301 Redirects on Large Real Estate Website
-
Hi guys,We are about to move over to a new website and need advice on handling the 301 redirects.We have a large real estate website with around 12,000 pages, a lot of these are properties (about 10,000)On our old website, the url structure for each property is as follows -domainname.com/property/view?property=14863on our new site, the url structure isdomainname.com/properties/view/6137The property ID number is always different from old site to new. The way we see it, we have two options. a.) a manual redirect of each and every property url. A very very long jobb.) a folder level redirect, so redirect the 'property' folder on the old site into the 'properties' folder on new. The con with this one is we are not sure if this is the best route to take, if it is how we would go about it?Some advice would be really appreciated guys. I know there are some hyper intelligent SEO's in here and we need to make sure we handle this right!Many thanks in advance.Mark
-
This is true, you can wait for google to deindex them, but that can take 6 months or more.
You could also wait for the 404s to show up and check the referrer and then manually set up the redirect, but if you miss seeing them, you may also risk the linking site removing the link.
Another thing you could do is pull reports from GWMT and Bing WMT and Majestic to discover who is linking to which pages, and then start with those redirects, then watch out for the 404s and pick them up as you discover them.
If you do want to push google along with removing the old pages, you can do it by requesting them in WMT. 12,000 isn't really many, and last time I tried it, you can ask for 1,000 per day, but you have to do them one at a time. That means either a slow manual process or do it with a macro. I think I've had 20,000 or more deleted that way.
-
Hi Mark,
Considering that the old property IDs and new property IDs don't match up and you'd have to configure 1-to-1 redirects (with what sounds like a lot of manual work to get it right and potentially a very large .htaccess file), I'm going to ask a dumb question: why do you need to redirect all of the properties?
In cases like this, I invariably pull some data in to prioritize URLs. Namely, inbound link and direct/referral traffic data.
If a page is not linked to from any external subdomains and gets little or no direct or referral traffic, it's usually best to simply let it return a 404 once you've updated the site - Google will hit the 404 and de-index the page in due time, while the new page will (provided the new site has sound architecture and some authority to justify a deep crawl budget) get picked up.
The only justifiable reason to do a 1-to-1 301 redirect across the board for this many URLs, in my opinion, is if there is enough link equity / traffic to justify the work. Otherwise, Google knows how to handle 404s and they'll crawl/index the new property URLs in due time.
Best,
Mike -
Hey Alan,
Thanks loads for the advice there. Makes a lot of sense.
Problem I have is we do not have any kind of access to the old site. Nor the client having a good relationship with the agency who made the previous site.
I have run multiple crawls of the old site with Screaming Frog and Moz and I just cant get all the properties spidered. Out of the total amount of properties I have about one third of them, which of course can be redirected.
We made a final change to the url structure so the property address is added. The urls now look like the following -
OLD - domainname.com/property/view?property=14863
NEW - domainname.com/property/street-name-postcode/propertyid
The main problem we have and why I think it is not possible using mod rewrite, is the property ids are different on both sites. There is really nothing in common between the two URLs at all aside from /property/ and page title.
Any further advice would be very much appreciated Alan as its clear you have done jobs like this before.
Thanks,
Mark
-
If you have unix and shell access it should be a snap.
but as you're asking this question, you probably don't even know what "grep" is
Get a list of title and URLs from each site
mix them together
sort by title
this will tell you if there are duplicates or if you missed any
if the domain names are different search and replace them so they are the same
Manipulate the list so it is in redirect format
12,000 is not a lot. I worked on sites with several million.
Don't do a folder level redirect.
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
-
301 Redirects Showing As 307 Redirects
Hi, Our clients are adamant that they have set up 301 permanent redirects on their websites, but when we check using Screaming Frog and various online HTTP status code checkers they are showing as 307 temporary redirects. Examples;
Technical SEO | | Webpresence
http://www.lifestylelifts.co.uk/home-lifts/
http://www.terrylifts.co.uk/ Again, the client says they are seeing 301 redirects. Why are we seeing 307's? Who is right? Very puzzling, any theories would be very much appreciated 🙂 Thanks in advance. Lee.0 -
Gradual Drop in GWT Indexed Pages for large website
Hey all, I am working on SEO for a massive sports website. The information provided will be limited but I will give you as much context as possible. I just started digging into it and have found several on-page SEO issues of which I will fix when I get to the meat of it but this seems like something else could be going on. I have attached an image below. It doesn't seem like it's a GWT bug as reported at one point either as it's been gradually dropping over the past year. Also, there is about a 20% drop in traffic in Google Analytics over this time as well. This website has hundreds of thousands of pages of player profiles, sports team information and more all marked up with JSON-LD. Some of the on-page stuff that needs to be fixed are the h1 and h2, title tags and meta description. Also, some of the descriptions are pulled from wikipedia and linked to a "view more" area. Anchor text has "sign up" language as well. Not looking for a magic bullet but to be pointed in the right direction. Where should I start checking off to ensure I cover my bases besides the on page stuff above? There aren't any serious errors and I don't see any manual penalties. There are 4,300 404's but I have seen plenty of sites with that many 404's all of which still got traffic. It doesn't look like a sitemap was submitted to GWT and when I try submitting sitemap.xml, I get a 504 error (network unreachable). Thanks for reading. I am just getting started on this project but would like to spend as much time sharpening the axe before getting to work. lJWk8Rh
Technical SEO | | ArashG0 -
301 Redirects
Hi, I have switched my site from a http .co.uk site to a https .com site. I have set a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file pointing all traffic going to the original .co.uk site to go to the new https: RewriteEngine on
Technical SEO | | imoprojects
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^up-bus.co.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.up-bus.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "https://www.up-bus.com/$1" [R=301,L] however when i search in google for keywords the original .co.uk site is still registering in search, is there something else I am required to do to tell google to use the new https site instead? Do i need to do redirects for every page, or is what I have done above sufficient? Hope you can help, I am struggling with getting our site to register on google search, any advice greatly welcome Thanks in advance, Ian0 -
301 Redirect Question
I am working with a website and I ran a Screaming Frog and noticed there are 4,600 301's on the website (www.srishoes.com). It seems like the issue is between the www. and without it and they aren't working together. Is this something that the website provider should update and what type of impact might this have on the site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ReunionMarketing
Matt0 -
Hi, I am little bit confused in 301 redirect
Hi, I am little bit confused I have set my preferred domain to www but anyone can access my site via both www and non www domains, do I need to 301 redirect all non www to www or not , If yes then I want to know Why and If no then also I want to Why.
Technical SEO | | amarjitkapur0 -
301 redirect new site design
Hi I'm just setting up some 301 redirects for a new site design about to go live. The old site structure had some 'overview' pages in the urls (without any content) that just 302'd to a sub page. Do i need 301 redirect these overview page urls or since they had no content theres no need and I probably shouldn't or should i ? Also for pages that have no direct equivalent replacement is it still best to 301 to nearest relevant page or just leave it. For example a thank you page that currently shows after user submits email form wont be on new site (since message shows on form page after submission rather than new page). Should i 301 to form page or just leave it ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
What if my host doesn't have the 301 redirect feature?
Ok, So i need to do a 301 redirect but my host doesn't have the feature with htaccess. I currently use yahoo. What are my options?
Technical SEO | | bronxpad0 -
301 redirects inside sitemaps
I am in the process of trying to get google to follow a large number of old links on site A to site B. Currently I have 301 redirects as well a cross domain canonical tags in place. My issue is that Google is not following the links from site A to site B since the links no longer exist in site A. I went ahead and added the old links from site A into site A's sitemap. Unfortunately Google is returning this message inside webmaster tools: When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL. However I do not understand how adding the redirected links from site B to the sitemap in site A will remove the old links. Obviously Google can see the 301 redirect and the canonical tag but this isn't defined in the sitemap as a direct correlation between site A and B. Am I missing something here?
Technical SEO | | jmsobe0