301 Redirection of entire section to the homepage

[nyakim]

Hi Guys,

So here's the deal.

Let's say I have a site at mysite.com/ which talks about tomatoes, and I also have a subsection that talks about potatoes at mysite.com/potatoes

I want to stop providing information about potatoes altogether so i'm thinking about doing a 301 redirection from all of the pages at mysite.com/potatoes(.*) to the home page.

The thing is, mysite.com/potatoes actually has a great page authority (3475 links from 145 domains) so I really don't wan to lose all that juice...

Here are my questions:

• Will the links be added to the ones i have for the homepage already?
• Since my home page and my /potatoes section ranked for 2 different subjects, how is this transfer going to affect my rankings for the homepage? will it now also rank for both tomatoes AND potatoes?
• How much time does it usually take for google to recognize the 301 and pass the link juice?
• Any other tips on optimizing this process?

Thank you for your time!

-francois

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Francois,

I'm looking at older questions that are still unanswered, and wondering if you're still looking for advice, or if you took some action here. Really interested to hear what happened with this site!

[EGOL]

The thing is, mysite.com/potatoes actually has a great page authority (3475 links from 145 domains) so I really don't wan to lose all that juice...

Dude, are you sure that you want to dump these??...   You are almost the King of Potatoes

If this was my site I would be hesitant about dumping these pages with tons of links.  I would do analytics to see how much traffic they are bringing and also using adsense channels (or other channeling) determine how much money they are making.  You might want to post once a month on this topic.  You can always keep these pages and use lots of nice thumbnail images of tomatoes to lure visitors over to your tomato pages. And reduce the number of links on your site that lead visitors to the potato pages. That big collection of tomato links will also pump some of the linkjuice over to your tomato pages.  Not as good as a redirect but still preserves the linkvalue that contributes to the authority of your domain.

[RyanKent]

Using your example, the problem is that the sites linking to your potato pages are clearly looking for pages about potatoes. If you stop offering information on that subject then everyone who clicks an existing link and finds themselves on your tomato page will be disappointed. You will suffer a high bounce rate which will send Google a signal something is wrong.

As users report back that the "potato" link is no longer valid or helpful, many of those sites will pull their links. Based on the numbers you are averaging about 25 links per site. Are many of these links from a footer that is site wide?

You are attempting to manipulate the system. Google is a multi-billion dollar company. It can't be too hard for them to figure out that a bunch of links for "potatoes" going to a page that doesn't use the word "potato" on it is an indicator that something is wrong.

If you have any related "potato" pages on your site, then redirecting users to that page is a win for everyone. If your site no longer has any helpful information, then a 404 page built for users interested in that topic would most helpful.

How much time does it usually take for google to recognize the 301 and pass the link juice?

It depends on your site's popularity and the traffic for the pages involved. Between a day and a month.