Restructuring/Removing 301 Redirects Due To Newly Optimized Keywords
-
Just to be clear, this is for one unique page on a website. Also, please see my diagram attached.
Let's say that a page's URL was originally /original. So, you optimize the page for a new keyword (keyword 1), and therefore change the URL to /keyword-1. A 301 redirect would then be placed...
- /original > /keyword-1
However, let's say 6 months down the road you realize that the keyword you optimized the page for (keyword 1) just isn't working. You research for a new keyword, and come up with (keyword 2). So, you'd like to rename the page's URL to /keyword-2.
After placing a redirect from the current page (keyword 1) to the 'now' new page (keyword 2), it would look like this...
- /original > /keyword-1 > /keyword-2
We know that making a server go through more than one redirect slows the server load time, and even more 'link-juice' is lost in translation.
Because of this, would it make sense to remove the original redirect and instead place redirects like this?
- /original > /keyword-2
- /keyword-1 > /keyword-2
To me, this would make the most sense for preserving SEO. However, I've read that removing 301 redirects can cause user issues due to browsers caching the now 'removed' redirect. Even if this is ideal for SEO, could it be more work than it's worth?
Does anyone have any experience/input on this? If so, I greatly appreciate your time!
-
Hi Corey,
I appreciate the you taking the time to read through our questions and provide some insight. Thanks for all of your help!
P.S. we're also from Chicago. So if I see you out and about, remind me that I owe you a brew.
Thanks,
Drew and the rest of the Logical Media Group team
-
Sure, the chaining redirects thing is something that Matt Cutts has talked about, I think in a few videos. I'm blessed with the ability to actually test/observe this stuff on loads of major sites that are in production as well, which is always the ultimate bit of validation on an SEO theory. Every now and again even Google will give advice that is flat out wrong, and for the most part, the SEO community will repeat it again and again as it's lore.
As for extracting headers, I have some back-end automation that I've written. Here's a nice little free tool that lets you see a single page though:
http://www.northcutt.com/tools/free-seo-tools/http-header-viewer/
If you have a chain of redirects occurring on a page, it will show. Sometimes this is necessary, especially if you have them flying in from all over (ie. in the application, in your .htaccess, in the Apache config files). It always helps to test; I've surprised a few clients with this one.
-
Hi Corey,
Thanks for taking the time to read through this and provide a response!
I'm happy to hear that you think the latter is indeed a better method. You say that chaining redirects causes other issues as well. Do you mind elaborating on this? I just watched a Matt Cutts video and he does confirm that you should avoid chaining too many redirects because Googlebot could actually stop following them at some point (sounds like around 4 or 5).
It's also interesting to hear that you mine for this situation during your auditing process. Do you do this by looking through the .htaccess file or is there a tool you use?
Thanks again for taking the time to help us out with this! Any additional feedback is greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
The Logical Media Group Team
-
Well, first of all, you can't use a keyword as your TLD.
I think I see what you're getting at though. No, don't ever chain redirects; part of my auditing process in fact involves mining for that exact thing, because it causes other issues. Instead of:
/originalUrl.php -> /secondTry.php -> /thirdTry.php
Do:
/originalUrl.php -> /thirdTry.php
/secondTry.php -> /thirdTry.phpI'd also add, at least half of the SEO blogs that I've read over the years are provably wrong in one way or another. But I think I see what that person was getting at too. 301 redirects do sometimes get cached, because a 301 redirect is supposed to be a permanent redirect (unlike a 302 redirect). That doesn't mean that you can't change it though.
In the scenario that they described, they said that they would not just remove the redirect and expect everything to return to normal. It was a 'permanent' redirect. It needs to be 'permanently' directed back to definitely be undone where actually possible.
Good luck.
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
-
Can I undo a 301 redirect? Will it penalize my ranking?
I'm in charge of building a website for a company that made a mess. They own domain xxx.it (xxx is not the real domain, just a placeholder). Some years ago they 301 redirected xxx.it to xxx.com (they just changed TLDs). Last year they 301 redirected xxx.com to yyy.com (so, they actually changed domains). Now, after 13 months, the company failed and the new leadership wants me to undo everything and 301 redirect from yyy.com to xxx.it. So: 301 redirect is permanent. So, conceptually it's wrong to undo it. What happens if I undo it? Will my ranking be penalized, even if a significant amount of time has passed (13 months)? Will crawlers detect a loop (even if i remove any 301 redirect from xxx.it and theorically break the loop)? Here is the potential loop: xxx.it -> xxx.com -> yyy.com -> xxx.it -> etc... All of the articles I found on the web are quite old and not clear about this topic, that's why I'm asking this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naska19900 -
Tags: 301 Redirect, Rel Canonical, or Leave Them Alone?
The title is pretty self explanatory ... we have cornerstone pages ( such as a page for "Widget A") that rank for a certain keyword and then relevant articles that all link to that particular cornerstone page. Each of those articles has the same tag ("Widget A") to tie them together. If you click on that tag, it creates a list of all articles with that tag. We think that this may be siphoning off some of that keyword Google Juice from our Widget A cornerstone page. Our question is, should we 301 redirect that tag to point to the Widget A cornerstone page, use a rel canonical pointing to the Widget A cornerstone page, or just leave it alone like we are doing now? Our goal is to have the Widget A cornerstone page receive the most Google Juice possible and not be diminished by the tags. Note* - We don't want to stop Google from crawling the tags because some of our tags rank highly for other keywords. Also, we tried 301 redirecting the tags before and our ranking dropped significantly ... however, we made a lot of site changes at the same time so we are not sure if the drop in rank was due to redirecting the tags or the site changes. Help please ... thanks in advance 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Humanovation0 -
301 redirecting staff Domain to Company Domain
My colleague owns a domain (A) for about 10 years that he does not use. The domain's content is the same as my company's website (B) content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
Question: Can I 301 redirect domain A to domain B's homepage or is it better he just closes down his website since this would not be SEO best practices? thank you0 -
301 Redirecting from Static to Dynamic URLs. I think we messed up
I'm looking for some guidance on an issue I believe we created for ourselves and if we undo what we did. We recently added attributed search to our sites. This of course created a bunch of dynamically generated URLS. For various reasons, it was decided to take some of our existing static URLs and 301 redirect them to their dyanamic counterpart. Ex .../Empire-Paintball-Masks-0Y.aspx now redirects to .../Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles-0Y.aspx?Manufacturer=Empire Many of these stat URLS had top 3 rankings for their associated keywords. Now, we don't rank for anything. I realize that 301 redirecting is the way to go...if you NEED to. My guess is our drop in keyword ranking is directly tied to what we did. I'm looking for an solid argument to be made to my boss as to why we should not have done this and that it, more than likely has resulted in dropped keyword rankings and organic traffic. I welcome any input. Also, if we decided to revert back (remove all 301 redirects and de-index all dynamic URLS), what is the likely hood we can recapture some of this lost organic traffic? Can I disallow indexing in a robot.txt file to remove, say anything with a '?' in the URL? Would the above URL example (which was ranking in the top 3 in SERPs), have a good chance of finding its way back? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Istoresinc1 -
Is a 301 to a 301 ok?
I have a site that has a lot of url differences. Due to coding we sometimes have to 301 to a page that is 301'd to another. Is there any danger in doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
How to do a 301 redirect for url's with this structure?
In an effort to clean up my url's I'm trying to shorten them by using a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file. How would I set up a rule to grab all urls with a specific structure to a new shorter url examples: http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/other-reviews/item/article-title http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/article-title So in the example above dynamically redirect all url's with /articles/reviews/other-reviews/item/ in it to /reviews/ so http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/boat-reviews/item/1550-review-nucanoe-frontier http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/other-reviews/item/1551-review-spyderco-salt http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/fishing-gear-reviews/item/1524-slayer-inc-sinister-swim-tail would be... http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/1550-review-nucanoe-frontier http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/1551-review-spyderco-salt http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/1524-slayer-inc-sinister-swim-tail with one 301 redirect rule in my .htaccess file.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mr_w0 -
Not allowing me 301 Redirect
I am trying redirect my old site to my new site, both on the same domain. For one reason or another, I am having a hard time redirecting the some of the old urls to the new site. Please let me know how I can fix this issue. Below are the following old urls that are not allowing me to redirect: <colgroup><col width="636"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/accommodations/ |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/dining/ |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/entertainment/ |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/events/ |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/flintstones/ |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/ |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/beach.html |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/dining.html |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/pools.html |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/ |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html |0 -
301 Redirect To Corresponding Link No Matter The URL?
Hey guys I have hosting on Host Gator with I believe an apache web server. I need a code to put in the HT ACCESS to redirect all WWW URL's to their corresponding http URL. I haven't been able to get a code to work. For example, http://www.mysite.org/page1.html -> http://mysite.org/page1.html , without having to redirect hundreds of pages individually Here is the format my server uses in the HT ACCESS file for 301 redirects. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.org$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.org
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DustinX
$RewriteRule ^Electric-Pressure-Cookers.html$ "http://mysite.org/Pressure-Cookers.html" [R=301,L] Thanks0