Removing 301 Redirects
-
Is it safe to remove old 301 Redirects from an SEO standpoint and can 301s dramatically affect seo?
Prior to switching our old domain over to our new domain, we had (and currently still do) tons of 301 redirects, because of optimizing our file names and structure.
Then our old domain was redirected to our new domain in the same redirect file.
So that being said, now that our new domain has been up and running for about 3 months, would it be safe for me to get rid of the old 301 redirects and redirect anything that was on our old domain to our new domains home page? This would clean up our redirects tremendously and I hope would help with SEO.
-
This is what I would like to do, as we do not currently sell online. We were not getting a lot lot of traffic from them. So you think it is safe to do 1 redirect from the old domain?
-
Correct, but a mass 301 redirect from all URLs on the site to the homepage will still pass PR and the pages will not 401.
The only reason I would keep them there is if there is significant traffic to internal pages that are generating revenue. For instance, if you are getting a lot of traffic from a Nike sneaker page you would want that to redirect to your new Nike sneaker page, not a homepage where they would then have to search for Nike.
-
Definitely need to keep the 301 redirects in place if there are any backlinks going to your old URL structure. Depending on your website, there could be many websites linking to the OLD URL to this day. if you remove the 301's you will lose the juice and anyone who clicks those links would now get a 404 or just go the the top level of the new domain (depending on how you have it setup)
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
-
Forced Redirects/HTTP<>HTTPS 301 Question
Hi All, Sorry for what's about to be a long-ish question, but tl;dr: Has anyone else had experience with a 301 redirect at the server level between HTTP and HTTPS versions of a site in order to maintain accurate social media share counts? This is new to me and I'm wondering how common it is. I'm having issues with this forced redirect between HTTP/HTTPS as outlined below and am struggling to find any information that will help me to troubleshoot this or better understand the situation. If anyone has any recommendations for things to try or sources to read up on, I'd appreciate it. I'm especially concerned about any issues that this may be causing at the SEO level and the known-unknowns. A magazine I work for recently relaunched after switching platforms from Atavist to Newspack (which is run via WordPress). Since then, we've been having some issues with 301s, but they relate to new stories that are native to our new platform/CMS and have had zero URL changes. We've always used HTTPS. Basically, the preview for any post we make linking to the new site, including these new (non-migrated pages) on Facebook previews as a 301 in the title and with no image. This also overrides the social media metadata we set through Yoast Premium. I ran some of the links through the Facebook debugger and it appears that Facebook is reading these links to our site (using https) as redirects to http that then redirect to https. I was told by our tech support person on Newspack's team that this is intentional, so that Facebook will maintain accurate share counts versus separate share counts for http/https, however this forced redirect seems to be failing if we can't post our links with any metadata. (The only way to reliably fix is by adding a query parameter to each URL which, obviously, still gives us inaccurate share counts.) This is the first time I've encountered this intentional redirect thing and I've asked a few times for more information about how it's set up just for my own edification, but all I can get is that it’s something managed at the server level and is designed to prevent separate share counts for HTTP and HTTPS. Has anyone encountered this method before, and can anyone either explain it to me or point me in the direction of a resource where I can learn more about how it's configured as well as the pros and cons? I'm especially concerned about our SEO with this and how this may impact the way search engines read our site. So far, nothing's come up on scans, but I'd like to stay one step ahead of this. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | ogiovetti0 -
301 Redirect Review Nodes
I have a client who rents out vacation beach rentals. They currently have thousands of homes under management. Each property has its own internal reviewing platform. Reviews are not really intended to be viewed on their own, as in a stand alone page with just the review on it. The problem is that Drupal makes just about every type of node viewable on its own dedicated URL. I was just thinking about taking request to view stand alone reviews and 301’ing them to their respective property page, the context in which they are intended to be viewed. The website has about 2500 review nodes currently crawlable via Drupal that sit on their own URLs. Would there be a material impact to 301 them to their respective property page when any attempt to view them on their own is made to the site?
Technical SEO | | conversionpipeline20 -
URL Redirect
Hi All, So we have employees who can own their own domains for business, however, one employee has a domain that links back to our main site, but when it does, the URL and Page title of our main site, still say his own domain. IE: www.johndoe.com links to www.mysite.com except the url and itle still say www.johndoe.com What are the implications of this? Thank you
Technical SEO | | PeteEllard0 -
Panda Cleanup - Removing Old Blog Posts, Let Them 404 or 301 to Main Blog Page?
tl;dr... Removing old blog posts that may be affected by Panda, should we let them 404 or 301 to the Blog? We have been managing a corporate blog since 2011. The content is OK but we've recently hired a new blogger who is doing an outstanding job, creating content that is very useful to site visitors and is just on a higher level than what we've had previously. The old posts mostly have no comments and don't get much user engagement. I know Google recommends creating great new content rather than removing old content due to Panda concerns but I'm confident we're doing the former and I still want to purge the old stuff that's not doing anyone any good. So let's just pretend we're being dinged by Panda for having a large amount of content that doesn't get much user engagement (not sure if that's actually the case, rankings remain good though we have been passed on a couple key rankings recently). I've gone through Analytics and noted any blog posts that have generated at least 1 lead or had at least 20 unique visits all time. I think that's a pretty low barrier and everything else really can be safely removed. So for the remaining posts (I'm guessing there are hundreds of them but haven't compiled the specific list yet), should we just let them 404 or do we 301 redirect them to the main blog page? The underlying question is, if our primary purpose is cleaning things up for Panda specifically, does placing a 301 make sense or would Google see those "low quality" pages being redirected to a new place and pass on some of that "low quality" signal to the new page? Is it better for that content just to go away completely (404)?
Technical SEO | | eBoost-Consulting0 -
Sudden drop in Rankings after 301 redirect
Greetings to Moz Community. Couple of months back, I have redirected my old blog to a new URL with 301 redirect because of spammy links pointed to my old blog. I have transfer all the posts manually, changed the permalink structure and 301 redirected every individual URL. All the ranking were boosted within couple of weeks and regained the traffic. After a month I have observed, the links pointed to old site are showing up in Webmaster Tools for the new domain. I was shocked (no previous experience) and again Disavowed all links. Today, all the positions went down for new domain. My questions are: 1. Did the Disavow tool worked this time with new domain? All the links pointed to old domain were devaluated? Is this the reason for ranking drop? Or 2. 301 Old domain with Unnatural links causes the issue? 3. Removing 301 will help to regain few keyword positions? I'm taking this as a case study. Already removed the 301 redirect. Looking for solid discussion.Thanks.
Technical SEO | | praveen4390 -
301 Redirect
Hi there, We are re-branding & re-structuring our website, there will be quite a number of 301 re-directs, possibly hundreds. The question is: Should i wait until the re-branding has been completed and do al the 301's in one go?, or should I try and do 301's as i go along? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
What are the impact of doing URL Rewriting instead of 301 redirections whille optimizing a blog?
In WordPress, with the ALL In ONE SEO pluggingm we've optimze the permalinks to show more keewords in the URL'. What can be the impact?
Technical SEO | | webit400 -
Rel - canonical vs 301 redirect
I have multiple product pages on my site - what is better for rankings in your experiance? If I 301 the pages to 1 correct version of the product page - or if I rel caanonical to the one correct page?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610