Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Updating inbound links vs. 301 redirecting the page they link to
-
Hi everyone,
I'm preparing myself for a website redesign and finding conflicting information about inbound links and 301 redirects.
If I have a URL (we'll say website.com/website) that is linked to by outside sources, should I get those outside sources to update their links when I change the URL to website.com/webpage? Or is it just as effective from a link juice perspective to simply 301 redirect the old page to the new page? Are there any other implications to this choice that I may want to consider?
Thanks!
-
I agree, never redirect when you can fix the link.
-
Thanks Richard and Irving!
-
The general consensus of my SEO peers is that approximate 15% of link juice is lost in the redirect and I second what Richard has recommended.
-
Quick fix = do the redirects.
Best practice = do the redirects and try to get the inbound links changed as well.
It is best if you can get the links changed, but always be sure to do redirects as well as there may be other links that you are not aware of.
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
-
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Max Number of 301 Redirections?
Hi, We currently made a re-design of a website and we changed all our urls to make them shorter. I made more than 300 permanent redirections but plenty more are needed since WMT is showing some more 404s from old urls that I hadn't seen because they were dynamic. The question is, please, is there a limit? I think we have more than 600 already. We don't want to create a php commando to redirect all the old ones to our home, we are redirecting them to their correspondent url. By the way, Im doing them with the 301 method in .htaccess. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
How to find all crawlable links on a particular page?
Hi! This might sound like a newbie question, but I'm trying to find all crawlable links (that google bot sees), on a particular page of my website. I'm trying to use screaming frog, but that gives me all the links on that particular page, AND all subsequent pages in the given sub-directory. What I want is ONLY the crawlable links pointing away from a particular page. What is the best way to go about this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AB_Newbie0 -
How do I fix a 301 Redirect Loop?
Saturday I waas doing some correcting of some duplicate titles, including nofollowing tags, etc. (my main problem was duplicate titles due to tags and categories being indexed). Now this morning I see that one of my pages refuses to load, citing a 301 redirect loop. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/feeding/switching-baby-formula/ Originally, the page was posted under the wrong category. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/uncategorized/switching-baby-formula I resaved it under the correct category (feeding) and now it won't load. Can someone help me figure out how to correct this mess? Thanks so much Heather
Technical SEO | | Gotmoxie0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How long should I keep 301 redirects?
I have modified a the URL structure of a whole section of a website and used mod_rewrite 301 redirect to match the new structure. Now that was around 3 months ago and I was wondering how long should I keep this redirect for? As it is a new website I am quite sure that there are no links around with the old URL structure but still I can see the google bot trying from time to time to access the old URL structure. Shouldn't the google bot learn from this 301 redirect and not go anymore for the old URL?
Technical SEO | | socialtowards0 -
Drupal URL Aliases vs 301 Redirects + Do URL Aliases create duplicates?
Hi all! I have just begun work on a Drupal site which heavily uses the URL Aliases feature. I fear that it is creating duplicate links. For example:: we have http://www.URL.com/index.php and http://www.URL.com/ In addition we are about to switch a lot of links and want to keep the search engine benefit. Am I right in thinking URL aliases change the URL, while leaving the old URL live and without creating search engine friendly redirects such as 301s? Thanks for any help! Christian
Technical SEO | | ChristianMKTG0 -
Deep Page Link - url no longer exists
I used Open Site Explorer and found a link to our site on http://www.business.com/guides/bedding-supplies-3639/ The link was setup to go to an important, deep page on my website, but the structure of our urls changed and the url no longer exists. The link (anchor text 'National Hospitality Supply') does direct to our homepage, www.nathosp.com. My question is, am I receiving full link juice? Or would I be better served to create a 301 redirect to the revised / new page url? In case it matters, if I had my choice I'd prefer the link to go to the intended deep page. Thanks in advance for your insight. -Josh Fulfer
Technical SEO | | mhans0