301'ing over 700 internal links to the main page
-
I just got a contract for a site. After I analyzed their website, I noticed that they have over 700 pages indexed. However, their internal linking structure sucks. It's basically all 700 pages in one directory.
What do you recommend? I redirect all the internal structures to their new locations, or would it be better to redirect all those internal pages to their main domain name, and build a completely new seo-friendly structure?
Redirecting their current pages to each individual page is gonna take a lotta time, and I don't think they're gonna pay for it. :l
-
EGOL has a very important answer you need to consider, which is what I was really getting at in my second and last sentences. (but I didn't say it well)
But to answer about the redirect of every page to the root: I don't have any actual experience of this but I wouldn't think it would be a good thing because the front page is untargeted, compared to the page the visitor thought they were going to get.
If doing this was a good idea, there would be no reason for using a 404 page not found. You would instead just redirect all missing pages to the front page.
My guess is that as soon as that pattern was discovered, the value you got from it would evaporate.
Remember that the whole purpose of all those pages was to satisfy the needs of a visitor. Send them to an inappropriate place and you have failed. (by the way, google does this a lot themselves. Their own redirects leave a lot to be desired.)
-
After I analyzed their website, I noticed that they have over 700 pages indexed. However, their internal linking structure sucks. It's basically all 700 pages in one directory.
What do you recommend?
STOP!
Do not do this until you have clearly defined two things.
-
Why you are doing this.
-
The goal that you want to accomplish.
Any actions that you take without considering BOTH of those questions are shooting without taking aim and not knowing what your target should be.
You might not need the redirect because linking structure and directory structure are completely different things. Redirects could cause a significant loss of power for this site.
-
-
If the pages you are redirecting have links pointing at them and you 301 them to your home page, chances are your home page will rank higher and DA will increase.
Whatever plan you decide on, my advice would be to do it a few pages at a time and see what happens.
-
Thanks for the detailed response.
I've been analyzing the website and their pages for the past hour.
For example, lets say the keyword is "send flowers to city". The domain name is "cityflorists". And she has pages for every city. I'm gonna 410 them, and just keep pages relevant to the city, it'll being down the number of pages to below 50 for sure.
The main question I want to ask, however, without any complications is, that what happens if you 301 over 700 internal pages to the main domain? Will the website get penalized? Or will the domain authority increase?
-
700 pages is nothing.
It really depends on what you are trying to do, but if you are a programmer, it would be very simple and fast to decide how to split up the files into the final structure, then get a listing of the new locations and generate the .htaccess file from that, because you know the original location.
I would do it by taking an exact copy of the current data and do this in a different location, so as not to cause any disruption. Once it all works, then do a fast swap.
What would make this more complex is if you had to rename the pages, but I would just write a file that contains old,new and use that to generate the needed changes.
interlinking the pages is another job (in their new locations) but if you are a programmer, as noted in the previous line, it is simple.
Something else you must consider is how will the client manage the system afterwards. Be sure not to put them in the situation that they need you in order to add a new page..
At least you are thinking about this before doing it. I just heard from a friend whose client got someone else to restructure his site and they completely destroyed the fantastic #1 and page 1 ranking they spent years creating.
-
Hi,
Will do my best to understand and your answer question appropriately.
If those pages are not are not providing any value in terms of traffic, ranking or links then there's no point of keeping them on the site. You could redirect but I would just implement a 410 status code to indicate to search engines that these pages no longer exist.
For pages which are providing value, restructure the site and place them in different directories (with 301 from old to new pages). Obviously you should build out these pages in terms of content and links in the following months.
It wouldn't be too difficult to evaluate your most important pages through Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools e.t.c
However the most difficulty for this project is prioritsation and how you present this to the client, considering there are 700 pages. Take the following steps when handling this with the client:
(1) Map out and plan how you want to structure the site.
(2) In plain english, list what you want to do with the site and the steps you will be taking to do so (for the next 3-6 months). Also be prepared for alternatives and difficult questions the client might potentially ask. In addition calculate the time, resource and how much you can do based on your allocated budget.
(3) Present this to the client in a clear and honest approach- be upfront with the situation. You should try and negotiate a common ground - Maybe he can give you a bit more budget this month but you get less next month for link building. How you bargain this depends on your payment terms which I do not know. But you should also be prepared to take some of the costs from your own pocket.
Next time I would suggest before taking on a contract to clearly identify the number of pages, site issues e.t.c so that project scope creep and this difficult situation does not occur to you again.
But to end this on a calmer note, buddy it's ok and you shouldn't allow yourself to get stressed about this, its all good and take this as a positive step towards your career. Whatever happens, just know that in future effectively planning will help you anticipate these issues beforehand and behave accordingly.
Take care and hope this helps.
Vahe
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
-
What is the best SEO tool to check internal linking structure
HI, Is there any tool to check how a website's internal linking structure has been linked. Some times few important pages may not linked very well and some links will be over linked. This will surge rankings...like if more links are pointing to one page? Is there any tool to check this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Does adding more outgoing links on a high PA page decrease the juice passed to previous links?
Hi, I'm not sure how PA DA exactly works when the goal is to create backlinks to your site in order to have the most impact on passing PA DA juice (if there is such a thing) to ones money site. For example let's say you have a blog and the PA is 40 DA is 30. Let's say I create a backlink pointing to my site on the homepage of this blog, in which I desire better rankings for, and the links I created are only 1-3 outgoing links on this post which is again on the homepage. Then say in a months time, I want to add another post on the homepage (so the 40 PA and 30 DA stays the same) creating a backlink to one of my other money sites. Does adding this second round of backlinks result in sending less juice to the first? This is what I want to know. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | z8YX9F800 -
HTTPS website migration and internal links
Hey Moz! I read Moz's guide on migrating websites from http to https, and it seems changing all relative internal links to absolute https is recommended (we currently use relative internal links). But is doing this absolutely necessary if we will already have a redirect in our .htaccess file forcing all http pages to https? Changing all of our internal links to absolute https will be very time consuming, and I'd like to hear your thoughts as to whether it's absolutely recommended/necessary; and if so, why? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Interlinking vs. 'orphaning' mobile page versions in a dynamic serving scenario
Hi there, I'd love to get the Moz community's take on this. We are working on setting up dynamic serving for mobile versions of our pages. During the process of planning the mobile version of a page, we identified a type of navigational links that, while useful enough for desktop visitors, we feel would not be as useful to mobile visitors. We would like to remove these from our mobile version of the page as part of offering a more streamlined mobile page. So we feel that we're making a fine decision with user experience in mind. On any single page, the number of links removed in the mobile version would be relatively few. The question is: is there any danger in “orphaning” the mobile versions of certain pages because links don’t exist pointing to those pages on our mobile pages? Is this a legitimate concern, or is it enough that none of the desktop versions of pages are orphaned? We were not sure whether it’s even possible, in Googlebot’s eyes, to orphan a mobile version of a page if we use dynamic serving and if there are no orphaned desktop versions of our pages. (We also plan to link to "full site" in the footer.) Thank you in advance for your help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R
Eric0 -
Internal links question
I've read that Google frowns upon large numbers of internal links. We're building a site that helps users browse a list of shows via dozens of genres. If the genres are expose, say, as a pulldown menu as opposed to a list of static links, and selecting the pulldown option filters the list of shows, would those genres count against our internal links count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Add or not add "nofollow" to duplicate internal links?
Hello everyone. I have searched on these forums for an answer to my concerns, and despite I found many discussions and questions about applying or not applying "nofollow" to internal links, I couldn't find an answer specific to my particular scenarios. Here is my first scenario: I have an e-commerce site selling digital sheet music, and on my category pages our products are shown typically with the following format: PRODUCT TITLE link that takes to product page Short description text "more info" link that takes to the same product page again As you may notice, the "more info" link takes at the very same page of the PRODUCT TITLE link. So, my question is: is there any benefit to "nofollow" the "more info" link to tell SEs to "ignore" that link? Or should I leave the way it is and let the SE figure it out? My biggest concern by leaving the "nofollow" out is that the "more info" generic and repetitive anchor text could dilute or "compete" with the keyword content of the PRODUCT TITLE anchor text.... but maybe that doesn't really matter! Here a typical category page from my site; http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html My second scenario: on our product pages, we have several different links that take to the very same "preview page" of the product we sell. Each link has a different anchor text, and some other links are just images, all taking to the same page. Here are the anchor texts or ALT text of such same links: "Download Free Sample" (text link) "Cover of the [product title]" (ALT image text) "Look inside this title" (ALT image text) "[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text) "This item contains one high quality PDF sheet music file ready to download and print." (ALT image text) "PDF" (text link) "[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text) So, I have 7 links on the same product page taking the user to the same "product preview page" which is, by the way, canonicalized to the "main" product page we are talking about. Here is an example of product page on my site: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html My instinct is to tell SEs to take into account just the links with the "[product title] PDF file" anchor text, and then add a "nofollow" to the other links... but may that hurting in some way? Is that irrelevant? Doesn't matter? How should I move? Just ignore this issue and let the SEs figure it out? Any thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
301 canonical'd pages?
I have an ecommerce site with many different URLs with the same product. Let's say the product is a hat. It's in: a a) mysite.com/products/hat b) mysite.com/collections/head-ware/hat c) mysite.com/collections/stuff-to-wear-on-your-head/hat Right now, A is the canonical page for B and C. I want to clean up my site, so that every product only has ONE unique URL, which is linked to from all the collections. So B and C URL will be broken. Is it necessary that I 301 them if they were already canonical'd? Based on the number of products I have, I would have to 301 1000+ URLs. I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do to avoid getting penalized. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0