Old Blogs
-
We have several blogs on our site for a range of products we no longer stock. Would you set up a redirect for these - and how long would you keep it in place?
-
@Caroline_Ardmoor Yes, setting up 301 redirects for these blogs is a good practice, as it helps preserve the SEO value that these pages might have accumulated over time. This is particularly important if the blogs have backlinks or still receive substantial traffic.
You should redirect these old blog posts to the most relevant new content or product pages. If no such relevant page exists, you could direct users to a related category page or to your homepage.
As for the duration, 301 signifies a 'permanent' redirect, so you should ideally keep them in place indefinitely. However, in practice, after around a year or so, most of the link equity (the SEO value of links) will have transferred to the new page. Still, if old links to the page exist on other sites or in bookmarks, you'll want to keep the redirect in place to ensure users don't hit a dead end.
-
@Caroline_Ardmoor Yes, it is generally recommended to set up redirects for blogs or any other pages that no longer exist or have been removed from your site. Redirects ensure that users and search engines are directed to relevant content instead of encountering broken links or errors.
To set up redirects, you can use the .htaccess file if you're using Apache server or utilize the redirection module if you're using Nginx. Here's an example of how to set up a redirect using the .htaccess file:
-
Open your .htaccess file located in the root directory of your website.
-
Add the following line to create a redirect:
Redirect 301 /old-blog-url.html http://www.example.com/new-blog-url.html
Replace "/old-blog-url.html" with the URL path of the old blog and "http://www.example.com/new-blog-url.html" with the URL of the corresponding new blog or an alternative relevant page.
- Save the .htaccess file.
Regarding how long you should keep the redirect in place, it depends on the specific circumstances. If you have permanently removed the product and its corresponding blog posts, a 301 redirect (as shown above) is appropriate, indicating that the content has permanently moved. In this case, it is generally recommended to keep the redirect in place indefinitely to maintain a good user experience and preserve any SEO value associated with the old URLs.
However, if there is a chance that the products or related content might return in the future, you may consider using a temporary redirect (302 or 307) instead. Temporary redirects indicate that the content has temporarily moved, and you can specify a shorter timeframe for keeping the redirect in place.
In any case, regularly monitoring your website's analytics and traffic patterns can help you assess whether the redirects are still necessary or if any updates are required based on user behavior.
-
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
-
Unsolved Question about a Screaming Frog crawling issue
Hello, I have a very peculiar question about an issue I'm having when working on a website. It's a WordPress site and I'm using a generic plug in for title and meta updates. When I go to crawl the site through screaming frog, however, there seems to be a hard coded title tag that I can't find anywhere and the plug in updates don't get crawled. If anyone has any suggestions, thatd be great. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KyleSennikoff0 -
How to index e-commerce marketplace product pages
Hello! We are an online marketplace that submitted our sitemap through Google Search Console 2 weeks ago. Although the sitemap has been submitted successfully, out of ~10000 links (we have ~10000 product pages), we only have 25 that have been indexed. I've attached images of the reasons given for not indexing the platform. gsc-dashboard-1 gsc-dashboard-2 How would we go about fixing this?
Technical SEO | | fbcosta0 -
Optimization expert suggesting we add Canonical tag to every page on site
Hi guys, We're currently launching a new page, and we have an optimization and technical SEO expert (highly rated on Upwork, very intelligent, has solved complicated issues in the past and improved our Core Web Vitals greatly) suggesting we put canonical tags on every page of site, pointing to itself (other than the case of where canonicals should point to other page, we have those listed separately. Do you guys see a benefit to this? Could it harm us? He says large retailers do this, couldn't quite glean the benefit from it though. Current site ranks well and isn't set up like this. Any insight would be much appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CitimarineMoz0 -
Solved How to solve orphan pages on a job board
Working on a website that has a job board, and over 4000 active job ads. All of these ads are listed on a single "job board" page, and don’t obviously all load at the same time. They are not linked to from anywhere else, so all tools are listing all of these job ad pages as orphans. How much of a red flag are these orphan pages? Do sites like Indeed have this same issue? Their job ads are completely dynamic, how are these pages then indexed? We use Google’s Search API to handle any expired jobs, so they are not the issue. It’s the active, but orphaned pages we are looking to solve. The site is hosted on WordPress. What is the best way to solve this issue? Just create a job category page and link to each individual job ad from there? Any simpler and perhaps more obvious solutions? What does the website structure need to be like for the problem to be solved? Would appreciate any advice you can share!
Reporting & Analytics | | Michael_M2 -
Will transferring my blog from blogger to wordpress benefit me economically?
Will transferring my blog https://www.techgape.com/ from blogger to wordpress benefit me economically?
Technical SEO | | nassim191 -
Redirecting old Sitemaps to a new XML
I've discovered a ton of 404s from Google's WMT crawler looking for mydomain.com/sitemap_archive_MONTH_YEAR. There are tons of these monthly archive xmls. I've used a plugin that for some reason created individual monthly archive xml sitemaps and now I get 404s. Creating rules for each archive seems a bad solution. My current sitemap plugin creates a single clean one mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. How can I create a redirect rule in the Redirection WP plugin that will redirect any URL that has the 'sitemap' and 'xml' string in it to my current xml sitemap? I've tried using a wildcard like so: mysite.com/sitemap*.*, mysite.com/sitemap ., mysite.com/sitemap(.), mysite.com/sitemap (.) but none of the wildcard uses got the general redirect to work. Is there a way to make this happen with the WP Redirection plugin? If not, is there a htaccess rule, and what would the code be for it? Im not very fluent with using general redirects in htaccess unfortunately. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Paid links that are passing link equity from a blog?
We have a well-known blogger in our industry with whom we've had a long-standing relationship. We've had inbound links from his blog for many, many years. Today I noticed that we are running a banner ad listed on all pages of his blog under a heading that says "Sponsors." He has dedicated an entire page of his site giving full disclosure of all advertising. However, all of the links on his site pointing to us are passing link equity. To my knowledge they've been this way ever since they were first established years ago. I am fairly certain this fellow, with whom we have an excellent relationship, neither knows nor cares what a "nofollow" attribute is. I am afraid that if I contact him with a request that he add "nofollow" attributes to all of our links that it will damage our relationship by creating friction. To someone who knows nothing and cares nothing about SEO, asking them to put a "nofollow" on a link could either seem like a technical request they don't know how to handle, or something even potentially "shady" on our part. My question is this: Considering how long these links have been there, is this even worth worrying about? Should I just forget about it and move on to bigger fish, or, is this a potentially serious enough violation of Google Webmaster guidelines that we should pursue getting those links "nofollow" attributes added? I should add that we haven't received any "unnatural" link notifications from Google, ever, and haven't ever engaged in any questionable link-building tactics.
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
Need some help with an old wordpress site we just merged with a new template
Sorry. URL is awardrealty.com I have a new website that we merged into a new wordpress theme. I just crawled the site with my seomoz crawl tool and it is showing a ridiculous amount of 4xx pages (200+) and we cant find the 4xx pages in the sitemap or within wordpress. Need some help? Am i missing something easy?
Technical SEO | | Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.0