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.
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
-
Hi Moz Community,
I have a 301 redirect question...
I just acquired an old domain:
-
Totally in my niche
-
Domain is 14 years old
-
Website exists of 1000 pages
-
Great amount of backlinks
-
Website is offline since about 2 weeks
-
Will place a new website online asap with new url structure
For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages.
My question: What to do with the 950 other url's?
-
Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage?
-
Should I forward those pages to the 404 page?
-
Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones?
-
Another solution maybe?
Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible?
Thanks in advance!
-
-
Of course, you've acquired the domain and not the old site; that makes sense. If I was desperate I would consider scraping what content I could from cached versions of the site (I'd outsource that)- if there are no legal implications in doing so. If that isn't possible/feasible, I'd direct what you can to the most relevant pages where possible and take the hit. I think your plan to create matching pages for the top 50 pages is sound. Whatever you do beyond that with 301s is of limited value if you can't match the content so in that case, I'd consider saving some time and creating redirecting everything else to your home page (or product overview page, for example, if this is of greater value and has higher engagement potential).
The best you can do in each case is match as closely as you can to the content on the new site, where that isn't possible, consider the user's experience - can you deliver them to a page of interest where you can engage and potentially convert them into customers? You should always but the user's experience first, as this is what Google values most. After all, they want to do exactly the same for their customer - deliver relevant and engaging content.
Worst case, if you've captured the biggest chunk of the value with those top 50 pages, you're going to salvage some value, at least. Consider the rest a bonus.
Good luck
-
Hi, thanks for the answer.
An archive of some kind is not possible. The content itself from the old site is not ours and we can't use it.
In a perfect world with lots and lots of free time I would rewrite all 1000 pages and put a 301 on each one of them to the new page. But I don't have the resources to rewrite another 950 pages. And I know I will lose a lot of value because of this. But I want to lose as less as possible.
So my question kind of stays... What should I do with the 950 url's I do not have a specific page to redirect to? Homepage, 404, divide over the new 50 articles or something else?
-
I'd be extremely reluctant to let any of those old pages die.
I would suggest you move them across to an appropriate section of the site (possibly an archive section, for example, if the content doesn't fit in so well with your new site structure) and create 301s to all of them. (Bear in mind, you will get the best value keeping the content, URL structure, etc. as close to the original as possible to retain the highest value from the redirects - Linking to loosely matched pages is less valuable and matching to unrelated content has negligible value. Remember, the purpose of the 301 is to indicate the content you were looking for now lives somewhere else, and then seamlessly guide your visitor to it. Using it in any other way gives the visitor a poor experience and your engagement statistics will show this. How engaged users are with your content is of significant value in SEO terms.
This assumes, as you state, that the old site was a good match to your new site and there's no detriment to having the old copy in place on your new site. There's no shame in letting links to irrelevant content die - technically, you could create 410 redirects to indicate that the content has been removed, but often you'd just 301 these, too and take a hit on the PR. (https://moz.com/community/q/should-i-implement-301-redirects-vs-410-in-removing-product-pages)
Now that 301 redirects pass on 100% of PageRank, you've got even more reason to maintain the links from old to new. (Caveat: PR is not the only ranking factor, so you're still going to take a bit of a hit when you redirect, but not as much as you will if you let that content wither and die.)
Some useful reading: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
I hope that helps and good luck!
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
-
Can I use a 301 redirect to pass 'back link' juice to a different domain?
Hi, I have a backlink from a high DA/PA Government Website pointing to www.domainA.com which I own and can setup 301 redirects on if necessary. However my www.domainA.com is not used and has no active website (but has hosting available which can 301 redirect). www.domainA.com is also contextually irrelevant to the backlink. I want the Government Website link to go to www.domainB.com - which is both the relevant site and which also should be benefiting from from the seo juice from the backlink. So far I have had no luck to get the Government Website's administrators to change the URL on the link to point to www.domainB.com. Q1: If i use a 301 redirect on www.domainA.com to redirect to www.domainB.com will most of the backlink's SEO juice still be passed on to www.domainB.com? Q2: If the answer to the above is yes - would there be benefit to taking this a step further and redirect www.domainA.com to a deeper directory on www.domianB.com which is even more relevant?
Technical SEO | | DGAU
ie. redirect www.domainA.com to www.domainB.com/categoryB - passing the link juice deeper.0 -
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed. Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
Redirect root domain to www
I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below. Does anyone have a solution to this? I'm not 100% sure what to do. Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not? Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages. "Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate." Thanks
Technical SEO | | SeaDrive0 -
What should be use 301 or 302 redirection for 404 pages
Please suggest which redirection we should use for 404 pages- 301 or 302. If you can elaborate it with reason then it will be highly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | koamit0 -
302 or 301 redirect to https ?
I am redirecting whole site to https. Is there a difference between 302 or 301 redirect for seo? Site never been indexed. Planning to do that with .htaccess command RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
Technical SEO | | Kotkov
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L] There are plenty of ways http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/ssl-example-usage-in-htaccess.html Which way would be the best? Thanks is advance0 -
Is it worth setting up 301 redirects from old products to new products?
This year we are using a new supplier and they have provided us a product database of approx. 5k products. About 80% of these products were in our existing database but once we have installed the new database all the URLs will have changed. There is no quick way to match the old products with the new products so we would have to manually match all 5k products if we were were to setup 301 rules for the old products pointing to the new products. Of course this would take a lot of time. So the options are: 1. Is it worth putting in this effort to make the 301 rules? 2. Or are we okay just to delete the old product pages, let the SE see the 404 and just wait for it to index the new pages? 3. Or, as a compromise, should we 301 the old product page to the new category page as this is a lot quicker for us do do than redirecting to the new product page?
Technical SEO | | indigoclothing0 -
How long will Google take to stop crawling an old URL once it has been 301 redirected
I need to do a clean-up old urls that have been redirected in sitemap and was wondering about this.
Technical SEO | | Ant-8080 -
301 Redirect & Cloaking
HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
Technical SEO | | Artience0