301 Directs
-
We have found a lot of 404 error pages that we have transferred with 301 directs.
My questions is, should these 301 directs be marked as a NF (nofollow)?
-
Haa!
I love that infographic Greg! We have a printed version on our war room wall
-
- No you should not use NF (nofollow) on your 301 redirects. Make sure when redirecting your 404's that you are redirecting them to a relevant page.
- Never NoFollow 301s unless it an affiliate link if for instance you had the site that allowed someone to sign up and you are compensated financially for that person signing up on your website then you would use the nofollow tag. Here is it URL discussing what I'm talking about Example of affiliate links
- If you did add NoFollow on your code change it ASAP an instance of when you may see it used is when somebody puts a URL in the comment box of any major blogging platform for instance no follow is built into comments on WordPress but that's all automatic. Meaning you do not have to add the no follow I bring this up only if this involves you checking your code.
- You should never know follow a link that is internal you would destroy your ability to be found online. Outside of the affiliate link scenario I gave above.
Greg
-
Google will eventually get rid of them. If you have similar pages to the ones that are 404 errors, then you should redirect them. If you don't then best practice is to let them fall off.
However, if you had key terms ranking on page 1 or 2 on those pages I would definitely redirect them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp5Nf8ANfOw This is a video by Matt Cutts where he kind of tells you how to handle these errors effectively
-
No, you don't want to NoFollow 301s. The point of a 301 permanent redirect is for "everyone to be redirected" - users, search bots, & link juice - but adding NoFollow would prevent this.
-
We have had 404 errors for over a month now through Moz. These are of high priority to be taken care of as well, so leaving it for Google to get rid of sounds very discouraging. These links are not ones we use on our site anymore and that is why we've been re-directing.
-
I think 404's should be 404's as if someone is linking to pages that don't exist, a 404 is the best response. Google and bots will see a 404 and remove that url.
301's are more useful when reorganizing a site and traffic (inbound links, search traffic) come in to old urls. To just redirect all 404s as a 301 us not usefull I would say.
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 to search results page?
Hi - we just launched our redesigned website. On the previous site, we had multiple .html pages that contained links to supporting pdf documentation. On this new site, we no longer have those .html landing pages containing the links. The question came up, should we do a search on our site to gather a single link that contains all pdf links from the previous site, and set up a redirect? It's my understanding that you wouldn't want google to index a search results page on your website. Example: old site had the link http://www.oldsite.com/technical-documents.html new site, to see those same links would be like: http://www.newsite.com/resources/search?View+Results=&f[]=categories%3A196
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Moving to a new domain name - 301 redirect NOT an option
Hi everyone My question concerns moving from an old to a new domain name without losing all previous SEO efforts. I am aware that a properly executed 301 redirect is the answer and way to go as well as telling Google about it in Webmaster Tools. However, what is the situation, if you do not own the old domain name anymore? If you have no means of getting back the old domain name and wanting to basically mask/switch the already existing website to the new domain name, will search engines penalise the "new site" as a duplicate, since the "old site" is still in the search engine rankings? I know that not being able to execute a proper 301 redirect and starting out with a new domain means a fresh start, but what is the best way to minimise the negative impact (if any)? Basically dropping the sites' current content and starting out new in favour of the new domain name is not really an option. Even if you were to take the content from the old site and place it on another site, this would surely be seen as duplicate too. Anyone thinks that Webmaster Tools/Google is savvy enough to spot the difference when the "old site" gets removed and the "new one" added instead (in Webmaster Tools). I read something along the lines about having your host point the DNS from the old site to the new one. Could something like be helpful? Thanks all in advance for your help and input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hermski0 -
Pages that 301 redirect to a 404
We are going through a website redesign that involves changing URL's for the pages on our site. Currently all our pages are in the format domain.com/example.html and we are moving to stip off the .html file extension so it would just be domain.com/example We have thousands of pages as the site deals with news so building a redirect for each individual page isn't really feasible. My plan is to have a generic rewrite rule that redirects any page that ends .html to the stripped off version of this. A problem I can see with this is that it will also redirect pages that don't exist. So for example, domain.com/non-existant-page.html would 301 to domain.com/non-existant-page which would then return a 404 status. What would the SEO repercussions be for this? Obviously if a page doesn't exist already then it shouldn't show up in the search engine indexes and shouldn't be a problem but I'm a bit worried about how old pages that currently legitimately 404 will be treated when they start to 301 redirect to a 404 instead. Not sure if there any other potential issues from this that I've missed either? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbb0240 -
Question about moving content from one site to another without a 301
I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site. Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc. We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy. We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites. Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow. Do you think that is the case? What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
What is the Proper Use of 301 redirects for SEO purposes?
I heard and read from different sources that 301 redirects from aged domains with healthy link profiles is great to boost a sites rank as oppose to building a site around the page and linking it to the domain you want to rank. Whats is the best practice for this strategy? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars0 -
Aged domain and 301 redirect? (11 year old domain)
Hey everyone, I'm about to launch a new website for an accounting firm. They currently have a website, which has an 11 year old domain. They are doing very well locally for SEO, and i'm guessing it's because of the aged domain, as their website is very badly built, and contains almost no content. They would like to launch the new site with a simpler, easier to remember domain. If i launch the new site, point the aged domain using a 301 redirect, and do redirects for all of the old pages to the newer versions of them, is there a chance the company will lose their current SEO rankings? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCDesign740 -
How long for a 301 redirect to pass PR?
Hi, How long does it take for a 301 redirect to pass PR/Juice to the new domain it's redirecting to? From what I understand you tell Google in Webmaster tools this domain is now going to this domain and then setup a file on the old domains hosting to redirect to the new. And that's it! If that is correct how long does it take? 2 days, 2 weeks, months, maybe never??? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Can re-directs decrease your rankings??
Hi Guys, I need some advice here please - I have the chance to put some links on a few websites to my website in hope it will help with my rankings.. BUT - I have noticed that the webstites are being re-directed to another websites.. so my questions is ; Can re-driects decrease your rankings?? Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090