Best Place to Redirect 301 to?
-
Hey Everyone!
I have an old site with hundreds of blog posts that are very spammy (duplicate content, keyword stuffed, and just plain bad content). I am going to redirect them and delete them from WordPress but I'm wondering where is the best place to redirect them to? Home page, other posts, other pages...?
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Thanks!
-
Adam, keep in mind that if that's low quality content... and you redirect those URLs to somewhere else, then you're passing any links and any potential quality factors over to the new URLs.
When Google Panda came out, keep in mind that one of the only ways to recover is to delete the low quality content from your site entirely. So why would you want to redirect that low quality content and pass that on to another URL or another site?
I agree with what the others here have said, Casey and Wesley. Think of the user experience.
-
There was a great Moz blog post on the whole re-direct issue by Cyrus Shepard which is well worth taking a look at.
-
User experience, which of course is paramount as been mentioned above. However, what hasn't been mentioned above is the clear need to PRUNE (remove completely) from your site low-quality content for Panda reasons. I personally would not want to redirect any page that has a 100% bounce rate or an average site visit of less than 20 seconds. I'm sure if you filtered these target pages the metrics would be even worse than this.
The problem with low quality or thin content is that even a small amount on the average site will drag down a site algorithmically. Google used to view websites as books, and the best practice was to continually add pages to that book so that you had more possible targets for Google to rank and send you long-tail search traffic referrals. That is no longer the case. Instead, anything that doesn't provide a high-quality user experience is just dragging you down and that includes exactly what you stated in your question "duplicate content, keyword stuffed, and just plain bad content."
So what should you do with these pages? I would certainly not 301 redirect them just for the sake of "redirecting them" nor do I believe that a "custom 404 page for a previous BAD piece of content" enhances user-experience. Instead, I would urge you to remove them completely by the site via a 410 GONE redirect. Google has already publicly stated that they process 410's faster and that this is the PREFERRED best practice to ensure these pages are completely removed from the index.
Hope that helps. Good luck with your project.
-
Absolutely agree here. Do not 301 for the sake of redirecting. Google would much rather someone landed on a good 404 page rather than to a page that had nothing to do with the original request.
Google also won't penalise you for having 404's on the site - this is commonplace and fully expected.
Have a read what Google say about it here and look at using Google's own 404 widget here.
-Andy
-
Think about the user experience when implementing a solution like this.
If your user expects to find a blog post about a certain topic make sure they are redirected to at least something which is connected to that.On a webshop selling clothing articles it would make sense to redirect a deleted shoe article to the category page for shoes or to show them a custom 404 page which helps them on their way to find more content.
If redirecting them to something relevant is not possible i would suggest creating a custom 404 page which explains that the page has been deleted but that certain pieces of your content may be interesting for them. (Link to those pieces of content.)
Just redirecting users to the homepage or other pages which are not relevant only annoys the user and gives them a negative association with your website.
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
-
Unsolved Temporary redirect from 302 to 301 for PNG File?
#302HTTP #temporaryredirect
Technical SEO | | Damian_Ed 0
Hi everyone, Recently I have faced a crawl issue with my media images on website. For example this page url https://intreface.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Horion-screen-side-2.png has 302 HTTP Status and the recommendation is to change it 301. I have read the article on temporary redirections here:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection?_ga=2.45324708.1293586627.1702571936-916254120.1702571936
but its not written here how to redirect in my HTML 1 image url not the landing page.
Screenshot 2023-12-15 at 11.02.40.png
I have messaged to MOZ Support but they recommended to go for the MOZ Community!
Screenshot 2023-12-15 at 11.06.02.png Could you assist me wit this issue please? I can reach HTTML of the necessary page and change what I need for permanent redirection but firstly I need to understand how to do that correctly.0 -
Redirects, 301's & 404's
I have tons of links that I have had added a redirect to after creating my companies new website. Is it bad to have all these 301s? How do I permanently redirect those links? Also, on Google Search Console it's telling me I have 1,000+ excluded links. Is this bad? Will it negatively affect me? Is this something to do with my sitemap? Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | sammecooper0 -
301 Redirect - Technical Question
I have recently updated a site and for the url's that had changed or were not transferring I set up 301 redirects in the htaccess file as follows This one works - Redirect 301 /industry-sectors http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing But this one doesn't - Redirect 301 /industry-sectors/equine http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing/application/equestrian/ What it does is change the url to this instead http://www.tornadowire.co.uk/fencing/equine ..... which returns a 404 page not found error The server is nginx based server and we have moved from a joomal platform to a wordpress platform I would be grateful for any ideas
Technical SEO | | paulie650 -
301 redirecting old content from one site to updated content on a different site
I have a client with two websites. Here are some details, sorry I can't be more specific! Their older site -- specific to one product -- has a very high DA and about 75K visits per month, 80% of which comes from search engines. Their newer site -- focused generally on the brand -- is their top priority. The content here is much better. The vast majority of visits are from referrals (mainly social channels and an email newsletter) and direct traffic. Search traffic is relatively low though. I really want to boost search traffic to site #2. And I'd like to piggy back off some of the search traffic from site #1. Here's my question: If a particular article on site #1 (that ranks very well) needs to be updated, what's the risk/reward of updating the content on site #2 instead and 301 redirecting the original post to the newer post on site #2? Part 2: There are dozens of posts on site #1 that can be improved and updated. Is there an extra risk (or diminishing returns) associated with doing this across many posts? Hope this makes sense. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | djreich0 -
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 Redirect with an Exact Domain name Match
My Client had a site that ranked for a pretty competitive two word phrase, but for a variety of reasons had to transfer the site to a different domain name (with none of the previous keywords). We've 301'd everything just fine to the new site, but our traffic for that two word phrase, as well as related long tail traffic, is beginning to drop. Could the drop be related to something that we didn't do well in the transfer? Or is it due to the new domain name now not being an exact match? Sitenote question: Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine. Is there any reason to switch GA to the new domain? What are the pros/cons? Much thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | TrevorMcKendrick0 -
Removing 301 Redirects
Is it safe to remove old 301 Redirects from an SEO standpoint and can 301s dramatically affect seo? Prior to switching our old domain over to our new domain, we had (and currently still do) tons of 301 redirects, because of optimizing our file names and structure. Then our old domain was redirected to our new domain in the same redirect file. So that being said, now that our new domain has been up and running for about 3 months, would it be safe for me to get rid of the old 301 redirects and redirect anything that was on our old domain to our new domains home page? This would clean up our redirects tremendously and I hope would help with SEO.
Technical SEO | | hfranz0