Best practice around removing large section of the website
-
We are looking at removing a large section of our website that is getting low/no traffic.
My current thought of removing this would be to delete the pages and add 301 redirects to a similar page within the site that is not being deleted.
This will be removing 400+ pages, does it this make sense? Or should we point them to the homepage?
Finally should we do this in one batch or should we slowly remove the pages over the course of a couple weeks.
Thanks - appreciate the help in understanding the best practice in terms of SEO.
-
If you're looking to redirect old URLs, sending them to the nearest equivalent page on your site makes sense and would be a good idea.
However, my question would be - Do you actually need to redirect? If the part of your website you're looking to remove is getting little to no traffic as it is, you might be better off letting the pages 404.
404 errors are a natural part of your website - something that Google is happy to admit. If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results.
The reason why I suggest this is that with each redirect you add to your .htaccess file, you add extra code that needs to be 100% correct and you make your file a little bit bigger. The bigger it is, the longer it takes to process and the longer it takes to process, the longer it will take your site to load. Now, for 400+ URLs we're talking small amounts here and likely nothing that will affect your site speed to a degree that it will negatively affect your site - but it can be a long process to put in place and can cause problems if you're inexperienced with redirecting.
I usually follow 2 criteria when asking if I should redirect an old URL.
-
Is it getting traffic from people visiting or entering my site? Check this with your analytics, although it looks as though the answer for you will be no.
-
Does the old URL contain any external backlinks that you would like to preserve. If it does, a 301 redirect will help pass on the link equity.
If the answer to both of these questions is "no", I'm happy to let the URL 404. Over time, it will stop being crawled, reducing any errors you see in Webmaster Tools.
Hope this helps - certainly no harm in redirecting if done correctly (and you can do it in one big go - personal experience with rebranding some big global sites shows this to not be a problem). However, I would ask if you really need to - you're unlikely to harm your site either by not redirecting.
-
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
-
Why google does not remove my page?
Hi everyone, last week i add "Noindex" tag into my page, but that site still appear in the organic search. what other things i can do for remove from google?
Technical SEO | | Jorge_HDI0 -
Cached version of website
Hi, Upon checking the text cache view of our home page, I noticed the mobile menu links are also coming in text format which looks weird. Please see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:indialetsplay.com&biw=1366&bih=638&noj=1&strip=1 Our coder told us that he has created separate menu i.e. one version for the desktop and one for the mobile version. Anyway, the reason the coder created a different menu for mobile in order to support the design requirements. Does the duplicating the menu good for on page SEO? Give the best solution for handling it.
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Best Practice on 301 Redirect - Images
We have two sites that sell the same products. We have decided to retire one of the sites as we'd like to focus on one property. I know best practice is to redirect apples to apples, which in our case is easily done since the sites sold the same thing. www.SiteABC.com/ProductA can be redirected to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA. My question is how far does that thinking go regarding images? Each product has a main product page, of course, and then up to 6 images in some cases. Is it necessary to redirect www.SiteABC.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg? Or can they all be redirected to just the product page?
Technical SEO | | Natitude0 -
Which one is the best
Dear Seo experts, 1,5 month ago i started a informative website, i started it with a blank registrated domainname. Now 1 month further I've stacked the website with content and did much linkbuilding. Yesterday i ve bought a domainname from quarantine, its a domainname around 6 years old and has a bunch of backlinks already. What to do next? The first one has good content and good recent linkbuilding done. The second is a better domainname and is old and has old backlinks. And also higher PA and DA then the first one. Should i now go for the first one and 301 redirect the old domainname to the new one. Or should I do it the opposite way, 301 redirect the new website to the old domainname and move all content to the old domainname and try to move all linkbuilding to older domain? Hopefully anyone could give me a great answere, thank you so much! Kind regards, Menno
Technical SEO | | MennoO0 -
Website is not indexed in Google
Hi Guys, I have a problem with a website from a customer. His website is not indexed in Google (except for the homepage). I could not find anything that can possibly be the cause. I already checked the robots.txt, sitemap, and plugins on the website. In the HTML code i also couldn't find anything which makes indexing harder than usual. This is the website i am talking about: http://www.xxxx.nl/ (Dutch) The only thing that i am guessing now is the Google sandbox, but even that is quite unlikely. I hope you guys discover something i could not find! Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | B.Great0 -
New website, to www or not
I was just wondering if there are any advantages to using the www instead of just the domain name for seo. Can these be elaborated on?
Technical SEO | | simvegas1 -
What is best practice for redirecting "secondary" domain names?
For sites with multiple top-level domains that have been secured for a business or organization, I'm curious as to what is considered best practice for setting up 301 redirects for secondary domains. Is it best to do the 301 redirects at the registrar level, or the hosting level? So that .net, .biz, or other secondary domains funnel visitors to the correct primary/main domain name. I'm looking for the "best practice" answer and want to avoid duplicate content problems, or penalties from the search engines. I'm not trying to game the system with dozens of domain names, simply the handful of domains that are important to the client. I've seen some registrars recommend hosting secondary domains, and doing redirects from the hosting level (and they use meta refresh for "domain forwarding," which I want to avoid). It seems rather wasteful to set up hosting for a secondary domain and then 301 each URL.
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0