301 redirect recommendations
-
One of our clients we are working on have two sites the main with a PR5 and a separate one with a PR4.
We are planning on doing a 301 from the PR4 to a page on the PR5
Is it best to do:
www.PR4.com ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page
or
www.PR4.com/page ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page
Most pages on the PR4 site can fit into one PR5 page logically. However the PR4 has an about us, contact us, blog/with posts, FAQ, Applications, Legal Resources which are all pretty out dated..
The PR4 site is kinda messy and we are not sure if it will be easy to 301 each page individually with the user in mind.
can we do a sitewide 301 redirect from the root PR4.com to a page PR/5.com/releveantPR4page and also do deeper 301's? PR4.com/PR4page ---> PR5.com/releveantPR4page
-
Both Lance and CleverPhD have some good points. Really go page by page and map out the entire domain. Both on the PR4 and PR5 sites. Create excel spreadsheets to align up the location and destination of your 301 redirects.
Then, calculate the # of pages you have listed on the PR4 site that need redirecting but really don't have a home. IF the number is small enough, just redirect those pages/URL's for visitors to the homepage. Google doesn't like mass 301 redirects to the homepage, but if those pages have small inbound links, and some value - that will get pushed back to the main index URL.
You could also let it 404 as CleverPhD said, but what I would map out, is a kick-ass 404 redirect page. Include elements like a search function for people to look for new content, add a link to a form that people can fill out to advise of the 404 error. Offer up alternatives and/or pages-URL's that might offer something similar. Have fun with it and add some creativity to help convert those almost lost users to possibly visitors and then clients. Don't just let the 404 page be the end all of the site visit. I have found by really focusing on 404 error page improvements, you can improve both the bounce and exit rates of said pages, and as a result retain users that become clients in the end - all because you were able to take the time to build something that caught their attention, and thus - kept them inside the site
Some great examples of creative 404 errors might include this or some creatively funny ones like that. This is another one I liked here.
Hope some of that helps
Cheers!
-
I would consider the ROI of the redirect. If a specific page flows a bunch of link juice and on terms important to the business then redirect to the best page. After a point, the rest won't return enough value for your client to be charged at your hourly rate.
-
You want to go page to page (your second example) as much as possible. Google prefers more of a one to one vs a many to one relationship with 301 redirects. That said, if you have a bunch of garbage pages with garbage links with not much traffic to them, you may just want to let them 404 and die out of the index. Take some time looking at your Analytics and you may find you can just drop those pages.
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 long will old pages stay in Google's cache index. We have a new site that is two months old but we are seeing old pages even though we used 301 redirects.
Two months ago we launched a new website (same domain) and implemented 301 re-directs for all of the pages. Two months later we are still seeing old pages in Google's cache index. So how long should I tell the client this should take for them all to be removed in search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Liamis0 -
URL Too Long vs. 301 Redirect
We have a small number of content pages where the urls paths were setup before we started looking really hard at SEO. The paths are longer than recommended (but not super crazy IMHO) and some of the pages get a decent amount of traffic. Moz suggests updating the URLs to make them shorter but I wonder if anyone has experience with the tradeoffs here. Is it better to mark those issues to be ignored and just use good URLs going forward or would you suggest updating the URLs to something shorter and implementing a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | russell_ms0 -
If I 301 redirect a sub-page that is #1, will I risk losing SERP?
I have a site that for some reason Google decided to rank one of our articles #1 for a fairly competitive term. The article is kind of a BS blog post and I want to 301 it to our page about the topic as that's designed for conversion. If I do this, will we risk losing the ranking? If so, what are other options? Can I change the content of the ranked page to something closer to our landing page? Any advice is welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dk80 -
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO
I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts? Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Organic keywords have dropped significantly in a short time period when relaunching site, but all 301 redirects are working properly.
We redesigned a site and relaunched it on the same domain. All 301 redirects were completed and are working properly. Around the same time, they fired an seo company who was published inbound links to their site on spammy directories (and this was during the same time period that Google's Hummingbird algorithm change took place). After the website relaunch, their keyword rankings fell off dramatically; and in all of our research, we're not seeing what has caused this issue. I'm not seeing any red flags in their moz reports or even in their google analytics traffic; but organic keywords are way down, and now leads from organic traffic are also way down. Help??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
Duplicate content even with 301 redirects
I know this isn't a developer forum but I figure someone will know the answer to this. My site is http://www.stadriemblems.com and I have a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file to redirect all non-www to www and it works great. But SEOmoz seems to think this doesn't apply to my blog, which is located at http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog It doesn't seem to make sense that I'd need to place code in every .htaccess file of every sub-folder. If I do, what code can I use? The weirdest part about this is that the redirecting works just fine; it's just SEOmoz's crawler that doesn't seem to be with the program here. Does this happen to you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Should I 301 Redirect Old Pages to Newer Ones?
I know there is value having lots of unique content on our websites, but I'm wondering how long it should be kept for, and if there is any value in 301 redirecting it? So, for example we have a number of pages on our website that are dedicated to single products (blue widget x, blue widget y, red widget x, red widget y). Nice unique content, with some (but not many) links. These products are no longer available though and have been replaced. So I'm faced with three choices: 1. Leave it as it is, and hope it adds to the overall site authority (by value of being another page), and also perhaps mop up a few longer tail keywords. Add a link to the replacement product on these pages; 2. 301 redirect these pages to the replacement products to give these a bit of a boost, and lose the content; 3. 301 redirect these pages to the replacement products and move all the old content to a new 'blue widgets archive' and 'red widgets archive' page? Would appreciate everyones thoughts!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0