Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Is it worth setting up 301 redirects from old products to new products?

    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.

    Is it worth setting up 301 redirects from old products to new products?

    Technical SEO
    4
    6
    1359
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • indigoclothing
      indigoclothing last edited by

      This year we are using a new supplier and they have provided us a product database of approx. 5k products. About 80% of these products were in our existing database but once we have installed the new database all the URLs will have changed.

      There is no quick way to match the old products with the new products so we would have to manually match all 5k products if we were were to setup 301 rules for the old products pointing to the new products. Of course this would take a lot of time.

      So the options are:

      1. Is it worth putting in this effort to make the 301 rules?

      2. Or are we okay just to delete the old product pages, let the SE see the 404 and just wait for it to index the new pages?

      3. Or, as a compromise, should we 301 the old product page to the new category page as this is a lot quicker for us do do than redirecting to the new product page?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • indigoclothing
        indigoclothing last edited by

        As a follow up to this post, we launched the new site 3 weeks ago and seen a site-wide drop in SERPS 😞

        Of course there could be other variables involved, but we pushed ahead with the new product db without 301-ing the old products to new products as when we tried to do it, it was a far too time consuming exercise trying to pair up all the URLs in Excel.

        Google has already indexed the new pages so hopefully the new site structure will not cause long term damage. In the mean time trying to 301 redirect as many of the best performing old product pages (as per Page Authority in the PRO crawl diagnostic tool).

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • therealmarkhall
          therealmarkhall last edited by

          If the old products are indexed then you will get some long tail traffic to the no doubt, so deleting the page is a no no, i would either keep the page and display the new products underneath or 301 to the new product page.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • therealmarkhall
            therealmarkhall last edited by

            If the old products are indexed then you will get some long tail traffic to the no doubt, so deleting the page is a no no, i would either keep the page and display the new products underneath or 301 to the new product page.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • matbennett
              matbennett last edited by

              The answer probably differs from site to site.  I'd start by looking at how much you earn a month from people who land on product pages to give you an idea of the potential cost of that traffic bouncing.

              I suspect that the compromise is something along the lines of redirecting to categories as you suggest.  However I would additionally be looking at all of the top entry pages that are product pages and 301ing those.  How many will depend on that value.

              Also do talk to your developer.  It might not be as hard to match the old urls to the new ones as you imagine.  There are usually some fields that you can tie together and build a redirect rule from.

              Another alternative to directing to the category page might be to direct to a search (it can still return a 404 if you wish).  If your URLs were KW rich you might be able to turn that in to a search so that the product still comes up.

              Few options there to think about.  Good luck with it.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Aran_Smithson
                Aran_Smithson last edited by

                From a usability perspective I'd look at the redirects as a 404 is some what off putting when your trying to buy. It could lead to visitors losing trust and ultimately sales.

                In turn, if usbility is effected in such a way then doubtless the SEO will follow.

                If you have matching products which have indexed pages with some page authority, then I'd take the time to redirect them.

                Your compromise is not bad, it would save a mountain of time which can be devoted to other cool things and its certainly better than several thousand 404 errors!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • usDragons

                  Spammers created bad links to old hacked domain, now redirected to our new domain. Advice?

                  My client had an old site hacked (let's call it "myolddomain.com") and the hackers created many links in other hacked sites with links such as http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html The old myolddomain.com site was redirected to a different new site since then, but we still see over a thousand spam links showing up in the new site's Search Console 404 crawl errors report. Also, using the links: operator in google search, we see many results of spam links. Should we be worried about these bad links pointing to our old site and redirecting to 404s on the new site? What is the best recommendation to clean them up? Ignore? 410s? Other? I'm seeing conflicting advice out there. The old site is hosted by the client's previous web developer who doesn't want to clean anything up on their end without an ongoing hosting contract. So beyond turning redirects on or off, the client doesn't want to pay for any additional hosting. So we don't have much control over anything related to "myolddomain.com". 😞 Thanks in advance for any assistance!

                  Technical SEO | | usDragons
                  0
                • vmsolu

                  How to redirect 302 status to 301 status code using wordpress

                  I just ran the link opportunity option within site explorer and it shows that 31 pages are currently in a 302 status.  Should I try to convert the 302's to 301's?  And what is the easiest way to do this? I see several wordpress plugins that claim to do 301 redirects but I don't know which to choose. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

                  Technical SEO | | vmsolu
                  0
                • Silviu

                  301 redirect relative or absolute path?

                  Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
                  meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
                  "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
                  S.

                  Technical SEO | | Silviu
                  0
                • Alick300

                  301 redirect using javascript

                  Can I use javascript code to redirect(301) a webpage?

                  Technical SEO | | Alick300
                  0
                • Gmorgan

                  301 redirects & merging two sites into one

                  We have a client that has two sites that rank well for different searches in their market. The main pages ranking are things like advice articles and news pieces. For various reasons, they just want one site. I believe they need to duplicate the content from the outgoing site and place it on the main site, with a 301 redirect from each old page to each new one. What happens when they eventually want to redirect the entire domain? Would these smaller, internal redirects become obsolete, therefore removing any link value they once had? I am not sure how this works or if there is a best practice way to do this. Thanks Gareth

                  Technical SEO | | Gmorgan
                  0
                • CommercePundit

                  Does it really matter to maintain 301 redirect after de-indexing of old URLs?

                  Today, I was reading latest blog post on SEOmoz blog about. Uncrawled 301s - A Quick Fix for When Relaunches Go Too Well This is very interesting study about 301 & How it useful to maintain traffic. I'm working on eCommerce website and I have done similar stuff on my website. I have big confusion to manage 301 redirect. My website generates new URLs due to following actions. Re-write dynamic URLs. Re-launch entire website on different eCommerce platform. [osCommerce to Magento Commerce] Re-name category. Trasfer one product from one category to another category. I'm managing my 301 redirect with old practice. Excel sheet data from Google webmaster tools and set specific new URLs for redirect. Hoooo... Now, I have 8.5K redirect in htaccess... And, I'm thinking it's too much. Can we remove old 301 redirect from htaccess or not? This is big question for me. Because, all pages are not hyperlink on external website. Google have just de-indexed old URLs and indexed new URLs. So, Is it require to maintain 301 redirect after Google process?

                  Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
                  0
                • Evo

                  Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?

                  Hi Guys After adhering to the On Page optimisation suggestions given by SEOmoz, we redirected some of old urls to new ones.  We set 301 redirects from the old pages to new on a page by page basis but our search engine ranking subsequently fell off the radar and lost PR. We confirmed redirection with fiddler and it shows 301 permanent redirect on every page as expected. To manage redirection using a common code logic we executed following: In Http module, using “rewrite path” we route “all old page requests” to a page called “redirect.aspx? oldpagename =[oldpagename]”.  This happens at server side. In redirect.aspx we are redirecting from old page to new page using 301 permanent redirect. In the browser, when old page is requested, it will 301 redirect to new page. In hope we and others can learn from our mistakes - what did we do wrong ?!? Thanks in advance. Dave - www.paysubsonline.com

                  Technical SEO | | Evo
                  0
                • askthetrainer

                  How to Redirect only specific pages to new domain

                  My HTACCESS FILE IS AS FOLLOWS: rewriteengine on
                  rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$
                  rewriterule ^mydomain/(.*)$ "http://www.mydomain.com/$1" [R=301,L] #4d864805b49b5 I want to move ONLY specific pages from this domain to a new domain How do I edit my HTACCESS (which redirects http:// to www.) to move specific pages from old domain (which I have to delete) to new domain.... I.e. http://mydomaon.com/move.html needs to move to http://mynewdomain.com/move.html Where i can delete the original domains

                  Technical SEO | | askthetrainer
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.