Clarification around 301 redirects.
-
I’ve come across numerous blogs recently that suggest that SEOs should NOT do bulk re-directs to a category page. This has come as something of a surprise (doh!!) and I feel like I should already know this. It does seem like there is lots disagreement here so I thought that I’d ask what people’s opinions were to make sure that I get my thinking straight. I've read all the main Moz blog posts on this topic and, although really useful, they've left me none the wiser around a few specific questions.
Here’s some more detail about the situation. We’re currently consolidating a lot of content into a main blog, which will be the focal point of new blogs posts that are created. This is different to the past, where we tended to create separate blogs for different products on separate domains. I’m currently considering how we move content across from one the older blogs to this new blog (which will soon sit on a subfolder of our main domain).
I have three (!) questions:
1) Could you confirm that doing bulk re-directs a category page is bad? I already know that doing them all to the homepage is an error.
2) Should I re-direct the home page of the old blog on a separate domain to the relevant category page on the new site? The category page is related, but does not cover the EXACT topic. The category page covers our replacement product offering. It I shouldn't do this, where should I re-direct the old blog domain to?
3) I’ve recommended that we set up 301 redirects on a one-to-one basis, redirecting each piece of content to its new location on the old site. What about content that has been earmarked for removal and for which there is no obvious alternative? My previous recommendation has been to re-direct these pages to the most relevant category page on the new blog. Would it be better to let this 404 or, as an alternative, create a custom 404 for the users on the new blog highlighting the new content that we offer?
Any help would be appreciated
-
Thanks for your reply Monica. The blog is a landing page where the separate blog posts were listed, which is what I think you are suggesting so I'll go ahead and recommend that we do the re-directs to the corresponding page.
Thank you all for your replies - it's helped to get my thinking right
-
I agree with everyone here. But I do have some separate thoughts.
Bulk redirects aren't negative if they are done correctly. For example, I just moved a website that had about 1000 discontinued products. As opposed to losing those valuable pages, we redirected them to the corresponding category pages or to the replacement products. The 600 or so links that had to be redirected to a category aren't going to hurt my site. It will help my customers who are looking for those products, however. A client would probably rather land on a page that says "this product is no longer available, here are the replacements" than a 404 error page.
In the case of a blog, it is a lot better to redirect each blog to its new home. For blogs that no longer exist, I would redirect them to the corresponding category. No one likes to hit a 404 page, and if there is a chance that someone could land on a page that no longer exists, it is better to have them get to somewhere on your site.
As far as your blog's home page, is that a separate category on your site or is your entire site a blog? If your page was just a landing page where your blogs were listed, then you should redirect to the corresponding page on the new site, like Jonathan suggested.
-
- I'm going to say it depends on the scenario. In real estate, or automotives, online auctions, retail, basically any industry that cycles through inventory with no guarantee that listing will return - I say it is good to do bulk redirects. Better to send your users to a page with closely related product offerings than a 404, right? Now, I wouldn't do all of them to the homepage or the highest level child. Instead, do them to the lowest level child folder.
So, for example, if your store no longer carries a certain product, but you do still sell products from the vendor... then redirect a URL like website.com/product-category/product-vendor/product-abc123 to /product-category/product-vendor/.
-
Did you keep any of the content from that old blog? I might suggest redirecting to a landing page with your most popular content related to the old product offering, and then also adding links to the replacement offering and its helpful content.
-
Similar to what I suggested in no. 1, I think I would redirect to the most relevant category page on the new blog. A custom 404 isn't a bad idea, either, but I think it's always best to avoid having any search engine log a 404.
-
I'll keep it short:
1. Doing bulk redirects is bad, because you will not have relevancy between your links.
2. Redirect your old homepage to the page that is the most relevant to that on your new site. It can be the homepage on your new site or maybe it is a product page.
3. Redirect them to the most relevant pages.
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
-
Adventurous 301 redirection chain
Picture this - if you have a spirit for adventure! Client builds Alpha****Domain.com Then builds a number of backlinks to Alpha****Domain.com Client also creates a number of 301 redirects from several older domains to AlphaDomain.com Client then changes Alpha****Domain.com to Beta****Domain.com They create 301 redirects from Alpha****Domain.com to Beta****Domain.com But then... they 'park' Alpha****Domain.com (ie. no longer accessible)! About one year later, client changes a whole bunch of URLs on Beta****Domain.com without keeping track of changes. Thankfully, the hosting service (Shopify) automatically creates some redirects, but it's more by accident than design! Questions: After step 6 above, are the 301 redirects created in steps 3 and 5 now totally redundant and broken? If AlphaDomain.com no longer exists, surely all redirects to and from this domain are broken? Or can they be recovered? What happens to all the backlinks originally created in step 2? Finally, can anything be done to recover lost URLs in step 7? Yes. What a mess!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Technical 301 question
Howdy all, this has been bugging me for a while and I wanted to know the communities ideas on this. We have a .com website which has a little domain authority and is growing steadily. We are a UK business (but have a US office which we will be adapting too soon) We are ranking better within google.com than we do on google.co.uk probably down to our TLD. Is it a wise idea to 301 our .com to .co.uk for en-gb enquiries only? Is there any evidence that this will help improve our position? will all the link juice passed from 301s go to our .co.uk only if we are still applying the use of .com in the US? Many thanks and hope this isn't too complicated! Best wishes,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TVFurniture
Chris0 -
301 Redirect / Canonical loop on home page?
Hi there, My client just launched a new site and the CMS requires that the home page goes to a subfolder - clientsite.com/store. Currently there is a redirect in place such that clientsite.com -> clientsite.com/store. However, I want clientsite.com to be the canonical version of the URL. What should I do in this case, given that there is now a loop between the redirected page and the canonical page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
Can some brilliant mozzer out there teach a moron/newbie like me how to 301 redirect several URL's I have?
Okay - I am a supermodel. I look pretty. My legs are amazing. My cheekbones are high. But when it comes to 301 redirects I am the ugliest supermodel on the block. Crap, here is the truth: I am not even a supermodel. I am just a middle-aged, goofy looking dude who is a newbie to fixing websites. I have inherited several sites from a friend and I have been helping by creating solid contextual links internally and externally for a while. But, when Roger the wondrous SEOMoz robot talks to me, he says, "oops, it looks like your foolish freak self has a site that has both a www. and a non-www, which can create competition for yourself." What do I do when he says that? I just whisper a "thank-you" but gently press the skip this step button and go on with my life because I do not know how to make my non-www.'s redirect into the www. sites... Now, I have sort of asked this question on the site before, but I was answered by someone who does not understand my level of ignorance. any use of the word canonical or just put this lfwjkshj.htp/php inside the left ear of your mom, does not tell me anything so, is there any willing and kind soul who can walk me through redirecting several of my sites to their proper home - kind of like Carl Chubbs Weathers did for Happy Gilmore in that Academy Award winning classic? Thanks for the help in advance best, dumbhead
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creativeguy0 -
Warning about a 302 redirect
Hello everyone, I'm testing the pro software and recently I installed an SSL Certificate on one of the websites I'm monitoring, I put in place an .htaccess directive to force all traffic to the secure version of the site (https) and I noticed how this raised a warning because my directive is forcing the traffic with a 302 redirect. These are the lines: _RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80 _ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com/$1 [R,L] I understand that this is not good so I figured since I'm already redirecting all www to -www I can force traffic that arrives trying to use www to the secure version like so: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example.com$ RewriteRule (.*) https://example.com/$1 [R=301,L] But this is not 100% effective because if someone visits the site directly on the -www version this person wont get redirected hence it wont be forced to see the https. So my question is: does anybody know of an alternate way to force traffic to the secure socket using a 301 instead of a 302? Oh boy, just by writing the question I think I may have figured it out, I'll post it anyways because (1) I could be wrong and (2) It could help someone else. It just hit me but the directive that is forcing www to -www specifies what type of redirect to do here [R=301,L]. So to try to answer my own question before even posting it this could probably do the trick: _RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80 _ _RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com/$1 [_R=301,R,L] I'll be testing it out ASAP and again I'll post the question anyways just in case it doesn't work, in case someone has a good suggestion or to help someone that could be in the same situation. If this is turns out right I will need someone to slap me in the face 😐
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevenpicado0 -
302 redirect
Aloha, I do a small study of 302 redirects. I wonder if you have any examples of sites where the use of a 302 is made.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon
For example, to ski resorts: where there is a summer version and a winter version. In this case, the field of 302 will return the version of the relevant season. ex: http://www.valmorel.com/ >> 302 >> http://www.valmorel.com/fr/hiver/accueil-hiver.html I wonder if the use of 302 is the right solution.
What do you think? D.0