Tricky 301 question
-
A friend has relaunched a website but his web guys (he didn't consult me!) didn't do any 301s and now traffic unsurprisingly has tanked.
The old site and database no longer exists and there are now 2000+ 404's.
Any ideas how to do the 301s from old urls to new product urls WITHOUT it being a massive manual job?
-
That's my point, you only need to worry about the pages that had external links
Thanks -
Thanks
-
Pages dont just get equity from external links of course. If a category page has 10 links to it the product pages linked to on that page benefit. The wholesale drop in rankings isn't because every page had an external link to it.
-
I don't know what you mean about link equity, if there is no link pointing to the page then there is nothing lost.
As for search engines finding a lot of 404s, they will remove them from the index after a while, no problem there, you are returning the correct status code, that's what they want. This will allow them to clean up there index and stop crawling the pages. -
If the majority of URLs have no logic, then it makes things a bit tricky in regards to minimizing the amount of work.
I once had a very active and large website with about 500-1000 single lines of rewrite code (1 for each URL) in my htaccess. Surprisingly, it did not slow the server down at any noticeable rate, unless you are very sensitive to milliseconds and even then, one trial to the next could easily differ from regular internet congestion. My point is, nobody ever noticed.
Here's a few ways that I would handle this job to get through it as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
The more aggressive and time consuming approach:
I would output all the URLs that were changed from phpmyadmin or whatever mysql administration tool you might use to a spreadsheet. From that spreadsheet, I would add the original URL.
Then with the old URL (A1) and new URL (A2) I would write a formula to output the correct rewrite (A3.) Then simply copy and paste that formula down all the rows that it applies to. You might need to break up the URLs to grab the right pieces for your formula.Of course use, regex where you can, and keep your .htaccess rewrites to a minimum.
If that is still too much work, hire someone to do it through elance.com
The somewhat sloppy pace-yourself-approach:
Another approach you could take is to just monitor google webmaster tools for all the page not found errors. And once a day or once a week, grab those URLS, create the rewrite, and mark it as fixed in webmaster tools.
The reason I say this is somewhat sloppy is because, you might find that you could have used regex in a lot of instances to better handle all those missing URLs.
But it may be a good way of staying on track with google, and handling the issues only as they arise so it does not feel like such a mammoth task.
-
Thanks Alan, yes they have good external links to many pages. They retail a very niche product and have a lot of forum, review, social type links. It might be though if need be they just have to focus mostly on 301s for the pages with those links. As best practise I am in favour of 301'ing regardless of external links as the link equity gets messed up and causes ranking issues, as in this case, as well as sending a signal to the engines about the amount of wasted resource they will use crawling a site with 1000s of 404s.
-
Thanks Donna & Luis. Luis is right i'm looking for a way for this not to be a mammoth manual task for their developer.
-
Thanks, the regex is a good idea and might be part of the solution for some urls at least but there seems to be some discrepancies in logic between old and new product urls and some of the new product urls are actually still the same as the old (which of course is fine).
-
Thanks Luis, unfortunately neither 1 or 2 are ideal.
1. I don't think there is much logic in the change of url structure between old and new product urls which makes that idea impossible.
2. Thats going to be a last resort
Andy
-
do you know if they had any external links?
If they don't have external links then I would just let them 404.
some people have some wired thoughts of what 301's do. They simply redirect a request, so a request o A is told to remake the request to to B, so the crawler will follow it that way and award the pagerank to the new page with a small loss on each request.If no external links what is there to gain? don't complicate your site with unnesasary redirects, there is a small argument that the pages may have been bookmarked at old url, but I think that argument is so weak I would not bother
-
Yeah. I heard him. I guess I'm saying "probably not".
I like how you're keeping us honest though Luis. I don't like it when people respond with what they want to say rather than with an answer to the specific question.
-
Donna,
Andy has been very specific about this: "WITHOUT it being a massive manual job" hehe
thanks for supporting my answer.
Luis
-
It really depends on the nature, link and traffic patterns of your site Andy. If the vast majority of those 2,000+ 404's are coming from pages that should never have been indexed in the first place, you can probably get away with Luis's 2nd suggestion. If they're differentiated, valuable, and show evidence of incoming links and traffic, you've got some work ahead of you.
You might be able to streamline the process by inventorying and grouping like pages, then doing group redirects. But I suggest you do some analysis first to determine whether the effort is warranted.
-
2000+ is a lot of URLs to work through. But you can most likely get through them quickly with a few good regular expression 301 redirects in your .htaccess
If you have a pretty consistent form from the old url to the new one, this will be a piece of cake.
ex:
old URL: this/was/coolnew URL: this/is/cool
However, if there is really no rhyme and reason to the newly formed URLs, this could end up taking a considerate amount of time.
I would look into writing 301 redirects with regular expressions in .htaccess (I'm assuming your server is and uses .htaccess)
There are a number of resources for doing this, and even one here at moz.com
https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection -
Hello Andy,
1. Try this: http://webdesign.about.com/od/htaccess/ht/redirect-an-entire-site-using-htaccess.htm
2. Second/faster solution. You could add this line of code to your .htacess file (and all the current "404's users" will go to the homepage):
ErrorDocument 404 /
But pay attention... 404's are perfectly normal if the page no longer exists, for user experience you should only ever use a 301 redirect if the page that no longer exists is going to a equal page.. i.e about cars to cars, about rabbits to rabbits. Maybe the only solution is creating a 404 specific landing page for this (with links to different sections of your site)
Hope this helps,
Luis
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 a website to mine within a subfolder
Hey there Mozzers, I have purchased a very amazing Social Media Related Plugin. I already have a business website about digital marketing which pretty much falls in the same category. I am thinking of transferring that plugin into a subfolder of my own website. Is there anything I should keep in mind when I do that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngelosS1 -
Pop up question and link flow?
Does a pop up like the one on this site www stressfreeprint co uk (top left corner about us, who we are) count as an external link or would link juice not flow to it. I like to have a few pages that i don't want to waste link juice on but would still like to have them and hope this is the answer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Parked Domain question
Hi, If a domain has been parked for more than 12 years, and has never been used for a project so far, does this has an impact on SEO or its like having a fresh new domain? Sebi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheHecksler0 -
Language Detection redirect: 301 or 302?
We have a site offering a voip app in 4 languages. Users are currently 302 redirected from the root page to /language subpages, depending on their browser language. Discussions about the sense of this aside: Is it correct to use a 302 redirect here or should users be 301 redirected to their respective languages? I don't find any guideline on this whatsoever...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner1 -
How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
I have encountered some issue with 301 redirect and htaccess file. I need to redirect the following url: http://www.domain.com/?specifications=colours/page/3 to: http://www.domain.com/colours The 301 redirect command I wrote in htaccess file is as follow: Redirect 301 /?specifications=colours/page/3 http://www.domain.com/colours And it doesn't work at the moment. What is the correct way to set up 301 redirect here? Your help will be sincerely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0 -
Diversifying anchor text question
Hi, I've seen a new article by Dr. Pete on diversifying links for 2013 (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-1-seo-tips-for-2013), now my question is this: Dr. Pete talks about mixing up the anchor text for links, is so we don't get caught out by Google or actually mixing it has a better impact? For example: 1. 20 anchor text links targeting just the target term. 2. 20 anchor text links targeting 4 variations of the target term. Is number 2 recommended so things look natural or does it actually have a better impact on SEO. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Explaining 301 redirects instead of 302
I am trying to explain in layman's terms to a client why using 302 for their redirects (which they have done themselves) is not right. There view is they do not seem to listen or believe what is being said to them and do not want to do permanent damage to the old domain so are using 302 redirects. I have explained over and over 301 is needed but I do not seem to be good at communicating this. Can someone give me a good example or description I can use to get my point across?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
How many pages to 301 Redirect
Hi Mozzers, My site has 11,200 pages indexed in Google and I'm looking to remove some of the lesser content which should probably have been picked up by Panda. However these pages work out to about 1,100 in total and I'm not sure whether to remove these bit by bit or just do it in one fell swoop? Does Google not like a site's indexed pages fluctuating too quickly? Are there any other considerations I should be aware of? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | panini0