URL 301 Re-direct
-
Hello,
If we publish a blog post with a url which accidentally contains a number at the end (blog.companyname.com/subject-title-0), is it best-practice to update the URL (e.g. to blog.companyname.com/subject-title) and put in a 301 re-direct from the old to the new one or should it simply be left as is?
I've read that 301's lose link equity and relevance so is it really worth re-directing for the sake of a cleaner url?
Thanks for your input!
John
-
Thankyou Soo Much. Great Post
-
Great - thanks for taking the time to respond Roman with this insightful post
-
Well, the post that you are using as a reference makes sense if you have a website running and one of your pages is getting traffic and you don't know how to deal with a URL error.
- If your page is ranking on the first page of SERP
- you have 100 backlinks pointing to your page
- 2000 user coming every day.
Well, in that case, you will need to evaluate which tactics can give you a better result.
- Option - 1 Keep the URL as its right now.
- Option - 2 Replace it with a new one.
You will need to know if your new URL will help to rank for new keywords or put you in a better place in the SERP, also how is performing your competition for that specific keyword, what about the anchor text of your external and internal links.
So you make an analysis to see it is worth the risk. Usually SEO expert deal with URL updates adding value to the page, adding content, graphics, images, text. But as I see that is not your case
In the other hands, if you have just an article, I mean a simple article with a few visitors. Probably you want to rank it, but it has no external links, no traffic at all or insignificant traffic and has a low DA. Well, in that case, forget what I told and simple change the URL and stop worrying about it
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
-
Changing site URL structure
Hey everybody, I'm looking for a bit of advice. A few weeks ago Google sent me an email saying all pages with any text input on them need to switch to https for those pages. This is no problem, I was slowly switching the site to https anyway using a 301 redirect. However, my site also has a language subfolder in the url, mysite.com/en/ mysite.com/ru/ etc. Due to poor work on my part the translations of the site haven't been updated in a long time and lots of the pages are in english even on the russian version etc. So I'm thinking of just removing this url structure and just having mysite.com My plan is to 301 all requests to https and remove the language subfolder in the url at the same time. So far the https switching hasn't changed my rankings. Am I more at risk of losing my rankings by doing this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ruhol0 -
Our homepage url has been 301'd to the new https version - as our MD wanted us to have the secure protocol
Hello Mozers I'm just checking whether it is good practice to 301 the main homepage url to its https version. Will this have any detrimental effect on ranking and DA?
Technical SEO | | Catherine_Selectaglaze0 -
301 for a Very Long URL
Hey gang, Thanks ahead of time for the help. I have a url somehow that is very very long: http://www.colbysphotography.com/wedding-caterers-knoxville-east-tennessee/Here is an extensive list of wedding venues in the Knoxville and East Tennessee region. If you find that any of these links are not working, that the venues are no longer in business, or have a suggestion for an additional venue (at no charge), please contact Colby. Colby's Photography works hard on keeping this list helpful. I have tried Yoast Premium on a wordpress site to redirect the url but it doesn't seem to keep. I've tried a few other redirect plugins with not help either. I would love some suggestions on this one! Colby
Technical SEO | | littlecolby0 -
Why are my URL's changing
My rankings suddenly dropped and when trying to understand why I realized that nearly all images in Google's cached version of my site were missing. In the actual site they appear but in the cached version they don't. I noticed that most of the images had a ?6b5830 at the end of the URL and these were the images that were not showing. I am hoping that I found the reason for the drop in rankings. Maybe since Google cannot see a lot of the content it decided not to rank it as well (particularly since it seems to happen on thousands of pages). This is a cached version of my site I am using the following plugins that might be causing it: Yoasts SEO plugin, W3 total cache. Does anyone know what is causing ?6b5830 to be added to the end of most of my URL's? Could this be the reason for the ranking drop? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
301 redirects and seo..
I bought a domain and it has nice traffic. It only has about 5 main pages in php When i got the site i switched to html because php was overkill. I did the 301 and google deleted the php files and replaced with html version when i check site:domain.com It has been about 7 days. I DID NOT use 301 for each of the 5 pages to go php to html instead is used this code RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | samerk
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com
RewriteRule (.) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RedirectMatch 301 (.).php$ http://www.mydomain.com$1.html So basically if you load php it will load the html version. dog.php > dog.html Is this OKAY? or should it be done differently.... worried! Thanks !0 -
301 Re-direct as referral traffic
So we have this site set up in analytics as www.domain.com and then analytics is showing the referral traffic as coming from domain.com and I just wanted to make sure I'm right in the theory that Google is counting the 301 as a different site and showing what is otherwise direct traffic as traffic coming from domain.com. If that's wrong let me know. Otherwise I'll just go through with that theory since no one on any forums that I could find had an answer to it.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0 -
301 Redirecting weird URLs with % in them
I've been working on redirecting links reported as 404 in Google webmaster tools. I've stumbled upon 41 URLs that Google is reporting as 404 that include a '%' in the URL, but I don't know how to redirect. Here is an example: URL: bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ Attempted redirect: redirect 301 /bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ http://www.mysite.com/ Unfortunately, after implementing the redirect, http://www.mysite.com/bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ still resolves a 404 error. Anyone successfully fix these errors using Apache .htaccess?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
Should I change a 301 redirect?
I recently moved all the content from an old site to a new site on a new domain. I lost a significant amount of traffic as a result. There are 301 redirects for every page on the old site. Generally, these point to the same content as was on the relevant page of the old site. However, the 301 redirect for the homepage on the old site points to the homepage on the new site, not to the content from the old site homepage. I'm wondering whether to change the 301 to point at the content from the old site homepage. Any advice would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | seqal0