Question on 301s
-
Hi Everyone,
I have a questions on 301 redirects, i hope someone can give me some help on this.
There was some 301 redirects made on some of the URLs at the beginning of the year, however we are now re-structuring the whole website, which means the URLs which had been given a 301 redirect are now getting another 301.
The question is, should i delete the first 301 redirect from the htaccess file?
Kind Regards
-
Ryan your analogy is fantastic. I totally understand this now and it really makes sense to do it this way.
Thanks for being patient with me
Again thanks all for your feedback on this.
Kind Regards
-
Every URL which is no longer active would require a 301 redirect to the proper page. In the situation you describe:
/a should redirect to /abc
/ab should redirect to /abc
I recognize this seems confusing so forget it's a website for a moment. Think of it as mail after you move.
You lived at 100 Main Street. That is where you received your mail. Now you move to 200 Elm Street. You put in a forward order with the post office (a real world equivalent to a 301 redirect). Now any mail addressed to 100 Main Street will be received at 200 Elm Street.
Now you move again to 300 Wall Street. You would put in another forwarding order so your mail from 200 Elm Street gets delivered to your new address. This solution is fine BUT, your mail from 100 Main Street would be delayed. First it would get forwarded to the 200 Elm Street post office, who would then have to forward it to 300 Wall Street. This process is inefficient (in seo terms, you lose link juice).
You want to change your 100 Main Street forward order to direct your mail to the 300 Wall Street address. Now all of your mail is taken to the proper location in a single hop.
I hope this analogy helps!
-
What happens to the URL
If there are external backlinks going to the URL, are these not going to get lost?
Because as we have mentioned on these 301s, there has been 3 URLs in question.
Hope that makes sense.
-
In the simplest terms, the old page should always be directed to the new page. Think of it as a non-stop flight.
-
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your feedback, however I am getting a little lost
So what your are saying if I understand is, the 301 should be this:
example.com/a is redirected to example.com/abc
Kind Regards
-
The only thing that concerns me is what CafePress had said "Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so."
You can offer 100 links on a page. All the links can be to "seomoz.org" and they will all be crawled even though the real URL is "www.seomoz.org" and all 100 links will get redirected.
What CafePress referred to is redirects for a single URL.
www.example.com/a redirects to /ab which redirects to /abc and so forth. A crawler will only follow a single URL so far through a chain of redirects before the PR is completely gone and it stops.
Therefore the preferred solution is to redirect any old or broken URLs to their new URL in a single redirect. I'll share an example based on your site:
Very old URL: example.com/a. It is redirected to example.com/ab
Old URL: example.com/ab. It is redirected to example.com/abc
You could leave these two redirects in place, as-is, and they will work, but it is not recommended. The reason is any traffic to /a will have a double re-direct. First the traffic will go to /ab then to the final destination of /abc. This double redirect is an unnecessary delay, it adds extra points of vulnerability and is a waste of SEO link juice. The preferred solution would be to modify the /a redirect to point to the /abc page directly.
I hope that makes sense.
-
Also, if a page is indexed, which is highly likely (due to XML sitemaps, Google Analytics, Google Toolbar etc), then just removing the 301 redirect (links or no links) means that when this page disappears due to the site changes then you will have an indexed page resulting in a 404 error.
I maintain that you should have single hop 301 redirects on all of the pages that will not be there or will have been moved due to the site updated.
I also agree with what Ryan Kent says about links - you may have some links that have been discovered but not yet recognized pr picked up. If there is a chance that the content has been indexed then it should have an appropriate redirect.
-
Hi Ryan,
The only thing that concerns me is what CafePress had said "Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so."
I have another issue regarding the 301 re-directs:
We have:
/abcd http://www.example.com/abcde this is actually a 301 on a product page, however we have the same product in a shop page /shop/abcd which we have decided to do away with the shop directory, is it best practice to also do a 301 from the /shop/abcd to /abcde?
Hope that makes sense.
Kind Regards
-
I don't agree with the recommendation to simply delete the 301 due to no visible links. There are two reasons why:
1. It is more work for you to go and research the links to each page
2. There can always be links you are not aware of such as bookmarks, e-mail links, links which don't show up for various reasons, etc.
Just simply modify the 301 to point to the correct URL and you are all set.
-
Thanks for the fantastic feedback.
An example of what has happened on the .htaccess:
/abc http://www.example.com/abcd - This is the 301 that was made in March this year.
/abcd http://www.example.com/abcde - This is the new 301
If i notice that there are no links going to /abc using Open Site Explorer should i just delete this 301?
Kind Regards
-
I would change the original 301 redirect to the new location.
I would then add an additional 301 redirect to the secondary page (the old redirect) to the new location.
So you will have your original URL and the older redirected URL both 301 redirected to where the content now resides. This way you only have one hop on the 301 redirects and you have both old URLs pointing to the new one.
-
should i delete the first 301 redirect from the htaccess file?
The best results would be achieved if each URL had a single 301 redirect to the target page. To that end, yes, you should delete the old 301 redirect and create a new one.
-
+1
Totally forgot about mentioning the inbound links part. Thanks for picking it up, Rick!
-
Hey Gary,
I partially agree with Cafe. However, I wouldn't remove any redirects for URLs which may have backlinks. Maybe it would be a good idea to figure out if any of the redirects which you are removing are from URLs that have earned links? An Open Site Explorer link export would help you figure out if any of those URLs still have value.
-
Hi Gary,
Yes, it is always a good idea to cut down the number of 301 redirects (or any redirects in general) because if I remember correctly, Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so. You also lose another 10% link juice for each additional redirect.
Lastly, don't forget to 301 redirect the URLs from the beginning of the year to the new re-structured website.
Hope that helps!
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 -
Will 301s to Amazon Hurt Site?
We have 155 podcasts and in many we have affiliate links to Amazon. But I recently found out that one of the two products we are promoting is no longer available. I now have to fix many podcast descriptions. My thought is maybe to build a link like: financiallysimple.com/camera and 301 it to the Amazon product. That way if the product changes, I simply change where the 301 points. Simple. BUT my question is does that bouncing people offsite immediately hurt us? Are there any other options that will accomplish the same goal?
Technical SEO | | jgoethert
Thanks!1 -
Need better solution for 301s with Jekyll/S3 Site
Hey Mozzers, So, this isn't the first time that I've come to the community with questions regarding my new site. Although running a site using static HTML-generated pages has been fantastic in the first few weeks as far as load times, it's been a nightmare in terms of a few other SEO-related concerns, namely redirects. In the Q&A post above, Mat Shepherd pointed out a solution for adding 301s to an Amazon Webservices site using their "Redirection Rules" field on the "Configure Bucket for Website Hosting" page. However, I discovered soon after that I was limited to only 50 redirects using this method. Obviously, all things considered, this will not be enough. At this point, I'm basically out of ideas. If anyone else out there has a website with a similar setup, (Jekyll platform hosted on Amazon S3,) that has overcome this problem with redirects, I'd really appreciate hearing from you. Thanks in advance, everyone
Technical SEO | | danny.wood0 -
SEOMoz Crawler vs Googlebot Question
I read somewhere that SEOMoz’s crawler marks a page in its Crawl Diagnostics as duplicate content if it doesn’t have more than 5% unique content.(I can’t find that statistic anywhere on SEOMoz to confirm though). We are an eCommerce site, so many of our pages share the same sidebar, header, and footer links. The pages flagged by SEOMoz as duplicates have these same links, but they have unique URLs and category names. Because they’re not actual duplicates of each other, canonical tags aren’t the answer. Also because inventory might automatically come back in stock, we can’t use 301 redirects on these “duplicate” pages. It seems like it’s the sidebar, header, and footer links that are what’s causing these pages to be flagged as duplicates. Does the SEOMoz crawler mimic the way Googlebot works? Also, is Googlebot smart enough not to count the sidebar and header/footer links when looking for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | ElDude0 -
Question for experts - a website is ranking defying all google rules
Hi all Today I saw a strange result in google's search page. When I typed a keyword: Rezeptfrei bestellen, it gave me results like number 1- http://www.rezeptfreibestellen.com/ If I check this site in opensiteexplorer, this is nothing but a new site with no backlinks, or any other offpage work. Onpage work is simply keyword stuffing and domain name is also same as keyword. Now why google ranked this website above others? Where are google EMD and Penguin, Panda? Amit
Technical SEO | | expertvillagemedia1 -
Schema address question
I have a website that has a contact us page... of course and on that page I have schema info pointing out the address and a few other points of data. I also have the address to the business location in the footer on every page. Would it be wiser to point to the schema address data on the footer instead of the contact page? And are there any best practices when it comes down to how many times you can point to the same data, and on which pages? So should I have schema address on the contact us page and the footer of that page, that would be twice, which could seem spammy. Haven't been able to find much best practices info on schema out there. Thanks, Cy
Technical SEO | | Nola5040 -
Summarize your question.Google places listing has gone AWOL :-(
<cite>Bonjour from sunny wetherby UK :-)</cite> <cite>Ive got a rogue Google places listing. I want the listing to sit under http://www.barrettsteel.com/ not under www.barrettonline.co.uk</cite> <cite>Here is the problem illustrated:</cite> <cite>http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/local-listing-attached-badly.jpg</cite> <cite>So my question is please. How do move the Google Pla ces lisrting from under www.barrettonline.co.uk to underwww.barrettsteel.com</cite> <cite>Thanks in advance,</cite> <cite>David</cite>
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
SEO-MOZ bar question on root vs subdomain / canonicalization issues
When I look at the SEO-MOZ bar for our site and click next to subdomain (# links from #domains) it shows my main incoming links etc. but when I click on root domain ity shows mydomain/default.asp and 4 incoming links as well as a message that says this url redirects to another url. Does this imply canonicalization issues or is there a 301 redirect to my non /default.asp correcting this issue. Thanks kindly, Howard
Technical SEO | | mrkingsley0