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Hey guys I need a little help with setting up a big 301. Background: It's a bit of a mess as the old site is a total mess after being online for 10 years plus. It has html and php pages, and a mod rewrite to redirect old html links to the newer php version of those pages. It's now moving to a new site and as the domain name and URL structure has changed we can't use any fancy regex and have to do a page to page redirect. There are 1500 pages to redirect. However, the old site has thousands of linking root domains, and some of these are to the old html pages (which currently redirect to the php pages) and some to the newer php pages. Question: My initial plan was to leave the mod rewrite and only redirect the php pages. That means 1500 individual redirects instead of 3000 if I individually redirect both the php and html pages. I'm not sure what's best to be honest. We don't really want multiple hops in the redirect (html>php>new site), but surely 1500 redirects is better than 3000! Does anyone have any advice on which option may be best, or even a better option? Thanks 🙂

This might be a bit of a complex question as it has many implications and I’d really appreciate some expert advice. I have a client who has one specific .gov link which is absolutely amazing. It doesn’t have any anchor text and goes straight to the homepage. However it drives quite a lot of revenue! It’s lovely as SEO’s to think of links actually driving revenue rather than assisting rankings of course. Over the last 30 days this single govt.  link has driven: 418 clicks, 61 conversions, $7,500 revenue Not bad I hear you say! J I really want to extract maximum value from this and I’ sure it would perform far better if it went to a really tightly focused landing page rather than the homepage. It really is hyper-targeted buyer traffic (as the stats show) but could perform even better in my opinion. I can’t change the link, that’s not possible unfortunately. However I can do some server side stuff to redirect traffic from just this link to a desired new page. However, what are the SEO implications of this in the opinion of some of the experts here? Obviously the link itself is valuable from an SEO perspective and I don’t want to lose that. I’m not sure how Google would treat the link if this were to be done. Also I really want to A/B test the homepage versus a landing page to ensure that it really does give an improvement. I’m not even sure how to achieve that given the difficulty in this situation. Any advice would really be useful! Thanks J