Maintaining Link Value Of Old URLS With 301 Redirects
-
Large ecommerce site that has been around for a long time (15+ years.) During that time technology has changed a lot and we are running into issues maintaining 301 redirects for very old urls. For example we have a good amount of links to product and category pages. Some of the old links are to products that still exist and will exist for many years to come.(of note little to no traffic comes via these links. Most of them are close to 9 years old so they are buried deep within articles, forums, or websites) However as we make changes to the site and URL structure these old urls are taking up more resources to continue to maintain 301 redirects. I am Leary of no longer supporting them because I do not want it to impact rankings however there is concern on how much development time and technology resources it takes to continue to support as time goes on.
Does anyone have experience handling redirects 3 or 4 url structures old? Looking for insight from someone who has crossed this bridge before.
-
We have changed the URLS a few times over the past decade. It is just maintaining some of the super old backlinks to category and product pages that are getting harder to maintain.
I appreciate you taking the time to answer.
-
Okay, got it. To figure out how much value you're getting from that traffic, you need to figure out what you want customers to do once they hit those pages. If the customers do the thing you want them to do (buy, lead gen, consume more content, etc), then you still want to keep those redirects. If they don't, you can probably kill them without any repercussions to the brand/site. You can also reach out to those sites that are hosting your old links and ask them to put in new, more relevant links, if those links are still valuable in that the traffic from that link drives customers to do the action you want them to do.
I also wanted to add something that, I know you may fully realize, but no one has said yet, for every page that you're 301'ing to the new structure, you can take that old page and those old assets off your server. All you need is the 301 redirect code.
-
So you have old URLs; have they been changed already?
I'm assuming not since you're getting great traffic from organic. If that's the case, why change them? There appears to be no problem unless I'm missing something (assuming you haven't changed the URL).
This may be a question for developers that have more knowledge.
Thanks!
-
Erica,
Thank you so much for the response. To clarify so that i understand your recommendation correctly. The pages do still get traffic, some get a lot of traffic from organic search. They just do not get a lot of referral traffic from other websites. For example I have a lot of cases where a customer links to one of our products in a tutorial they did on their website. Because the tutorial is old the link to us is from many years ago and the url has a super old url structure. And maintaining the system that helps figure out where that old url should point to on our site is causing the problem. Because it is hard to know how to judge how much value is coming from that link from an SEO perspective I am having a hard time determining if we should continue to maintain these very old urls linking to us from external domains.
Does that help clarify?
-
If you don't get any traffic to these very old pages, there's really no reason to keep the redirects. When we rebranded from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com, we killed a lot of very old pages that didn't get any traffic anymore. We didn't redirect them, just tossed them away. We only redirected out-dated pages that were still getting traffic.
-
Cole,
First thanks for the response.
I probably should have added a bit more detail for clarification. The simple 301 redirect example.com/product-a-123-xyz.html is 301 redirected to example.com/product-a can be handled easily.
However because some of the Old urls had dynamic aspects to them our system has to run code to handle the redirect logic so that the 301 redirect takes sends them the to correct place. For example we sell tires for motorcycles. Because of old technology the url 10 years ago included vehicle specific elements like the year, model brand. Right now we have redirect logic that recognizes that the link is coming in from an old dynamic url and 301 redirect the customer to that specific tire on our site. Then at the product level they can then choose which vehicle they have, all dynamic aspects are taken care of now with ajax. But maintaining that old logic is eating up resources and I am debating if it is worth doing so.
-
Let me make sure I understand your question. You have migrated several (old) URLs into one (new) URL.
I would simply 301 redirect any old URL to a new URL that relates. For example, example.com/product-a-123-xyz.html is 301 redirected to example.com/product-a
You don't have to worry about what articles, bookmarks, etc. have the wrong URL because they are now redirected to the correct URL to maintain link value.
Do not 301 redirect page A to Page B that does not relate.
If you have any other 404s that come up via GWT or Moz and you have a relevant page for that 404, then go ahead and place a 301 redirect in. I would monitor this weekly (every Monday for example). It shouldn't be more than 20-30 to go through at most and that way you continue monitoring link value.
Does this answer your question? I hope this helps.
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
-
301 redirect homepage question
Hi If i have a homepage which is available at both www.homepage.com and www.homepage.com// should i 301 the // version to the first version. Im curious as to whether slashes are taking into consideration Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
Should 301-ed links be removed from sitemap?
In an effort to do some housekeeping on our site we are wanting to change the URL format for a couple thousand links on our site. Those links will all been 301 redirected to corresponding links in the new URL format. For example, old URL format: /tag/flowers as well as search/flowerswill be 301-ed to, new URL format: /content/flowers**Question:**Since the old links also exist in our sitemap, should we add the new links to our sitemap in addition to the old links, or replace the old links with new ones in our sitemap? Just want to make sure we don’t lose the ranking we currently have for the old links.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shawn811 -
Do I need both canonical meta tags AND 301 redirects?
I implemented a 301 redirect set to the "www" version in the .htaccess (apache server) file and my logs are DOWN 30-40%! I have to be doing something wrong! AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^luckygemstones.com
Technical SEO | | spkcp111
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm
RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] IndexIgnore *
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.luckygemstones.com/page-not-found.htm
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.luckygemstones.com/internal-serv-error.htm
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.luckygemstones.com/forbidden-request.htm
ErrorDocument 401 http://www.luckygemstones.com/not-authorized.htm I've also started adding canoncial META's to EACH page: I'm using HMTL 4.0 loose still--1000's of pages--painful to convert to HTML5 so I left the / off the tag so it would validate. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks, Kathleen0 -
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
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
301 Redirects
Hi, I ran the seomox link report and see that I have an entry for our home page (http://www.trophycentral.com/) and http://www.trophycentral.com/index.html. The index is shown with a 301 redirect. Does this mean that a redirect is already in place to http://www.trophycentral.com/? I want to ensure our traffic is not being split between the two urls, but not sure how to confirm this. Thanks! <colgroup><col width="294"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="81"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="80"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="77"></colgroup><colgroup><col width="214"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards
| URL | HTTP Status | Total Links | Page Authority | Number of Linking Root Domains |
| http://www.trophycentral.com/ | 200 | 5746 | 53 | 244 |
| http://www.trophycentral.com/index.html | 301 | 5123 | 42 | 4 |1 -
Ajax #! URLs, Linking & Meta Refresh
Hi, We recently underwent a platform change and unfortunately our updated ecom site was coded using java script. The top navigation is uncrawlable, the pertinent product copy is undetectable and duplicated throughout the code, etc - it needs a lot of work to make it (even somewhat) seo-friendly. We're in the process of implementing ajax #! to our site and I've been tasked with creating a document of items that I will test to see if this solution will help our rankings, indexing, etc (on Google, I've read the issues w/ Bing). I have 2 questions: 1. Do I need to notify our content team who works on our linking strategy about the new urls? Would we use the #! url (for seo) or would we continue to use the clean url (without the #!) for inbound links? 2. When our site transferred over, we used meta refresh on all of the pages instead of 301s for some reason. Instead of going to a clean url, our meta refresh says this: . Would I update it to have the #! in the url? Should I try and clean up the meta refresh so it goes to an actual www. url and not this browsererrorview page? Or just push for the 301? I have read a ton of articles, including GWT docs, but I can't seem to find any solid information on these specific questions so any help I can get would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Improvements0 -
Not sure which URL to use for 301 redirect
A client has new website design completed by another developer, was launched in April of this year. No 301 redirect was set up so duplicate content is an issue. Client has had a website with same domain name for about 10 years, but has not had any SEO work completed before or since his new site design. For non-www there are 6 referring links - 1 considered to have authority, for www there are also 6 but 3 considered to have authority. More links seem to coming from www than non-www. But for one of the clients keywords they are ranked #1 for their area and that links to their non-www address. And even though no redirects set up by developer, non-www has had far more visits according to Google Analytics. So many basics that still need to be done for site: no meta-descriptions on any page, H1 and page titles could use keywords, call to action moved above fold, etc. Considering this is a new site, and new SEO work and many more inbound links needed, does it matter which address I redirect to? _Cindy Barnard
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar0