Any downside to a whole bunch of 301s?
-
I'm working with a site that needs a whole bunch of old pages that were deleted 301'd to new pages.
My main goal is to capture any external links that right now go off to a 404 page and cleaning up the index. In dealing with this, I may end up 301ing pages that didn't have incoming links or may not have ever even really existed in the first place. These links are a mix of http and https.
Is there any potential downside to just 301ing a list of several hundred possible old urls that currently trigger the 404 page?
Thanks! Best... Mike
-
Hi Michael!
I recommend checking out this blog for more insight: http://searchengineland.com/how-many-301s-are-too-many-16960
The video on the blog linked above answers: Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site? How about how many redirects I can chain together?
Other things to watch out for with chained redirects:
- Avoid infinite loops.
- Browsers may also have redirect limits, and these limits can vary by browser, so multiple redirects may affect regular users in addition to Googlebot.
- Minimizing redirects can improve page speed
Hope this helps!
-
Thank you to everyone for chipping in their thoughts on this.
Logan, good article. It gave me a new idea and wanted to see what y'all thought.
If my main goal is to not have all these 404s from unpublished pages and to re-direct the incoming link value to pages that could benefit, what would you think of putting up a noindexed page that links to my top pages that I want to give greater authority to? Then, put in a request to de-index those old urls that have the noindexed (duplicate) content. That would mean not firing off a 404, just showing the same content on hundreds of noindexed/deindexed pages. Given your point about re-directs, chained re-directs and speed for mobile, would that do more for me than re-directing all of these old urls to new pages?
Compounding the problem a little, this particular site has a catalog that comes out twice a year where many product pages are constantly being unpublished. So, even if I re-directed the old unpublished pages to existing urls, some of those might be going away and need another re-direct to add to the chain shortly.
Any thoughts on this appreciated. Thanks! Best... Mike
-
301 redirects do have a significant impact on pagespeed on mobile devices since they are often connected to much less reliable networks. Varvy has a great article with more details: https://varvy.com/mobile/mobile-redirects.html
If Google has already reindexed all of your new URLs, then you don't need to worry about covering every single one of your old URLs - stick with the ones the had links pointing to them.
A good way to measure how many of your 301 redirects are being used is to append query parameters to the end of the resolving URL (ex. below) where you set the src parameter to the referring URL. This gives you some unique identifiers to apply filters to in your landing page report in Google Analytics.
/old-page >> /new-page?redir=301&src=/old-page
-
As I understand it, there is two aspects to 301 redirects.
- User experience
- Organic search
Matt Cutts says, there is no limit the number of 301 redirects, unless they are chained together. (ie. start_page > page1 > page2 > proper_page)
I don't expect it will impact on site speed much, nothing you couldn't regain with a bit of speed optimisation.
From a user perspective if you have moved an old page that has high traffic or some good quality links on it. It is very important to ensure that traffic N is back on the right page using a 301.
From organic search perspective (especially Google) again if you are using 301 is it will eventually update its own index to include the new page indicated.
There are two things you should be aware of: -
- By using a 301 from an old page, you could resurrect a bad back link
- A small amount of link authority is lost (only very small)
-
What happens when you have thousands? Is it sensible to remove 301's from say, two years ago?
-
I generally try to keep redirect lists for my clients under 100. You mentioned you had some links to 404 pages, I'd focus on those and add others as you see fit based on traffic volume to those old pages. I've never actually tested the threshold at which site speed starts to become a problem, I see some experimenting in my future!
-
Hi Logan,
Thanks for the insight. Would a few hundred re-directs be a site speed bummer for Shopify hosted site? I've worked on other sites that had decent speed and hundreds of re-directs. Firing off spitstorm of 404s on urls that used to be landing pages for links seems sub-optimal as well.
Best... Mike
-
Hi,
You should keep your 301s to a minimum. Every time a URL is requested, the server checks every single redirect you have to see if there's a match. The larger your redirect list gets, the more impact it'll have on site speed.
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
-
301s Or Stick With Canonical?
Hello all! A nice interesting one for you on this fine Friday... I have some pages which are accessible by 2 different urls - This is for user experience allowing the user to get to these pages in two different ways. To keep Google happy we have a rel canonical so that Google only sees one of these urls to avoid duplicates. After some SEO work I need to change both of these urls (on around 1,000 pages). Is the best way to do this... To 301 every old url to every new url Or... To not worry as I will just point the indexed pages to the new rel canonical? Any ideas or suggestions would be brilliant. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Changing 301s or using 302s after a relaunch?
We are doing a relaunch and changing nearly every URL. Since the list of redirects is > 5.000 we might have some mistakes we want to change later (i.e. having a 301 to a directory but finding a single page later that fits its purpose better). Can I change the 301 later and will seachengines get that? Can I use 302s for a week or two until I'm sure about my redirects and only than do propper 301s?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nabujona0 -
301s being indexed
A client website was moved about six months ago to a new domain. At the time of the move, 301 redirects were setup from the pages on the old domain to point to the same page on the new domain. New pages were setup on the old domain for a different purpose. Now almost six months later when I do a query in google on the old domain like site:example.com 80% of the pages returned are 301 redirects to the new domain. I would have expected this to go away by now. I tried removing these URLs in webmaster tools but the removal requests expire and the URLs come back. Is this something we should be concerned with?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Any downsides of (permanent)redirecting 404 pages to more generic pages(category page)
Hi, We have a site which is somewhat like e-bay, they have several categories and advertisements posted by customers/ client. These advertisements disappear over time and turn into 404 pages. We have the option to redirect the user to the corresponding category page, but we're afraid of any negative impact of this change. Are there any downsides, and is this really the best option we have? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vhendriks0 -
Redirecting thin content city pages to the state page, 404s or 301s?
I have a large number of thin content city-level pages (possibly 20,000+) that I recently removed from a site. Currently, I have it set up to send a 404 header when any of these removed city-level pages are accessed. But I'm not sending the visitor (or search engine) to a site-wide 404 page. Instead, I'm using PHP to redirect the visitor to the corresponding state-level page for that removed city-level page. Something like: if (this city page should be removed) { header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rriot
header("Location:http://example.com/state-level-page")
exit();
} Is it problematic to send a 404 header and still redirect to a category-level page like this? By doing this, I'm sending any visitors to removed pages to the next most relevant page. Does it make more sense to 301 all the removed city-level pages to the state-level page? Also, these removed city-level pages collectively have very little to none inbound links from other sites. I suspect that any inbound links to these removed pages are from low quality scraper-type sites anyway. Thanks in advance!2 -
Does duplicate content penalize the whole site or just the pages affected?
I am trying to assess the impact of duplicate content on our e-commerce site and I need to know if the duplicate content is affecting only the pages that contain the dupe content or does it affect the whole site? In Google that is. But of course. Lol
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
How to redirect whole site to home page without breaking wordpress
Hi all I had a phpprobid site which was heavily indexed but got hacked. I have deleted the old site and installed wordpress and a holding page. I can't work out how to 301 redirect all the old indexed pages to the home page without the existing wordpress redirect. Anyone care to help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RaceMedia0 -
How do you de-index and prevent indexation of a whole domain?
I have parts of an online portal displaying in SERPs which it definitely shouldn't be. It's due to thoughtless developers but I need to have the whole portal's domain de-indexed and prevented from future indexing. I'm not too tech savvy but how is this achieved? No index? Robots? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0