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.
301 redirect from .html to non .html?
-
Previously our site was using this as our URL structure: www.site.com/page.html. A few months ago we updated our URL structure to this: www.site.com/page & we're not using the .html.
I've read over this guide & don't see anywhere that discusses this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection.
I've currently got a programmer looking into, but am always a bit weary with their workarounds, as I'd previously had them cause more problems then fix it. Here is the solution he is looking to do:
The way that I am doing the redirect is fine. The problem is of where to put the code. The issue is that the files are .html files that need to be redirected to the same url with out a .html on them. I can see if I can add that to the 404 redirect page if there is one inside of there and see if that does the trick. That way if there is no page that exists without the .html then it will still be a 404 page. However if it is there then it will work as normal. I will see what I can find and get back.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
BJ
-
Sha,
I wanted to send a quick update & see if we're on the right track? After implementing this 301 redirect, I'm seeing a few negatives, but also a few positives & would appreciate your feedback:
Concerns:
-
Google Organic Traffic has dropped by 26.65% since we implemented the redirect (12 Days).
-
Top Content Pages From Search Traffic has dropped from a weekly average of 1,500 pages to 998. I've segmented the Analytics to see if I had more or less pages that were driving traffic to my site (Organic Only).
Positives:
-
Bing Organic Traffic is up 32.15% although not substantial for our overall traffic, but it has increased.
-
Yahoo Organic Traffic is up 26.53% less traffic than Bing, so not substantial.
-
Webmaster Tools Pages crawled per day: http://screencast.com/t/krkD69bj3mG we've had a huge spike, which I'm assuming is a good thing & a direct correlation to the 301 redirect.
All this being said, are we on the right track? The initial traffic loss had me worried, but after seeing the crawl stats it gave me hope? Do i just need to be more patient to see this through? Are we missing anything, or is this what you would expect?
Thanks,
BJ
-
-
Happy to help
If you strike any issues let me know.
Sha
-
Thanks for all the help Sha! We'll play with the example code that you'd sent & see what we can come up with. After a few weeks I'll continue to watch our organic rankings & see how it affects us overall.
Thanks,
BJ
-
Not having seen the code your programmer intends to use, that is not possible to say definitively. That is why we built the test for you, so that you can see the code.
If you take a look at the code you will see that the Rule is writing 301 redirects if the conditions are met.
A .htaccess file is read from top to bottom. The first condition matched will be the one used.
Basically, you have one set of files on your server, all of which have the extension .html.
When a request is made, you are asking the server to load the .html file in the browser, but rewrite a "pretty URL" for the user to see in the Address Bar.
So, there are three possible scenarios for a request:
- the user requests /page.html (server loads.html and rewrites the URL to /page)
- the user requests /page (server 301 redirects request to /page.html, loads it in the browser and rewrites the URL to /page)
- the user requests a page that does not exist on the server (server 301 redirects the page to /404.html, loads it and rewrites the URL to /404)
Personally, I would not be going out of my way to rewrite simple URL's just to remove the .html extension, but that is your choice, and I am assuming there is more to it and you had some good reason for doing this in the first place.
The one thing you need to be cautious of in making these types of decisions is that chopping and changing from one thing to another and back again is not a great idea. A 301 redirect should really only be used when you are sure that you want to make a permanent change.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
My fear with this approach is how the search engines will handle the redirect? I know that from the users perspective this should work, but I've never read any articles that even resemble this type of approach.
Do you believe that this method will pass the value along in the search engines & treat it as a proper 301 redirect.
Thanks,
BJ
-
Hi BJ,
From the information you included here it seems your programmer's approach is sound.
We made a demo for you with a working test and example code for the .htaccess so that you can check that it will achieve your aim in any likely scenario.
Take a look at 301 Redirect and URL Rewrite Example
Hope that helps,
Sha
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
-
How to handle potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following a major site replacement
We are looking for the very best way of handling potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeezerG
a major site replacement and I mean total replacement. Things you should know
Existing domain has 17 years history with Google but rankings have suffered over the past year and yes we know why. (and the bitch is we paid a good sized SEO company for that ineffective and destructive work)
The URL structure of the new site is completely different and SEO friendly URL's rule. This means that there will be many thousands of historical URL's (mainly dynamic ones) that will attract 404 errors as they will not exist anymore. Most are product profile pages and the God Google has indexed them all. There are also many links to them out there.
The new site is fully SEO optimised and is passing all tests so far - however there is a way to go yet. So here are my thoughts on the possible ways of meeting our need,
1: Create 301 redirects for each an every page in the .htaccess file that would be one huge .htaccess file 50,000 lines plus - I am worried about effect on site speed.
2: Create 301 redirects for each and every unused folder, and wildcard the file names, this would be a single redirect for each file in each folder to a single redirect page
so the 404 issue is overcome but the user doesn't open the precise page they are after.
3: Write some code to create a hard copy 301 index.php file for each and every folder that is to be replaced.
4: Write code to create a hard copy 301 .php file for each and every page that is to be replaced.
5: We could just let the pages all die and list them with Google to advise of their death.
6: We could have the redirect managed by a database rather than .htaccess or single redirect files. Probably the most challenging thing will be to load the data in the first place, but I assume this could be done programatically - especially if the new URL can be inferred from the old. Many be I am missing another, simpler approach - please discuss0 -
Hacked website - Dealing with 301 redirects and a large .htaccess file
One of my client's websites was recently hacked and I've been dealing with the after effects of it. The website is now clean of malware and I already appealed to Google about the malware issue. The current issue I have is dealing with the 20, 000+ crawl errors which are garbage links that were created from the hacking. How does one go about dealing with all the 301 redirects I need to create for all the 404 crawl errors? I'm already noticing an increased load time on the website due to having a rather large .htaccess file with a couple thousand 301 redirects done already which I fear will result in my client's website performance and SEO performance taking a hit as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK0 -
Setting up 301 Redirects after acquisition?
Hello! The company that I work for has recently acquired two other companies. I was wondering what the best strategy would be as it relates to redirects / authority. Please help! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colin.Accela0 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
301 redirect subdirectory to new domain
I'm planning on using 301 redirects to spin out a subdirectory of my current website to be its own separate domain. For instance, I currently have a website www.website.com and my writers write tech news at www.website.com/news. Now I want to 301 redirect www.website.com/news to www.technews.com. Will this have any negative impact on SEO? What are some steps that I can take to minimize these impacts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Bishop1 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Should I redirect my xml sitemap?
Hi Mozzers, We have recently rebranded with a new company name, and of course this necessitated us to relaunch our entire website onto a new domain. I watched the Moz video on how they changed domain, copying what they did pretty much to the letter. (Thank you, Moz for sharing this with the community!) It has gone incredibly smoothly. I told all my bosses that we may see a 40% reduction in traffic / conversions in the short term. In the event (and its still very early days) we have in fact seen a 15% increase in traffic and our new website is converting better than before so an all-round success! I was just wondering if you thought I should redirect my XML sitemap as well? So far I haven't, but despite us doing the change of address thing in webmaster tools, I can see Google processed the old sitemap xml after we did the change of address etc. What do you think? I know we've been very lucky with the outcome of this rebrand but I don't want to rest on my laurels or get tripped up later down the line. Thanks everyone! Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0