Negative effect on google SEO with 301's?
-
Cleaning up the website by consolidating pages - each with a little bit of useful info - into one definitive page that is really useful and full of good content.
Doing 301's from the many old pages to the one new really good one. Didn't want to do rel canonicals because I don't want the old pages around, I want to get rid of them.
Will google see the 301s and go nuts or see that there is one definitive, really good page with no duplicate content? The change is very good from a user perspective.
Also, On-Page Report Cards on SEOMoz suggests that you put a rel canonical on a page to itself to tell google that this page is the definitive page. What do you think?
Thanks so much for anyone who has time to answer - so many gurus - this is a great forum. - jean
-
Good on 301. On rel=canon, I did not mean to imply "each page to itself." There are various issues that arise in coding pages, making changes to pages, etc. So, here is a classic: to a non coder, www.example.com and www.example.com/ are the same page. To the bots they are two. So by inserting rel=canon for that page you are saying if example.com/ comes up treat it the same as example.com.
For your example, if it were me, manual juicer and highest rated manual juicer are very distinctly different pages. The first could lead to a description of 4 and the second speaks only to one. You have to be careful with this in the SEO because if you get too diffuse in adding modifiers to the keyword (making them long tail for example) you can draw strength from the main keyword page. Sometimes it is good to do, sometimes not....this part is the art of SEO.
BTW........what type of OR wine???? (Nothing like a Willamette Valley Pinot....and, yes, I know how to pronounce Willamette!)
-
Thanks for the expert help. Generally there are 2 to 8 pages that I am consolidating - for me it's info about different models of a product - we have reviewed them all on different pages but having all of the info on one page with photos and background info is a lot juicier than a dib and a dab on each page - and is more useful for a reader on our site. There are incoming links to most of the pages from other sites so I don't want people to end up on our 404 page. Thus the 301 strategy. Fascinating about the rel canonical. I didnt know. So I need to put a rel canonical to itself on each page that is the main page for a topic. What if there are pages optimized to similar topics? Like manual juicer and highest rated manual juicer? Will a rel canonical for the page optimized for the keyword "manual juicer" and a rel canonical on the page for "highest rated manual juicer" reduce seo juice if the two pages are on the same site? To me when I hear Oracle I think of the database company. Shows how old I am. Ha. Thanks a lot for your time answering my questions.
-
Here is the issue as I see it: how many pages are you "consolidating" and why? First, if you are using a 301, IMO you are saying I have links on this page and link juice I do not want to lose. I want to move that link juice to my new page of similar type content. If you have 5 pages as an example that you are "consolidating" and three have one link that is the same to each page, then I would take one of the three for the 301 to the new page. On the other two, if one has no links, I would not redirect it unless there was some navigational reason. If the last page had 12 links, etc. then it absolutely gets 301'd.
It is likely that even 25 pages to one would not be an issue. The question is, is there a reason to redirect? If you are trying to redirect 50 pages for example and they are similar and all have different links, I would do the redirects slowly, maybe 3 to 5 per week for 10 weeks or more. The reason is I would not want it to take a chance an unnecessary flag is raised.
Yes, every page needs a rel=canon.Gurus, shmurus, have you seen the friggin' Oracles!!! Last year the final was gurus 32 oracles 33 (but it was an OT loss for the gurus - gotta love their heart!)
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
-
Microsoft IIS SEO tool claims I have no H1... It's not true.
I have 4300 pages that the tool claims are missing the H1 value but they are there. Here is an example: http://antiquebanknotes.com/rare-currency/first-national-bank-atlanta-illinois-2283.aspx/ Has anyone seen this before?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Google how deal with licensed content when this placed on vendor & client's website too. Will Google penalize the client's site for this ?
One of my client bought licensed content from top vendor of Health Industry. This same content is on the vendor's website & my client's site also but on my site there is a link back to vendor is placed which clearly tells to anyone that this is a licensed content & we bought from this vendor. My client bought paid top quality content for best source of industry but at this same this is placed on vendor's website also. Will Google penalize my client's website for this ? Niche is HEALTH
Technical SEO | | sourabhrana1 -
What's going on with google index - javascript and google bot
Hi all, Weird issue with one of my websites. The website URL: http://www.athletictrainers.myindustrytracker.com/ Let's take 2 diffrenet article pages from this website: 1st: http://www.athletictrainers.myindustrytracker.com/en/article/71232/ As you can see the page is indexed correctly on google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dfbzhHkl5K4J:www.athletictrainers.myindustrytracker.com/en/article/71232/10-minute-core-and-cardio&hl=en&strip=1 (that the "text only" version, indexed on May 19th) 2nd: http://www.athletictrainers.myindustrytracker.com/en/article/69811 As you can see the page isn't indexed correctly on google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KeU6-oViFkgJ:www.athletictrainers.myindustrytracker.com/en/article/69811&hl=en&strip=1 (that the "text only" version, indexed on May 21th) They both have the same code, and about the dates, there are pages that indexed before the 19th and they also problematic. Google can't read the content, he can read it when he wants to. Can you think what is the problem with that? I know that google can read JS and crawl our pages correctly, but it happens only with few pages and not all of them (as you can see above).
Technical SEO | | cobano0 -
As a wholesale website can our independent retailer's website use (copy) our content?
As a wholesaler of villa rentals, we have descriptions, images, prices etc can our agents (independent retailers) use the content from our website for their site or will this penalize us or them in Google rankings?
Technical SEO | | ewanTHH0 -
Planing Seo For New Seo
Hello; I have the domain which registerd in 2006 and i opened website 1 months ago and i start to do some seo like bought links pr1-pr7 50 links and 2500 social bookmarks 2000 blog links and also some wiki links am i doing good or bad ?
Technical SEO | | Sadullah0 -
What's the max number of links you should ever have on a page?
Our homepage has a few hundred links and our index pages(pages that link to our spintext pages) have about 900 links on them with no content. Our SEO guy said we have to keep the links under 1000 but I wanted to see what you guys think.
Technical SEO | | upper2bits0 -
Pictures 'being stolen'
Helping my wife with ecommerce site. Selling clothes. Some photos are given by producer, but at times they are not too good. Some are therefore taking their own photos and i suspect ppl are copying them and using them on their own site. Is there anyting to do about this - watermarking of course, but can they be 'marked' in anyway linking to your site ?
Technical SEO | | danlae0 -
We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
Technical SEO | | jack860