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
toxxx.com
(they just changed TLDs).Last year they 301 redirected
xxx.com
toyyy.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
toxxx.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.
-
I know this has been a couple of years, but just a heads up that we've written a more permanent resource about this question on the Moz blog (as it seems to come up periodically):
-
Thanks for your answer!
Of course i will redirect all the domains to the new one in order to avoid loops.
- About loops i was referring to the browser cache. As far as i know ome browsers cache also the 301 redirect, so will it be possible that for some users for some time the website will be invisible?
- So, if i won't be penalized in undoing a 301 redirect, this means that the "permanent" characteristic of 301 is not that strict actually...right?
-
1. There will be some kind of turbulence but if domains are OK (not penalized) then you shouldn't hesitated.
2. This loop is wrong. You should do it xxx.com -> xxx.it; yyy.com -> xxx.it; never enter into redirect loop because this make mess even huge that you expect. Also consider entering HTTP/2 and switching to HTTPS. Because this will be major moving in 2016 year and sooner or later you will do this too.
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
-
How can a site rank high without any visible SEO tactics?
Hi SEO specialists, I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but there is something bugging me for awhile now, so I thought let's give it a try. I work for several clients and one of them works in the Psychic business. Since a few months we see that site from Psychicvop.com is taking over all kinds of top rankings in Google. The strange thing is that I can't detect anything that I always learned which is basic material for SEO. There isn't much content and there link profile isn't really spectacular either. Does any of you have an idea what it is about this sites that makes them outrank every other site in the business?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiveFootballTickets0 -
Possible issues with 301 redirecting to a new domain name
Ive got a current domain and after a bit of a rebrand Im considering 301 rediecting the current site to a newly purchased domain. Id redirect each age to idential pages. Am I likely to see any issues. I know this is the recomended way from Google but just wondering how smoothly it works and whether Im likely to see any ranking drops or other problems?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulfoz16090 -
301 Redirects - 4 sites into 1
Hey all, I have an SEO conundrum that seems to have no right or wrong answer. If you have 2 minutes I’d love to hear your opinion. The Situation
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PamelaH88
Our client has 4 ecommerce sites (Sites A, B, C & D) all selling the same products.
He wishes to to merge all 4 sites into a single site (Site A) Options
In order to maintain maximum SEO authority do we: A - Choose a single site (B, C, or D) with the most SEO authority/juice/power and 301 re-direct it into Site A
Or
B – 301 re-direct all 3 sites (B, C & D) into Site A Our experience says that 301’ing from a single site works well, but from multiple sites feels spammy and risky. Really keen too hear your thoughts.1 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Php 301 redirect
Hi I am migrating an old wordpress site to a custom PHP site and the URL profiles will be different, so want to retain all link profiles and more importantly if a user visits the old urls via search then they are seamlessly transferred to the new equivalent page For example www.domain.com/about-us is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/aboutus.php www.domain.com/furniture is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/furniture-collections.php etc What is the best way of achieving this apart from .htaccess as not 100% confident of doing this. Could it be done via PHP or using meta tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
301 Redirect Dilemma - Website redesign
Hi Guys, We are redesigning a clients ecommerce site. As part of the process, we're changing the URL structure to make it more friendly. I have put together a provisional 301 redirect plan but I'm not sure just how far I need to go with it. So far I have extract all the pages from the existing site that Google Webmaster Tools says have links pointing at them - this totals 93 pages. I have matched each page like for like to the new website structure. My next step was to pull the landing pages report from Google Analytics, I have extracted the pages that received entrances over the last 6 weeks. This totals 553, less the redirects I have already done and cleaning up some Google Translate pages I have circa 410 pages left. Many of these pages has more than 1 URL pointing to that page. I'm debating how important it is that that all of these remaining 410 pages have individual redirects set up for them one by one. I have to rule out regex because there is no pattern that makes sense given that I have already set up redirects for the first 93 pages that have external links. My question therefore is how important are 301 redirects on pages that have no external links and receive less than 10 entrances over a 6 week previous period? Do I need to 301 every single product on the old site to it's corresponding page on the new site? Also, I'm not sure how to treat pages that have mutliple URL's on the old site, the existing URL structure is such a mess that in some instances I have 5 URL's for one product page? I could feasibly create 5 seperate redirects but is this necessary? Also what about speed considerations, the server is going to have to load these redirects and it may slow the site down. I'm sitting at 100 odd so far. Any answers are most appreciated. Thanks Derek.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseo0 -
301 redirect every pages?
Good evening, my question might sound stupid but please forgive me, I am still learning SEO. If I build a new site that will replace an existing site. Is there any point to do a 301 redirect for pages that had no inbound link so, no juice to pass? I kind of think that it would be a better practice to 301 redirect each pages to a page that make sense on the new web site .... but here is why I think that. Why I say that If I am lucky, many of my old web site pages will be indexed, many of them having no inbound links. So once the new web site online, until all my new web sites pages are indexed, I could imagine Google would send people to the index pages (the old ones that do not exist anymore)... I am right? So in that case, if I do a 301 redirect only for pages that have inbound links, the user would end up on a 404 page. Could you tell me if it make sense how I think? Thanks a lot !! Nancy P.S. I would not redirect if it make no sense to the user. I fully understand that we must always keep the user experience in mind in any 404 and 301 redirect decisions. But to simplify the question, just suppose it is ok from a user perspective to map every old site pages to a page in new web site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnigmaSolution0 -
Flash to HTML? Will I lose rank when I return?
My clients site in in flash! I am taking it down and building an all HTML site. the domain is 11 years old and google has only indexed 3 pages...Yikes! My question is that when I rebuild the site and optimize it for certain keywords and get my placement moved higher and then switch back in 6 months to the all flash site. Will I lose my gained rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0