redirect a must for rankings when it comes to the www and non-www version of a site? I am on the bottom of page 1 for my main key phrases but I can't do a 301 redirect with my web host that I've been with for over a year. I've been considering changing web host (currently with Yahoo) but I also have concerns about transferring the site and the impact it might have because of the changing ip address. So my options are Stay Put Change Web host Which would you recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
301 redirects from old to new pages whit a lot of changes
Hello all, We are going to restyle and change CMS so all the urls will change. We are also updating content, adding much more content to the old pages trying to be more user and SEO friendly. My doubt is about doing 301 redirects from old to new pages when the content has changed a lot. Does it will mantain the ranking of the page or will crawlers thought that is a total diferent page. For example: one page new page will change from the old one the url, title, headers, meta description, content text and images. Should i maintain old content and do the CMS change with the 301 redirects and later change the content, that means a lot of work, or do it all at once? Thanks in advance Tomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomas.guemes0 -
301 Redirect - How Long Until Recovery?
How long after one moves a page and sets up the 301s should the site take to regain its previous rankings? Context: i've ported a site to a new framework. Along the way, several high ranked pages needed to have new URLs setup, as well as the site moved from www.domain.com to simply domain.com. About 1 week after the change, the site's traffic went down 70% and has been there for about another 2 weeks. I suppose it could be something about the new framework that is causing problems though according to SEOMoz tools, the new framework is checking out pretty well. I assume the problem is reconciling all those old www inbound links with the new non-www location. It is all 301'd however ... so it should be working, but is not. So my questions are: 1. How long should it take Google to reconcile these changes and put us back to original SERP positions 2. is there something inherently problematic with switching from www to non-www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NealCabage0