Which is better, a directory 301 redirect or each page in the directory?
-
A customer of mine has a site with lots of articles and they are all quite spammy. They have not been affected by penguin yet so they asked what to do. I suggested losing the articles directory and 301 redirect to either the home page or another important page.
Would a 301 redirect on the entire directory to a single page be the way to go or add redirects from each page within the directory and spread out redirects to various pages in website?
Or do you have a better suggestion?
-
Hi Anthony,
First of all, it is always better to redirect URLs to individual pages than perform sitewide 301 directs. But in this case, if the individual pages aren't getting much traffic, it may not make much difference.
If the articles are truly low quality, and you are worried about a future penalty, you may want to simply remove them without a redirect at all. Serve a 410 HTTP response (gone) instead, and carefully watch your traffic/rankings to make sure nothing drops.
It's most likely Google is simply ignoring these pages. The best defense is to build up an offense of quality material so the bad doesn't outweigh the good.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.
-
No, I would only do this for articles that have a good "inbound" link profile. 301 redirects can slow down the servers, so having too many isn't good either.
-
Thanks MargaritaS, good point on the spammy links and redirecting with them. To clarify, it is the article content that is not well written and just about keyword stuffed, but not terribly. The articles look like someone use a boiler template and just replaced keywords and a sentence here and there and called it a new article.
I was thinking the best thing to do would be to bury the evidence (haha!!) and apply redirects to valued pages. Then I would have them start writing good original content in a blog.
So should I apply 40+ individual redirects? or just redirect whole directory to a single page?
Thanks again for your feedback.
-
Anthony,
This sounds tricky. When you say "spammy" are you talking about their inbound links, or are you referring to the content within those articles? I think there is an important difference there. If you do indeed have articles that look spammy because of the content itself (ex: keyword stuffing) but actually happen to have decent inbound links from reliable sources, then I would say to individually 301 redirect those. If you mean spammy as in the case that the inbound links pointing to these individual articles, then I would say lose them because you don't want to pass those bad links onto this "other" important page on your client's site.
Hope this helps!
MS
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
-
Redirect chains and rankings
Hi All, I've got interesting question for Moz community today. Has redirect chain got any impact on rankings or not? Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Optimal_Strategies0 -
Product Page Links
I have a product category page at https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/s1000rr/ which currently has 38 products on it. Problem is, all the product titles start with the name of the text: "bmw s1000rr" (because that's what they are) - so that means there are 38 anchored internal links on that page, all starting with the same keyword. You can see how that might look to the Google crawler. Recently that page dropped from around 15 to outside the top 100, and Moz tells me that the page is keyword stuffed with "bmw s1000rr" (no suprise) so I'm guessing that may be the reason the page has disappeared out of the SERPs. I don't really want to change all the product titles (then they wouldn't make sense) so I'm just wondering if there is any way around this? Is there some way of telling Google that this is a product category page and therefore to ignore the anchor text in all of those product links? Can/should the links have some kind of markup on them? Or is the page beyond help? Basically I'm looking at a way of keeping the product titles as they are, but avoiding a page penalty from Google somehow. I'm a bit of a newbie, any suggestions would be most appreciated. Cheers, Graeme
On-Page Optimization | | graeme720 -
Duplicate content shown in Google webmaster tools for 301 redirected URLs.
Why does Google webmaster tools shows 5 URLs that have been 301 redirected as having duplicate meta descriptions?
On-Page Optimization | | Madlena0 -
Pages exclusion
Hi there! I don't want to "make relevan"t 3 of the pages my website has. Should I give them a title and a description even if I dont't want them to be shown in the SERPs? Is there any penalty from google if I don't do so? I guess no but just to confirm. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Different pages for OS's vs 1 Page with Dynamic Content (user agent), what's the right approach?
We are creating a new homepage and the product are at different stages of development for different OS's. The value prop/messaging/some target keywords will be different for the various OS's for that reason. Question is, for SEO reasons, is it better to separate them into different pages or use 1 page and flip different content in based on the user agent?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeLin0 -
To Many Links On Page
I'm having a problem on a crawl warning for our main site. The warning is that every one of my pages has to many links, a little over 1,000 on almost all of them. I think this is because our category list on our left hand sidebar has so many categories, and that sidebar appears on every last one of our pages even all the way into our products. Can anyone take a look and tell me if this is the reason why and what I could possibly do about this? Thanks in advance! www.Ocelco.com
On-Page Optimization | | Mike.Bean0 -
Landing page too long
In my first seomoz test I have many tilte pages for products that are over 70 charachers long. The part #'s are long like 10-782-10-10-10-PPxxxx etc. All these part #'s are not my key products and I could delete or truncate. My question is if the part numbers are not that important, is it OK to leave them as is or is ranking being damaged because they exist?
On-Page Optimization | | Wales0 -
Recreate missing pages or just use 301 redirect?
Hi, on the Competitive Comparison section of the "link analysis" page the top 5 sites are linking to pages on my site that no longer exist. I'm wondering if it is worthwhile to recreate these pages that no longer exist or if I should just use a 301 redirect to some page on my site that has related info. Thanks for your suggestions.
On-Page Optimization | | PillarMarketing0