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
-
Unsolved I have a "click rate juice" question would like to know.
Hello I have a "click rate juice" question would like to know. For example. I created a noindex site for a few days event purposes. Using a random domain like this: event.example.com. Expecting 5000+ clicks per day. Is it possible to gain some traffic juice from this event website domain "example.com" to my other main site "main.com" but without exposing its URL. Thought about using 301 redirecting "example.com" to "main.com". But it will reveal the example-b.com to the general public if someone visits the domain "example.com". Also thought about using a canonical URL, but it would not be working because the event site is noindex. or it would not matter at all 🤔 Wondering if there is a thing like this to gain some traffic juice for another domain? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blueli0 -
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 -
URL Structure Question
Am starting to work with a new site that has a domain name contrived to help it with a certain kind of long tail search. Just for fictional example sake, let's call it WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com. The idea is that people might do searches for "what are the best restaurants in seattle" and over time they would make some organic search progress. Again, fictional top level domain example, but the real thing is just like that and designed to be cities in all states. Here's the question, if you were targeting searches like the above and had that domain to work with, would you go with... whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle-washington whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/washington/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/what-are-the-best-restaurants-in-seattle-wa ... or what and why? Separate question (still need the above answered), would you rather go with a super short (4 letter), but meaningless domain name, and stick the longtail part after that? I doubt I can win the argument the new domain name, so still need the first question answered. The good news is it's pretty good content. Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Massive URL Migration with thousands of 301
Hey Everyone! I'm currently working on a project that we have A Lot of product pages and we have thousands of URL's that need to be 301'd over. I know this can be a major issue and could lead to tons of errors. What is everyone's thought of doing such a huge Migration, Should I do it all in phases? or should I do them all at once so they can all be indexed together? What would you suggest to be the best way to go about doing such a massive migration?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
A very basic seo question
Sorry, been a long day and wanted a second opinion on this please.... I am developing an affiliate store which will have dozens of products in each category. We will not be indexing the product pages themselves as they are all duplicate content. The plan is to have just the first page of the category results indexed as this will have unique content about the products in that section. The later pagnated pages (ie pages 2,3,4,5 etc) will have 12 products on each but no unique content. Would the best advice be to add a canonical tag to all pages in the 'chairs' category pointing to the page with the first 12 results and the descriptions? This would ensure that the visitors are able to browse many pages of product but google won't index products 13 and onwards. Am I right in my thinkings? A supplemental question. What is the best way to block google from indexing/crawling 90,000 product listings which are pulled direct from the merchant so are not unique in the least. I have previous played with banning google from the product folder but it reports health issues in webmaster tools. Would the best route be a no index tag on all the product pages and to no follow all the products in the category listings? Many thanks Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Canonical URL Question
Hi Everyone I like to run this question by the community and get a second opinion on best practices for an issue that I ran into. I got two pages, Page A is the original page and Page B is the page with duplicate content. We already added** ="Page A**" />** to the duplicate content (Page B).** **Here is my question, since Page B is duplicate content and there is a link rel="canonical" added to it, would you put in the time to add meta tags and optimize the title of the page? Thanks in advance for all your help.**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRTBA0 -
Unique Ip Hosting Question
We have aged domains that have had unique ips for some time. Batch 1 average 2 years old and are in 1st to 5th place in their rankings. Batch 2 are 8 months old and not ranking at all. Will there be any issues associated with moving them all to a reseller account with a single ip address? In addition batch 1 that has good rankings with unique ips is there ever a possibility they will change our ips without notice or for any reason at all that will change and or fluctuate our rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shandaman0 -
301 or What?
Can someone please tell me the 100% correct way to set this up. Would I be right to set up a site this way... type in the browser..."example.com" and it re directs to "www.example.com. or, if i type in "example.com" it goes to example.com. or if I type in "www.example.com" it goes to "example.com"? or, type in "www.example.com" and it goes to "example.com" wouldn't most site link to a "www" version? PS whay isn;t the correct way set up by our HOST.? They should know what is most beneficial? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0