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.
Delete 301 redirected pages from server after redirect is in place?
-
Should I remove the redirected old pages from my site after the redirects are in place?
Google is hating the redirects and we have tanked. I did over 50 redirects this week, consolidating content and making one great page our of 3-10 pages with very little content per page.
But the old pages are still visible to google's bot.
Also, I have not put a rel canonical to itself on the new pages. Is that necessary?
Thanks!
Jean
-
50 redirects is a lot of redirects for one week! Sometimes when that much change has happened on a site it can longer than a few days for the site to be fully re-crawled/indexed and your rankings to normalize. Have you updated your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools?
I always like to put a self-canonical tag in where it makes sense, just because there are a lot of URL parameters (session IDs, tracking code, etc) that can cause duplicate URLs and it's nice to have the stripped-down plain URL be the canonical version.
Can you clarify what you mean by "the old pages are still visible to Google's bot"? Do you mean they're still showing up in the index after the redirect is in place? If so it could just be that your site hasn't been re-crawled yet. Some other things to check: Have you updated your internal links that pointed to the old pages so that they point to the new page? Have you done a link building push to try to get some external link love to the new page? Basically I would say don't rely on the redirects alone to help the bot find the new page.
Kristinn's suggestion would be another way to go: don't redirect the other pages, instead post a link at the top saying "for updated info go over here" and then canonical the old pages to the new page. Over time though a 301 is going to be the best long-term solution. If the URL is redirecting you shouldn't need to keep the content up on the page.
-
This is an interesting question. If you are not moving domains, then I would just leave the old pages as is and put a link to the new page on each of the old pages saying that there is more updated info there, thereby passing along the link juice. Since the new page is not a duplicate of any of the old pages, then no 301 required. At least that is how I am seeing it.
-
So do you think google will take me back and show my site in its organic listings again? The new pages are nowhere to be found today, even though they were in good positions a few days ago.
The site has been up since 1998, I have fresh content, lots of Facebook activity, regular blog entries, etc etc.
Thanks!
-
Once the organics show the new url, I wait aprox 90 days to remove. However, if you have many inbound links to the old pages, I would consider keeping them longer.
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 to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
Soft 404's on a 301 Redirect...Why?
So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TroyW0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Switching from a .org to .io (301 domain redirect)
I'm considering switching my main site from a .org to .io address; the .org is an exact match domain which helped to kickstart it a few years ago and now has about 50% repeat visitors, but was thrown off the Apple affiliation program for trademark infringement. I've found and purchased a nice (non-infringing) .io domain, and I've read the advice here on how to properly 301 the old domain; but my question is - does it matter that it's .io? Is this going to significantly hurt my rankings, even when everything has been 301'd properly? Another thought I had is that I may actually come out better off in the long run, what with Google penalties being applied to exact match domains. Is this a ranking suicide? If so, I'm tempted to leave it as is; even without the affiliation, it's making a good amount every month in ad fees that I don't want to disrupt. Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | w0lfiesmithUK0 -
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 | | Gmorgan0 -
302 or 301 redirect to https ?
I am redirecting whole site to https. Is there a difference between 302 or 301 redirect for seo? Site never been indexed. Planning to do that with .htaccess command RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
Technical SEO | | Kotkov
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L] There are plenty of ways http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/ssl-example-usage-in-htaccess.html Which way would be the best? Thanks is advance0