Reversing 301 Re-Directs
-
What's your philosophy on reversing 301 redirects? Does it depend on how long the redirect has been in place? Is it okay to implement a 301 redirect and remove it if the desired results aren't achieved?
Also, what about multiple 301 redirects and removing those? I'm working with a site that has several 301 redirects in place and there's no definite knowledge as to when these were placed. I know there's always a danger and the possibility of unintended results when moving these around. I'm just curious as to what others' experience has been with placing and removing these either within a short period of time or over the course of as much as a year.
Thanks in advance!
-
301 redirects can easily be reversed as needed. Think of it as call forwarding. You can cancel call forwarding or even re-forward a number.
Depending on the importance (i.e. PR) of the particular page which is being redirected, search engines may update their records in 1 hour or it may take several weeks. Sometimes the redirect goes smoothly, and other times there could be some bounce experienced, but things should settle in after a month.
301 redirects are a very natural part of the internet. Search engines are designed to handle them well.
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
-
Can 301 redirects that are inaccurate cause Google suppressions on rankings?
In an interesting study by DeganSEO titled 'Negative Impact of 301 Redirects - A Case Study' a drop of rankings was observed when popular blog posts were redirected to product pages. One hypothesis is that the suppression is due to topical difference between the redirected pages (blog posts) and the target page. The topical difference issue is an interesting one when you consider it in the context of website migrations. We always recommend that 301 redirects are done at a page level and that if an equivalent page doesn't exist to just 301 anyway but to the most logical page. If you think about it Google are likely to frown on this because a) it's not a good experience for the user - 404 would be more accurate for them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QubaSEO
b) it's lazy - if you have good content that has gained authority/trust then create the same content on the new site don't trytp pass that to an entirely different page. Thoughts? Experiences?0 -
Will I lose traffic from Google for re-directing a page?
I’m currently planning to a retire a discontinued product and put a 301 redirect to a related product (although not identical). The thing is, I’m still getting significant traffic from people searching for the old product by name. Would Google send this traffic to the new pages via the re-direct? Is Google likely to display the new page in place of the old page for similar queries or will it serve other content? I’d like to answer this question so that I can decide between the two following approaches: 1) Retiring the old page immediately and putting a 301 redirect to the new related pages. This will have the advantage of transferring the value of any link signals / referring traffic. Traffic will also land on the new pages directly without having to click through from another page. We would have a dynamic message telling users that the old product had been retired depending on whether they had visited out site before. 2) Keep the old product pages temporarily so that we don’t lose the traffic from the search engines. We would then change the old pages to advise users that the old product was now retired, but that we have other products that might solve their problems. When this organic traffic decreases over time, then we will proceed with the re-direct as above. I am worried though that the old product pages might outrank the new product pages. I’d really appreciate some advice with this. I’ve been reading lots of articles, but it seems like there are different opinions on this. I understand that I will lose between 10% - 15% of page rank as per the Matt Cutts video.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
301 from one site to another
I have two e-commerce websites and i'm going to remove some products from website as requested by a supplier and sell them only on one site. Is it a good idea to 301 redirect the pages from site 1 to site 2?? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Mass 301 redirect from a sub-domain - using Joomla or htaccess
How is best to mass redirect old domains - Listing the URL's in htaccess? We are looking to use Joomla as a CMS - transferring a blog from a sub-domain to the main site and want to 301 all the sub domain blog posts - any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect
Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
How do I 301 Redirect a complete folder?
Hi, I am want to delete a folder and all the contents. I then need to redirect anyone that is trying to reach a file in that folder to another page on my site. example: www.mydomain.com/folder/ (contains 50 pages) I want to delete the folder and all 50 pages. So if someone tries to reach www.mydomain.com/folder/page1.php the redirect would take them to a specific page on my site. Doing this to clean up old content. How would I do this on the .htaccess? I have redirected a page but not a folder. Thanks in advance! Force7
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Force70 -
301 vs Changing Link href
We have changed our company and want to 301 old domain from new domain in order to transfer the benefits of backlinks (DA: 50, 115 Linking Root Domains). I have the ability to modify around 50% of the backlinks. So my question is: Instead of redirecting all the links, should I update the 50% to link to the new domain instead of relying on redirects? Would this possibly trip an algorithmic filter and devalue these links? Or should I just do a 301 and not worry about modifying the links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice0 -
301 - do i change old links once 301 is in place?
Hey all, I'm about to setup a 301 on a website that has pretty good SEO rankings and I have the ability to change all the old inbound links that point to the old site, to the new site - should I leave them pointing to the old site that has the 301 on it or change all the old inbound links to the new domain name? Which has better SEO value? Thanks for helping, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0