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.
Does it really matter to maintain 301 redirect after de-indexing of old URLs?
-
Today, I was reading latest blog post on SEOmoz blog about. Uncrawled 301s - A Quick Fix for When Relaunches Go Too Well
This is very interesting study about 301 & How it useful to maintain traffic. I'm working on eCommerce website and I have done similar stuff on my website. I have big confusion to manage 301 redirect.
My website generates new URLs due to following actions.
- Re-write dynamic URLs.
- Re-launch entire website on different eCommerce platform. [osCommerce to Magento Commerce]
- Re-name category.
- Trasfer one product from one category to another category.
I'm managing my 301 redirect with old practice. Excel sheet data from Google webmaster tools and set specific new URLs for redirect. Hoooo... Now, I have 8.5K redirect in htaccess... And, I'm thinking it's too much.
Can we remove old 301 redirect from htaccess or not? This is big question for me. Because, all pages are not hyperlink on external website. Google have just de-indexed old URLs and indexed new URLs. So, Is it require to maintain 301 redirect after Google process?
-
I always use a 301 redirect.
2K is a lot of pages. If I can redirect them with a couple lines of htaccess code I would do it. If I had to code 2K lines and have that huge file scanned for thousands of visitors I might not do it if I am pretty sure that there is very little traffic.
I use lots of folders on my site and that makes these problems easy to solve.
-
Hi Egol. I am migrating a site with 6k pages. About 2K pages are useless old syndication articles with no incoming links; about 50 are old CID version of forms. These pages won't exist in the new site. How do I delete them, by no doing 301 redirect and not including them in any sitemap? Would they become 404 for a while and then disappear from google index?
-
My ecommerce [www.vistastores.com] website does not have issue due to change or URLs. I rarely change category page URLs and product page URLs. But, I'm facing issue due to narrow by search. If any attribute will remove from narrow by search so 100 pages will convert to 404 due to dynamic structure. That's why I'm setting up 301 redirect to category page URLs from all dynamic pages.
I have concern to reduce 301 redirect and broken links in website. But, I'm not able to stop it. Google may restrict my organic performance due to continue broken links on website and non associated 301 redirect.
-
I have 301 redirects on my sites. Every one that I have done is still out there in htaccess. I am not taking chances on how search engines handle these.
Other than deleting useless pages, I rarely change URLs. If I don't change URLs I don't have to worry about this stuff.
I have not emailed other sites to change the URL in their links. I have only changed the URLs on my own sites. I would worry that asking someone to edit a link might result in a loss... so I am happy with the redirected link.
-
No, I don't want to create romance on my website with 404.
EGOL & you have mentioned same about visitors and back links. Now, I have some good feeling after reading 20K redirect which is maintain by you. 8.5K is not big for me. -
In my view it is important to keep the old redirects, even after you have of replacing the Google index. With the 301 the relevance obtained in the old page, keep to the new page. The 301 is not only to Google index, but also backlinks your page has.
I consider that 8.5 k is not so big, I have sites with 20k and never had any problems or restrictions.
Anyway, if you want to remove the old ones, let the 404 page beautiful, which is always good: D
-
Oh Jesus... This is strong reason Why I'm your big fan since a member on SEO Chat forum.
I got your point. OR We can edit hyperlink on external website by email them... Right? -
Let's say that my website has ten links to your old URLs that deliver hundreds of visitors per day.
What will happen to all of those visitors if you remove the 301 redirects?
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
-
How effective are 301 redirects in passing page rank?
I have a blog which is ranking well for certain terms, and would like to repurpose it to better explain these terms it is ranking for, including updating the url to the new term the blog will be about. The plan being to 301 redirect the old url to new. In the past, I've done this with other pages, and have actually lost much of the rankings that I had earned on the original URL. What is your take on this? Maybe repurpose blog, but maintain original URL just to be on the safe side? Thanks
Technical SEO | | CitimarineMoz0 -
301 Redirect non existant pages
Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Vanity URLs are being indexed in Google
We are currently using vanity URLs to track offline marketing, the vanity URL is structured as www.clientdomain.com/publication, this URL then is 302 redirected to the actual URL on the website not a custom landing page. The resulting redirected URL looks like: www.clientdomain.com/xyzpage?utm_source=print&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=printcampaign. We have started to notice that some of the vanity URLs are being indexed in Google search. To prevent this from happening should we be using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 and will the Google index ignore the utm parameters in the URL that is being 301 redirect to? If not, any suggestions on how to handle? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seogirl221 -
Best Practice on 301 Redirect - Images
We have two sites that sell the same products. We have decided to retire one of the sites as we'd like to focus on one property. I know best practice is to redirect apples to apples, which in our case is easily done since the sites sold the same thing. www.SiteABC.com/ProductA can be redirected to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA. My question is how far does that thinking go regarding images? Each product has a main product page, of course, and then up to 6 images in some cases. Is it necessary to redirect www.SiteABC.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg? Or can they all be redirected to just the product page?
Technical SEO | | Natitude0 -
What to do with 302 redirects being indexed
Hi there, Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor. For example: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/ In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL; en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/ (there is no content here, and never has been). This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links. Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting. Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable. But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index? Is the canonical tag the best way? I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | etruvian0 -
De-indexed from Google
Hi Search Experts! We are just launching a new site for a client with a completely new URL. The client can not provide any access details for their existing site. Any ideas how can we get the existing site de-indexed from Google? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | rikmon0 -
How long should I keep 301 redirects?
I have modified a the URL structure of a whole section of a website and used mod_rewrite 301 redirect to match the new structure. Now that was around 3 months ago and I was wondering how long should I keep this redirect for? As it is a new website I am quite sure that there are no links around with the old URL structure but still I can see the google bot trying from time to time to access the old URL structure. Shouldn't the google bot learn from this 301 redirect and not go anymore for the old URL?
Technical SEO | | socialtowards0 -
Double 301 redirect
Hi together, due to some technical reasons I have redirect (301) an existing link two times. Example: www.mydomain.com/root/site.html > 301 > www.mydomain.com/site.html > 301 www.mydomain.com/site_new.html Is there anybody how has got some experience like doing a double redirect? What about link juice? Best regards Steffen
Technical SEO | | steffen_0