Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
-
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys.
In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL.
This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
-
Keri,
You never cease to be able to recall the good stuff. Funny, its been a busy week so am just getting to some of this. Great post here, thanks.
-
Thanks guys. For the record these pages do not have back links so I am going to be using the 301 redirect.
-
Very well put. (As usual) Thanks so much,
David, hopefully you will see EGOL's reply. Best of luck.
-
Thanks Robert,
I think that this is a question of weighing an improvement in optimization against a loss of external authority (backlinks from other websites).
If these are brand new pages with no accumulated external authority then there is very little loss in redirecting and a gain in optimization. That means DO IT NOW - before any valuable external authority accumulates.
However, if there are a lot of external links into these pages then a percentage of that accumulated authority will evaporate through the redirect. The more powerful these pages, the greater the loss. In this case the decision to redirect becomes more difficult. Only google could calculate the value of the improvement in URL optimization compared to the loss of external authority. If it was my site I would value the external authority much more than changing a url from /toys/ to /chew-toys/
So, I would give two different answers to this question based upon the characteristics of the website webpages involved.
-
EGOL,
You make a great point. My question is this: David says above that: None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
I think his assumption is that by changing the url's to something (that appears to be from his example) more query oriented and optimized he will be able to impact this. Given that and given that a 301 will transfer 90% plus of the link juice, do you think he is served in making the change?
Curious as I respect your opinions.
-
David,
Have you read Dr. Pete's post about Should I Change my URLs for SEO? He talks about this very topic.
-
How much ranking power do you think that an optimized URL delivers to a page? Consider that title tag is enormous, links are enormous..... URL is probably tiny tiny tiny.
Now consider that the authority that these pages carry will pass through your site.
So, if this was my site I would be asking... How much of my external linkjuice is hitting these 20 pages. If none then I would not expect to lose very much by redirecting the pages. But if these pages had lots of offsite assets pointing to them the URLs would have to be really fugly before I redirected them.
-
David,
First, as to your last sentence, I am assuming you are redirecting 20 urls that are "not optimal" to 20 new urls that are optimized. Such that your example above is one and another would be http://www.dog.com/food to http://www.dog.com/organic-raw-dog-food, etc. for approximately 20 urls.If these follow the best practices (301's url to url in the .htaccess file) you should have no issue with the change. Understand that if the "poor" url /toys is ranking number 8 on page 1 of Google, and you do the redirect, it does not mean that you will rank for /chew-toys in the same place. For a short while you will likely continue to rank and then likely will fall off quickly.
Your new page will gain the link juice but not the ranking of the old.
We do a lot of site redesigns to bring them to SEO and CRO standards and therefore use a lot of 301's to maintain PA and grow it. We typically see the juice move over two to three months or more in a gradual fashion. An example is a site that we transferred every url for in late Aug. had about 170 links to its home page. Two months later, when looking at the old url there were only a couple showing and the links were showing on the new. So, it will change but not overnight.
Hope this helps
-
Hi David,
From what you describe, you will have no negative effects from using 301 redirects to a new URL structure. Thats what 301's are for
Rankings may dip for maybe 3-7 days (depending on which pages are ranking, etc) if at all, but after that you should be good.
-
According to SEOMoz's article on redirection, 301 redirects DO pass on the page authority ("about 90-99%") however it will take time. This number varies depending on who you listen to, but there is evidence that it does eventually pass through Google.
Depending on how often your pages get crawled, this may take a while but if you're not going for rankings, this won't affect too much.
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 Redirect from Authoritative but Loosely-Related Domain
We acquired a health-related blog about a year ago with good domain authority and a pretty strong link profile (TF ~40). We have been publishing good relevant content in it but it's not really paying dividends and we are considering doing a 301 to our money site, which is focused primarily on senior issues but has a lot of health-related content. The question is - with the two domains only being loosely related in subject matter, do we stand to harm our main site by redirecting from the other domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sa_787040 -
Links / Top Pages by Page Authority ==> pages shouldnt be there
I checked my site links and top pages by page authority. What i have found i dont understand, because the first 5-10 pages did not exist!! Should know that we launched a new site and rebuilt the static pages so there are a lot of new pages, and of course we deleted some old ones. I refreshed the sitemap.xml (these pages are not in there) and upload it in GWT. Why those old pages appear under the links menu at top pages by page authority?? How can i get rid off them? thx, Endre
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neckermann0 -
How long should I keep the 301 redirect file
We've setup an new site and many pages don't exist anymore (clean up done). But for many of them we have new pages with new url's. We've monitored the 404 and have now many URL's redirected with 301 (apache file). How long should we keep this in place? Checking all links manually to see of new url is in place of the old url (in google) is too much work. tx!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KBC0 -
URLs: Removing duplicate pages using anchor?
I've been working on removing duplicate content on our website. There are tons of pages created based on size but the content is the same. The solution was to create a page with 90% static content and 10% dynamic, that changed depending on the "size" Users can select the size from a dropdown box. So instead of 10 URLs, I now have one URL. Users can access a specific size by adding an anchor to the end of the URL (?f=suze1, ?f=size2) For e.g: Old URLs. www.example.com/product-alpha-size1 www.example.com/product-alpha-size2 www.example.com/product-alpha-size3 www.example.com/product-alpha-size4 www.example.com/product-alpha-size5 New URLs www.example.com/product-alpha-size1 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size2 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size3 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size4 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size5 Do search engines read the anchor or drop them? Will the rank juice be transfered to just www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
301 redirect
Hi there, I have some good links pointing to one of my web pages at the moment, however we are just about to launch a new design with new URL structure and I am clear that I need to do a 301 redirect on the URL to the new URL. However, do I keep the old URL live forever? or can I remove it after a while? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Should I 301 a penalized domain to another domains subfolder?
I have a niche domain seems to have been hit by Penguin. It had very good rankings before the update, and I think at least a good part of the penalty might be due to overoptimized anchor text. So here is the question; If I decide to take this site down, should I 301 the entire domain to a relevant sub-folder of another site? i.e comtemporaryfurniture.com to domain.com/category/modern-furniture.html Will the penalty get passed onto the new domain? If the penalty is partly due to anchor text, then pointing it to another site's subfolder would mean the tartget URL has more varied anchor text and could boost rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
After the 301 redirect
Hi all, A quick question, after you have setup your 301 re-directs in .htaccess - is it necessary to keep your content in the original domains directory? My thinking is that requests do get as far as referencing the directory, thus it should be safe to delete all the files on the old domain? Thanx!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazza7770