How do I clean up this 301 disaster?
-
I launched my site, InternetCE.com, and blog, www.continuingeducationjournal.com, a few years ago.
I then learned I should probably merge the content, and foolishly created a subdomain, http://blog.internetce.com, and 301 redirected the blog to it. As an aside, my site is on a microsoft server, thus cannot host my wordpress blog on it.
After a bit more study, I realized that my blog wasn't helping me nearly as much as it could be, so I 301'd it again to http://internetce.com/blog.
In just becoming a pro member (long overdue) I realize that my entire site needs to be 301'd to merge non-www and www versions.
I read somewhere that mr. cutts says not to 301 more than twice for fear of mistakenly being construed as something a bit to spammy.
So, here I sit..not sure what to do.
Does anyone have any advice on how to most efficiently correct this spaghetti bowl?
Many thanks!
-
I completely agree with what Ryan Kent said. As with a lot of things, and even though it is a bit messy, if you are doing things for genuine reasons you are probably OK. If all of the redirected sites are pointing to where the content should be and now resides that is going to be OK, just make sure that you leave the 301's up there for a good amount of time (6 months or more).
-
i agree with Ryan your problem is not so great, just replace all teh 301's to the new site in one hop, dont be lazy and 301 all to the home page, as Bing for one will dismiss them.
also if the pages have no links, then there is little to gain by 301ing them.
As for hosting word press on a Microsoft server, you certainly can. if you use the Web Platform Installer it will do it all for you.
-
Hi Aaron.
Your situation is a bit messy, but actually it's not so bad.
Step 1 - implement a site wide www to non-www redirect (or vice-versa) on your InternetCE.com site.
Step 2 - update your 301 from the original site, www.continuingeducationjournal.com, to ensure the redirect happens in 1 hop.
Step 3 - update your 301 redirect from the blog subdomain (http://blog.internetce.com) to ensure the redirect happens in 1 hop.
Whenever possible all redirects should be a single hop. If a user bounces from your old blog to your subdomain, to your main domain but as www then to your main domain's root that would be 3 hops and a lot of PR would be wasted in the process.
The most popular pages should update within search engines in a couple days, while the least popular pages may take a month.
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
-
301 or 404 old Event pages
I have a site that lists events and then removes them from the site once the date and event has passed. Is it best to let the old event page 404 or 301 back up to a subfolder that lists the current events?
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Getting a Vanity (Clean) URL indexed
Hello, I have a vanity (clean looking) URL that 302 redirects to the ugly version. So in other words http://www.site.com/url 302 >>> http://www.site.com/directory/directory/url.aspx What I'm trying to do is get the clean version to show up in search. However, for some reason Google only indexes the ugly version. cache:http://www.site.com/directory/directory/url.aspx is showing the ugly URL as cached and cache:http://www.site.com/url is showing not cached at all. Is there some way to force Google to index the clean version? Fetch as Google for the clean URL only returns a redirect status and canonicalizing the ugly to the clean would seem to send a strange message because of the redirect back to the ugly. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Digi12340 -
Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?
Hi all, I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time. I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site. I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take. Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
301 Redirect
Hello, On the 26.2.13 we changed domain names having followed the guidance of both Matt Cutts Youtube videos and googles own online documentation. We have a 301 redirect in place from our old domain ukmotorhomehirerental.com to our new site leisurerentalsdirect.com on a page to page basis. The site structure has not been altered in anyway. Google has been informed of the change of address. After the change the new domain transition was pretty seamless and ranked in the same postion in the SERPsThe one thing I've not done yet is tell all the webmasters who link to the old site that the address has changed (could this be it?)
Technical SEO | | Badapplemedia0 -
301 redirect or maual edit of new urls
Hello forum! I will get right to the point,I have a 4 year old PR4 site with lots of links (vacation rentals marketplace, like Homeaway), In about a month from now new CMS will be ready and I will be doing redesign of the site. The problem that I have is (as many of you can guess) losing all the old links that rank high = losing traffic / revenue. Two posiblle solutions here: 1. 301 redirect for each page that ranks high - point it to new url 2. Manually editing new urls created by new CMS and making them to be the same as old ones. This means that some number of urls (the ones that rank high and generate traffic) would be exactly the same while other ones would be generated by CMS thus dufferent in many ways (unicode,different keywords etc.) What would You do here? I am more for 301 redirect but I read all kinds of horror stories in drop of SERP. Thank You for help and advices in advance.
Technical SEO | | Gregos0 -
Delete 301 redirected pages from server after redirect is in place?
Should I remove the redirected old pages from my site after the redirects are in place? Google is hating the redirects and we have tanked. I did over 50 redirects this week, consolidating content and making one great page our of 3-10 pages with very little content per page. But the old pages are still visible to google's bot. Also, I have not put a rel canonical to itself on the new pages. Is that necessary? Thanks! Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
Quick Seo question regarding 301 redirect
Hi everyone and thank you for showing interested in my problem and for helping me out with this easy thing i have going on Here is how it puts out : I have 2 websites, same niche, mostly same keywords. Site #1 holding strong on google #2 ranking for months now. Site #2 was holding strong in google top 10 rankings until 2 weeks ago when it got sandboxed for some reason I want to use a 301 permanent redirect from Site #2 to Site #1 to pass all the link juice onto Site #1 and hopefully beat the #1 spot The question: Will this affect Site #1 is anyway, considering Site #2 is in somehow sandbox ( i assume that, since he dropped more then 70 positions over night ) Is thins a good think to do or i risk damaging Site #1 by doing this ? Thanks allot in advance. Best regards,
Technical SEO | | caw_ro
Trinca Alexandru0 -
301 & backlinks
Apologies if my question sounds like a school Maths lesson 😉 If you have 2 sites: Site 1) is linked to by sites A,B & C Site 2) is linked to by sites X,Y & Z You then 301 redirect site 2 to site 1. Most of the juice from site 2 (obtained from links X,Y,Z) should be passed over to site 1. But what if site 2 is linked to by the same sites A,B,C as site 1 instead of X,Y,Z. Since both sites have exactly the same links will the same, less, or any weight be passed over by the 301 redirect? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | martyc1