Preserving link equity from old pages
-
Hi Moz Community,
We have a lot of old pages built with Dreamweaver a long time ago (2003-2010) which sit outside our current content management system.
As you'd expect they are causing a lot of trouble with SEO (Non-responsive, duplicate titles and various other issues). However, some of these older pages have very good backlinks.
We were wondering what is the best way to get rid of the old pages without losing link equity? In an ideal world we would want to bring over all these old pages to our CMS, but this isn't possible due to the amount of pages (~20,000 pages) and cost involved.
One option is obviously to bulk 301 redirect all these old pages to our homepage, but from what we understand that may not lead to the link equity being passed down optimally by Google (or none being passed at all). Another option we can think of would be to bring over the old articles with the highest value links onto the current CMS and 301 redirect the rest to the homepage.
Any advice/thoughts will be greatly appreciated. Thumbs up!
Thanks,
-
There are a couple options that I see here:
- Go through the list of pages, find the most relevant equivalents on your current site, and 301 redirect them. Yes, 20,000 pages is a lot but you'll quickly fall into a groove where you find whole sections of pages that can be redirected to the same place. I did it with 65,000 or so URLs when SEOmoz moved to Moz, and it took about a month to plan out alongside my other tasks. It's tedious, but doable.
- Figure out which pages have the high-value links you want to preserve, 301 redirect those to their most-relevant equivalents, and redirect the rest to the home page. This won't work quite as well to preserve link equity or any traffic/rankings they might be getting, but it will be faster.
Either way, once you've got those redirects in place I strongly recommend taking a look at the sites that link to the old pages, and seeing which ones you might be able to reach out to to get the links updated. That way, you won't be losing link value through the 301 - plus, you might strengthen or re-establish some relationships that could result in future links. Good luck!
-
The problem is these old pages don't have any analytics on them.
By doing a 404 we would lose the value of the links going to them. These are very high value links in many cases. We can identify the ones with high value links though.
-
You will be most likely fine. I'm sure you will take a look at analytics and see how much traffic/conversion these landing pages are getting and prioritize. If some of the pages are irrelevant (not contextually relevant anymore), no logical alternative and no traffic you may consider sending them to a 404 page w/search. Good luck!
-
Whenever you have old pages on your site (on the same domain name), using a 301 Permanent Redirect to redirect them to the most appropriate page on your site is what you should do. As long as you're 301 redirecting one URL to another on the same domain name, you won't lose any link equity.
So, the best thing for you to do is to 301 redirect those old URLs to the best page--otherwise redirect them to the site's home page.
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 does Googlebot evaluate performance/page speed on Isomorphic/Single Page Applications?
I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend. Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there? Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time? Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner1 -
What to do with large number of old/outdated pages?
Are we redoing a large portion of our site (not ecommerce). We have a large number of pages (about 2000 indexed pages, out of about 3000) that have been forgetten about until recently, are very outdated, don't drive any traffic (according to Google Analytics) But they are ranking very well for the targeting keyword (#3 organic for most). What should I do with those pages? Could you give any guidance on whether we should or what affect it might have one the rest of the website if we delete those pages or simply 301 redirecting all those pages to the home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aphoontrakul0 -
One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
Hi everyone I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too. eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDadd
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres" Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should. eg HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres". ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text. So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it. I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages. Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term? We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too. Thanks!0 -
301 from old site to new one , Should I point to home page or sub category page ?
Hey Seo Experts, I have a small website ranking for few terms like cabinets sale, buy etc . However what i have now decided is to launch a New website with more different products like living room furniture, wardrobes etc . Out of all these categories on new website Cabinets is one of the SubCategory . Now I do not want to have 2 websites . So wanted to 301 from small cabinets website to newly created website. Some of the doubts I have at the moment is ? 1 Should I REDIRECT 301 to sub category (i,e cabinets) which is purely related to Cabinets or Do a Redirect to HOME PAGE . As I also need more Authority to home page as well , as this is relatively new website ? 2 Second question related to this. If you have multiple sub domains does it divide the total authority & TF.Or it is just Ok to have multiple Sub domains if needed ? Any advice appreciated !! Thanks .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00070 -
Can internal links from a blog harm the ranking of a page?
Here is the situation: A site was moved from its original domain to its new domain, and at the same time, the external wordpress.com blog was moved to a subdirectory, making it an onsite blog. The two pages that rank the highest on the site have virtually no links from the blog and no external links, while all the other pages are linked extensively from the blog and have backlinks. Their targeted keywords are not so much easier to rank than the other pages for that to be the sole cause. To confuse the matter even more, there was a manual penalty affecting incoming links which was removed last month. The old site, which has many backlinks to the new site, is still in Google's index. The old blog however, has been redirected page by page and is not in Google's index. Most of the blog posts are short 1-paragraph company updates and potentially considered low quality content because of that (?) The common denominator among the two highest ranked pages (I'm talking top 3 in SERP v. page 3 or 4) seems to be either the lack of external backlinks or the lack of internal links from the blog. Could there be an issue with the blog such that internal links from it are detrimental rather than helpful?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Link to homepage or brand page?
Hi, I have opportunity to get a link from a brands website to our website as we are official retailers. Should I give them our homepage URL or should I give them their brands page on our website? The brand page will have their brand name in the URL, meta details, images, content and products. What is more beneficial SEO wise? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
How do I fix the error duplicate page content and duplicate page title?
On my site www.millsheating.co.uk I have the error message as per the question title. The conflict is coming from these two pages which are effectively the same page: www.millsheating.co.uk www.millsheating.co.uk/index I have added a htaccess file to the root folder as I thought (hoped) it would fix the problem but I doesn't appear to have done so. this is the content of the htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^millsheating.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.millsheating.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.millsheating.co.uk/ [R=301,L] AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonHegarty0