What is the Proper Use of 301 redirects for SEO purposes?
-
I heard and read from different sources that 301 redirects from aged domains with healthy link profiles is great to boost a sites rank as oppose to building a site around the page and linking it to the domain you want to rank. Whats is the best practice for this strategy?
Thanks
-
Take every 301 redirect you can get. There may be link equity which is unitilsed there.
-
Thanks for the quick response Matt. It make complete sense thanks for the intel.
-
Well a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect so it passes on 90-99% of link juice gained by the page your are redirecting. Therefore it would be better to 301 redirect an old page domain with a healthy link profile as you will pick up benefit from the multiple links gained as opposed to one link from a site of reasonable authority if you were to build a site around that page. The ranking impact from the redirect will be far greater as you are essentially gaining multiple links in one hit once the search engines catch up and recognize the redirects, thus having the greatest impact on ranking in relation to the two methods you mention above. Hope this makes sense...
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
-
Removing 301 redirect from 2.5 yr old domain
Hello, Need Advise. We are in Automobiles We have an Automotive site - build 3 yrs back - which is our main site (Site A) We built a separate niche site on Used cars 2.5 yrs back (Site B - url http://www.usedcarindelhi.com) - did seo - promote it for a year and later on in feb 2013 - did 301 domain redirection to Site A Now - we thinking to rebuild Site Site B again and remove redirection Will there be any harm on Site A, as we have now removed the redirection or shall we pass on link from home page of Site B to Site A i.e say Powered by Site A (on Top) or at all no direct linking is actually needed. PS :- Also - can anyone let know the backlink quality of www.usedcarindelhi.com. Its PR 3, DA - 18, Majestic Citation Flow - 18, Trust Flow - 11 . Pl advise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Multiple 301 Redirects on the same domain name
Hi, I'd appreciate some advice ont he below. I have a website, say www.site.co.uk that has just been redesigned using a new CMS. Previously it had URLs in the format /article.php?id=123, the new site has more friendly urls in the format /articles/article-slug. I have been able to import the old articles into my CMS using the same article IDs and I have created a unique slug for each post. So now in my database, I have the article id (from the querystring) and a slug. However, I have hundreds of old URLs indexed by Google in the format /article.php?id=123 and need to redirect these. My plan was to do the following. 301 Redirect /article.php?id=123 to an intermediate page, in this case /redirect/123. On this intermediate page I would do a database lookup for the article slug, based on the ID from the querystring, create a new URL and perform a second 301 redirect to my new URL E.g. /articles/article-slug-from-database. Whilst this works and keeps the site usable for visitors the two 301 redirects do worry me, as I don;t want Google indexing lots of /redirect/[article id] urls. The other solution is to generate hundreds of htaccess redirect rules that map old url to the new url. The first solution is much cleaner, but the two 301's worry me. Will Google work this out on it's own, is there a better way? Any advice is much appreciated. Cheers Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyCrompton1 -
Canonicalization interact with 301 redirects?
This is a interesting one I think. I have recently taken down some product list pages from our website www.towelsrus.co.uk. These have canonicalisation in place to deal with pages where a query string is generated depending on the search criteria. When I put a 301 redirect in place the target page redirects fine, however webmaster tools then errors with 404 on all canonicalised pages. Is this correct behaviour and how do we get over this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Time sensitive: HELP! We are having a problem doing a 301 redirect.....what can we do instead?
Our website has dynamic URLs and we are moving to another server/platform. 301 redirects is looking like a highly unlikely solution. A 3rd party company is handling the back-end of the website which they say works more like a "search engine" than a traditional website. Maybe that explains why they're having a hard time with the 301 redirects. Worst case scenario: we can't use the 301 redirect. What else can we do? We are considering "Indicate your canonical (preferred) URLs by including them in a Sitemap" as Google describes here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066#2. I'm wondering if this method only applies to duplicate content........and what would happen once the old website results in a 404 page...... HELP! We need to cross over to the new platform as soon as possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatriotOutfitters810 -
Does 301 Redirect solve many problems?
Hi, there are many problems with my site. I have a lot of duplicate page titles and a lot of missing meta tags. However, I think most of them are BECAUSE i have a lot of duplicate pages. So I have read some articles and I will 301 redirect all the duplicated pages. Will this solve the problem with duplicate titles and missing meta tags as well? For example, my homepage has like 10 duplicated pages. Since they are duplicated, they have the same titles and they are all missing meta tags. I am planning to fill in meta tags JUST for the canonical page and redirect all duplicated pages to that page. Is this a good practice? Also, just curious, do different title tags and different meta tag description make the pages "not duplicated?" I assume it will still appear as duplicated.... Sorry if this was confusing...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Avoiding 301 on purpose; Landing homepage linking to another domain with "Click here to go" and 5 sec meta refresh
Hello, Some users when they search for our site by using "ourbrand" keyword that ignore the first result (we will call it here ourbrand.de -not real name-) and they look for ourbrand.com . Even though we have that domain name also registered (indeed it also has a high ranking power) we are doing a 301 from the dot com to the dot.de . What we want to do is to index the homepage of the dot com, that is http://www.ourband.com as a secondary result while doing a 301 to any other internal URL of the dot com to the dot .de. Yes, we will loose link juice for the main domain but at least we will not loose visits from the brand traffic (which is our main traffic). So the question is, would Google index ourbrand.com if we show just a landing page that just show our logo, a "Click here to go to ourbrand.de" with a link to http://www.ourbrand.de and a meta refresh of 6 seconds to that URL? Additionally a cookie would be sent to the first time visitors, so in the next time they would be automatically redirected. PS: The 6 seconds is to avoid search engine consider it a "301" like it do with short meta refresh (not sure what time is the minimum to avoid be considered a 301). Any other suggestions on how to deal with this problem are welcomed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zillo0 -
Home page url 301 redirect suggestion
Hello, In our site we have already done 301 redirect from http:// to http://www. However, the home page links are still coming in 2 ways http://www.mycarhelpline.com/ http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=search&Itemid=2 Need suggestion We have already use rel canonical is another 301 redirect to be used for maintaining the home page pr from seo point of view. Does google still takes both urls as separate url and finds duplicate content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
The use of subdomains to improve SEO?
A clients website which provide a number of trade services which have a page for each service they provide for example: carpentry or electrician or plumbing etc. currently these pages are found at domain.co.uk/bathrooms/ bathrooms.html I am trying to optmise each page better as they are competing with other sites who for example sell bathrooms rather than bathroom installers or plumbers. As part of the on page optimisation I plan to change the page names and directory structure. I had an idea to split the website down into subdomains for various sections i.e for all their services Create a sub domain such as http://plumber.domain.co.uk 2.) upload the relevant content (in this example the plumbing page) to the sub domain location 3.) correct all the links to absolute URLs for each sub domain / Will this help target better use of keywords in the URL in terms of SEO efforts ? hope it makes sense thanks Darren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bristolweb0