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.
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
-
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
-
Yes, that makes perfect sense! That's exactly what I was looking for.
I will make the old content a draft and utilize it some place else.
Thank you!
-
Not really correct, unfortunately. As long as the 301 redirect has been written properly (it should be at the system level, not written into individual page code like a JavaScript redirect) then any request to the server for the page will be redirected before the old page can be reached. That's the express purpose of a 301-redirect.
So anyone clicking on an external link to the old URL (or a search crawler following it) will immediately be redirected to the new page as soon as they hit the server, whether the old page still exists or not.
-
As long as the correct 301-redirect is in place, there's no SEO benefit to keeping the original page, as it can never be reached. That's the whole point of a 301-redirect.
For content management purposes, you might find it useful to keep the old posts around in draft form in case you want to use them as a basis for writing a new post/faq, but there's no reason to keep them available otherwise.
Hope that makes sense?
Paul
-
I would leave it.
If there is a link to the old page somewhere, you'll get a 404 instead of 301 if you trash it. I'm talking about external links, I guess you've taken care of the internal ones.If you delete the page any direct or referral traffic to that page will result in 404 instead of 301.
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
-
My old URL's are still indexing when I have redirected all of them, why is this happening?
I have built a new website and have redirected all my old URL's to their new ones but for some reason Google is still indexing the old URL's. Also, the page authority for all of my pages has dropped to 1 (apart from the homepage) but before they were between 12 to 15. Can anyone help me with this?
Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
Redirecting old Sitemaps to a new XML
I've discovered a ton of 404s from Google's WMT crawler looking for mydomain.com/sitemap_archive_MONTH_YEAR. There are tons of these monthly archive xmls. I've used a plugin that for some reason created individual monthly archive xml sitemaps and now I get 404s. Creating rules for each archive seems a bad solution. My current sitemap plugin creates a single clean one mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. How can I create a redirect rule in the Redirection WP plugin that will redirect any URL that has the 'sitemap' and 'xml' string in it to my current xml sitemap? I've tried using a wildcard like so: mysite.com/sitemap*.*, mysite.com/sitemap ., mysite.com/sitemap(.), mysite.com/sitemap (.) but none of the wildcard uses got the general redirect to work. Is there a way to make this happen with the WP Redirection plugin? If not, is there a htaccess rule, and what would the code be for it? Im not very fluent with using general redirects in htaccess unfortunately. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Creating a CSV file for uploading 301 redirect URL map
Hi if i'm bulk uploading 301 redirects whats needed to create a csv file? is it just a case of creating an excel spreadsheet & have the old urls in column A and new urls in column B and then just convert to csv and upload ? or do i need to put in other details or paremeters etc etc ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TroyW0 -
How do I fix a 301 Redirect Loop?
Saturday I waas doing some correcting of some duplicate titles, including nofollowing tags, etc. (my main problem was duplicate titles due to tags and categories being indexed). Now this morning I see that one of my pages refuses to load, citing a 301 redirect loop. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/feeding/switching-baby-formula/ Originally, the page was posted under the wrong category. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/uncategorized/switching-baby-formula I resaved it under the correct category (feeding) and now it won't load. Can someone help me figure out how to correct this mess? Thanks so much Heather
Technical SEO | | Gotmoxie0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
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