How to conduct catch 301 redirects & have the separate 301 redirects for the key pages
-
Hi,
We've currently done a site migration mapping and 301 redirecting only the sites key pages. However two GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) is picking a massive amount of 404 areas and there has been some drop in rankings.
I want to mitigate the site from further decline, and hence thought about doing a catch 301 - that is 301 redirecting the remaining pages found on the old site back to the home page, with the future aim of going through each URL one by one to redirect them to the page which is most relevant.
Two questions,
(1) can I do a catch 301 and if so what is the process and requirements that I have to give to the developer?
(2) How do you reduce the number of increasing 404 errors from a site, despite doing 301 redirects and updating links on external linking sites.
Note: The server is apache and the site is hosted on Wordpress platform.
Regards,
Vahe
-
From my experience, doing a catchall 301 redirect to the homepage would be more devastating than leaving the 404 pages. The best idea is just to start knocking them out as soon as possible. For the pages that don't exist and there isn't a related page, leave them on the 404. Over time they will work themselves out of the SERPs.
Definitely don't abuse the 301 redirect feature. It is for permanent changes not temporary changes. You could really hurt future efforts on your site.
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
-
Redirecting Pages During Site Migration
Hi everyone, We are changing a website's domain name. The site architecture will stay the same, but we are renaming some pages. How do we treat redirects? I read this on Search Engine Land: The ideal way to set up your redirects is with a regex expression in the .htaccess file of your old site. The regex expression should simply swap out your domain name, or swap out HTTP for HTTPS if you are doing an SSL migration. For any pages where this isn’t possible, you will need to set up an individual redirect. Make sure this doesn’t create any conflicts with your regex and that it doesn’t produce any redirect chains. Does the above mean we are able to set up a domain redirect on the regex for pages that we are not renaming and then have individual 1:1 redirects for renamed pages in the same .htaccess file? So have both? This will not conflict with the regex rule?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez0 -
How to create AMP Pages for product website?
How to create AMP Pages for product website? I mean we can create it easily when we have wordpress through plugin, what about when we have millions of pages, It would be too tedious to create amp version of every page. So, is there any alternative way to create amp version?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sachin.kaushik0 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Page loads fine for users but returns a 404 for Google & Moz
I have an e-commerce website that is built using Wordpress and the WP E-commerce plug-in, the products have always worked fine and the pages when you view them in a browser work fine and people can purchase the products with no problems. However in the Google merchant feed and in the Moz crawl diagnostics certain product pages are returning a 404 error message and I can't work out why, especially as the pages load fine in the browser. I had a look at the page headers and can see when the page does load the initial request does return a 404 error message, then every other request goes through and loads fine. Can anyone help me as to why this is happening? A link to the product I have been using to test is: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/ Here is a part of the header dump that I did: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leapSEO
GET /organic-clothing/lounge-wear/organic-tunic-top/ HTTP/1.1
Host: earthkindoriginals.co.uk
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Cookie: __utma=159840937.1804930013.1369831087.1373619597.1373622660.4; __utmz=159840937.1369831087.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); wp-settings-1=imgsize%3Dmedium%26hidetb%3D1%26editor%3Dhtml%26urlbutton%3Dnone%26mfold%3Do%26align%3Dcenter%26ed_size%3D160%26libraryContent%3Dbrowse; wp-settings-time-1=1370438004; __utmb=159840937.3.10.1373622660; PHPSESSID=e6f3b379d54c1471a8c662bf52c24543; __utmc=159840937
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 09:58:33 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.17
X-Pingback: http://earthkindoriginals.co.uk/xmlrpc.php
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 6653
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-80 -
301 redirects within same domain
If I 301 redirects all urls from http://domain.com/folder/keyword to http://domain.com/folder/keyword.htm Are new urls likely to keep most of link juicy from source url and maintain the rankings in SERP?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bull1350 -
Need advice on 301 domain redirection
Hello friends, We have two sites namely spiderman-example.com & avengers-example.com which sells the same product listed out under similar categories, since we are about to stop or put down the site “avengers-example.com” because we just want to concentrate in bringing up a single brand called spiderman-example.com. “Spiderman-example” has comparatively more visitors and conversion rates than ''avengers-example'' ie. 90 % more traffic and conversion. Avengers-example has a small fraction of loyal customers who still search for the brand-name & there are a hand-full of potential keywords those ranking on its own. So is it advisable to redirect Avengers-example to spiderman-example using 301-redirect? Will this help to gain any link-juice from Avengers-example? If so how can we effectively redirect between two domain’s with minimal loss in page authority & linkjuice to enhance ''spiderman-example''? Off beat:These names "Avengers" and "Spiderman" were just used as an example but the actual site names has no relation to the ones mentioned above.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | semvibe0 -
301 Redirect to a new domain, Need linkbuilding ideas
Hi, I just 301 redirected my 3 year old domain to a new domain which was created yesterday. Now i want to start link building to my new domain. Should i start slowly by publishing 4-5 articles on article directories and a 1 press release a week? Can someone suggest me some ideas on how to handle a new domain. Will be waiting for replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dex3783783780 -
Lost all ranking after site-wide 301 redirect
Hi all I did a complete site-wide 310 redirect about 3 weeks ago for a site that had consistently been in Pos 1-5 for my targeted keyword ("low glycemic foods"). I changed the domain from low-glycemic-foods-org to low-glycemic-diet.com because I thought that was a more appropriate title and thru my readings I believed that if I carefully followed the recommended procedures I would quickly regain my SERP. Webmaster tools is showing that I have over 800 inbound links - many from very trustworthy sources including .edu, etc BUT my home page is nowhere to be found for the keyword search "low glycemic diet". My Seomoz onpage SEO score is an "A" Any enlightenment would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | veezer0