Negative effect on google SEO with 301's?
-
Cleaning up the website by consolidating pages - each with a little bit of useful info - into one definitive page that is really useful and full of good content.
Doing 301's from the many old pages to the one new really good one. Didn't want to do rel canonicals because I don't want the old pages around, I want to get rid of them.
Will google see the 301s and go nuts or see that there is one definitive, really good page with no duplicate content? The change is very good from a user perspective.
Also, On-Page Report Cards on SEOMoz suggests that you put a rel canonical on a page to itself to tell google that this page is the definitive page. What do you think?
Thanks so much for anyone who has time to answer - so many gurus - this is a great forum. - jean
-
Good on 301. On rel=canon, I did not mean to imply "each page to itself." There are various issues that arise in coding pages, making changes to pages, etc. So, here is a classic: to a non coder, www.example.com and www.example.com/ are the same page. To the bots they are two. So by inserting rel=canon for that page you are saying if example.com/ comes up treat it the same as example.com.
For your example, if it were me, manual juicer and highest rated manual juicer are very distinctly different pages. The first could lead to a description of 4 and the second speaks only to one. You have to be careful with this in the SEO because if you get too diffuse in adding modifiers to the keyword (making them long tail for example) you can draw strength from the main keyword page. Sometimes it is good to do, sometimes not....this part is the art of SEO.
BTW........what type of OR wine???? (Nothing like a Willamette Valley Pinot....and, yes, I know how to pronounce Willamette!)
-
Thanks for the expert help. Generally there are 2 to 8 pages that I am consolidating - for me it's info about different models of a product - we have reviewed them all on different pages but having all of the info on one page with photos and background info is a lot juicier than a dib and a dab on each page - and is more useful for a reader on our site. There are incoming links to most of the pages from other sites so I don't want people to end up on our 404 page. Thus the 301 strategy. Fascinating about the rel canonical. I didnt know. So I need to put a rel canonical to itself on each page that is the main page for a topic. What if there are pages optimized to similar topics? Like manual juicer and highest rated manual juicer? Will a rel canonical for the page optimized for the keyword "manual juicer" and a rel canonical on the page for "highest rated manual juicer" reduce seo juice if the two pages are on the same site? To me when I hear Oracle I think of the database company. Shows how old I am. Ha. Thanks a lot for your time answering my questions.
-
Here is the issue as I see it: how many pages are you "consolidating" and why? First, if you are using a 301, IMO you are saying I have links on this page and link juice I do not want to lose. I want to move that link juice to my new page of similar type content. If you have 5 pages as an example that you are "consolidating" and three have one link that is the same to each page, then I would take one of the three for the 301 to the new page. On the other two, if one has no links, I would not redirect it unless there was some navigational reason. If the last page had 12 links, etc. then it absolutely gets 301'd.
It is likely that even 25 pages to one would not be an issue. The question is, is there a reason to redirect? If you are trying to redirect 50 pages for example and they are similar and all have different links, I would do the redirects slowly, maybe 3 to 5 per week for 10 weeks or more. The reason is I would not want it to take a chance an unnecessary flag is raised.
Yes, every page needs a rel=canon.Gurus, shmurus, have you seen the friggin' Oracles!!! Last year the final was gurus 32 oracles 33 (but it was an OT loss for the gurus - gotta love their heart!)
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
-
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Specifying Your Organization's Logo Schema Required If Corporate Contacts Schema is in Place?
Does anyone know if specifying the organization's logo schema is required if corporate contacts schema is in place? I have the corporate contact schema in place on my site but not the second one. The site is http://www.cobaltrecruitment.com/ Thanks,
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO?
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) by adding the code they give have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO? Anyone know? Thanks! ~Brett
Technical SEO | | BBuck0 -
Can the Hosting location of image files have a negative effect if 'off-site' such as on the devs own media server ?
Hi Can the Hosting location of image files have a negative effect if 'off-site' such as if they are on the developers own media server ? As opposed to on the actual websites server or file structure ? In the case i'm looking at the image files are hosted on a totally separate server (a media subdomain of the developers site server) from the subject sites dedicated server. Will engines still attribute the properties of files hosted in this manner to the main website (such as file name, alt attributes, etc etc) ? Or should they really be on the subject sites server own media folder ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Will syndicated content hurt a website's ranking potential?
I work with a number of independent insurance agencies across the United States. All of these agencies have setup their websites through one preferred insurance provider. The websites are customizable to a point, but the content for the entire website is mostly the same. Therefore, literally hundreds of agency sites have essentially the same content. The only thing that changes is a few "wildcards" in the copy where the agency fills in their city, state, services areas, company history, etc. My questions is: will this syndicated content hurt their ranking potential? I've been toying with the idea of further editing the content to make it more unique to an agency, but I would hate to waste a lot of hours doing this if it won't help anything. Would you expect this approach to be beneficial or a waste of time? Thank you for your help!
Technical SEO | | copyjack0 -
Does hidden text, which appears for an onclick event, get indexed by Google and what SEO impact does this have?
I'm trying to simplify a conversion process with an onclick event to show text rather than having a completely separate page, but wondering if this is going to negatively impact on SEO, especially considering it's hidden text. I've seen a couple of things out there where you could position the text off the screen and the onclick results in it coming on.
Technical SEO | | JuiceBoxOM0 -
Canonical tags pointing at old URLs that have been 301'd
I have a site which has various white label sites with the same content on each. I have canonical tags on the white label sites pointing to the main site. I have changed some URLs on the main site and 301'd the previous URL to the new ones. Is it ok to have the canonicals pointing to the old URLs that now have a 301 redirect on them.
Technical SEO | | BeattieGroup0