Should 301 Redirects be used only in cross domains or also internally?
-
In the following video with Cutts:
he explains a bit more about 301 redirects but he only talks about cross sites.
What about redirecting internally from a non-existing product in a store to a new similar existing product?
-
It's okay to put similar available products on the product page that is no longer available. Before de-indexing them, make sure that the category pages have not garnered any backlinks. If they have, it might be worth 301 redirecting. If not, let them become deindexed.
-
Dear Stephanie,
What I recently decided to do (and I wonder what you think of it), is putting "similar available products" on the non existing product with links to the other products.
However, consider the fact that the non existing product is actually non reachable (since it is not available the product category pages don't point to it) so eventually it will be de-indexed.
Thanks
-
Like mentioned above, internal 301 redirects are completely appropriate, especially for product pages that no longer exist. However, instead of redirecting a non-existent product page to a new similar product page, you might want to consider redirecting it to a category page, especially if that non-existent product page has already garnered external links.
This will help demonstrate to search engines that this page is more important than other pages and increase the link equity to that page, which would ultimately help increase its page authority.
-
Internally redirecting pages with a 301 is fine. The whole point is to tell Google that what was once here, is now there.
However, if you're redirecting to a product is significantly different to the one that you had originally, you might want to have a placeholder on the old page, telling the client that this product s no longer available, but add a link to the new product that will achieve a similar outcome for the customer.
-
Hi,
I personally like to use 301 especially when there is a "redesign of architecture", the URLs will change internally so then you go and redirect from the old URLs to the new ones.
If we talk about products, then I wouldn't use the redirect, instead a custom 404 page and possibilities for the user to choose if (s)he would like to check for similar products or categories, etc.
I hope that helped,
Istvan
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
-
301 Redirect in breadcrumb. How bad is it?
Hi all, How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects? We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb. SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404. However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months. could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
New Domain, No 301 Possible - Any Advice
A client of mine lost their domain when an ex business partner sold it out from under them. They've filed with WIPO, but in the meantime we're trying to figure out how to help them out. They had two really excellent links - one from the NY Times and one from a .edu website. I'm going to reach out to the authors of those articles (the articles are pretty old, so I doubt they'll change the links), but does anyone have any advice on how to let search engines know the new domain replaces the old without having the ability to do redirects? The content on the site is exactly the same - we were able to get the files over, happily. I've re-submitted the site for indexing, changed the domain links in Moz Local, changed in Analytics, and on all their social sites. Is there anything I'm not thinking of that can be done to let Google know that this new domain replaces the old? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newwhy0 -
If I redirect a subdomain, does this affect the parent domain?
Hi I have a company for example: abc.com and they have a subdomain def.abc.com with a lot of errors. These errors i believe affect the parent domain abc.com. So my company would like to redirect the subdomain to another domain altogther ex: xyz.com Can i redirect the subdomain def.abc.com to another website domain? Would this affect the parent domain in a good or bad way? Or should i be using an external links to point to a new domain for the subdomain? Trying to think what's best for SEO and the parent domain. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crodriguez890 -
Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs?
Hello. My question is:** Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs and a gTLD - and the gTLD is much more authoritative to begin with? ** I appreciate this is a very nuanced subject so below is a detailed explanation of my current approach, problem, and proposed solutions I am considering testing. Thanks for the taking the time to read this far! The Current setup Multiple ccTLD such as mysite.com (US), mysite.fr (FR), mysite.de (DE). Each TLD can have multiple languages - indeed each site has content in English as well as the native language. So mysite.fr (defaults to french) and mysite.fr/en-fr is the same page but in English. Mysite.com is an older and more established domain with existing organic traffic. Each language variant of each domain has a sitemap that is individually submitted to Google Search Console and is linked from the of each page. So: mysite.fr/a-propos (about us) links to mysite.com/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in French. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc) mysite.fr/en-fr/about-us links to mysite.com/en-fr/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in English. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc). There is more English content on the site as a whole so the English version of the sitemap is always bigger at the moment. Every page on every site has two lists of links in the footer. The first list is of links to every other ccTLD available so a user can easily switch between the French site and the German site if they should want to. Where possible this links directly to the corresponding piece of content on the alternative ccTLD, where it isn’t possible it just links to the homepage. The second list of links is essentially just links to the same piece of content in the other languages available on that domain. Mysite.com has its international targeting in Google Search console set to the US. The problems The biggest problem is that we didn’t consider properly how we would need to start from scratch with each new ccTLD so although each domain has a reasonable amount of content they only receive a tiny proportion of the traffic that mysite.com achieves. Presumably this is because of a standing start with regards to domain authority. The second problem is that, despite hreflang, mysite.com still outranks the other ccTLDs for brand name keywords. I guess this is understandable given the mismatch of DA. This is based on looking at search results via the Google AdWords Ad Preview tool and changing language, location, and domain. Solutions So the first solution is probably the most obvious and that is to move all the ccTLDs into a subfolder structure on the mysite.com site structure and 301 all the old ccTLD links. This isn’t really an ideal solution for a number of reasons, so I’m trying to explore some alternative possible routes to explore that might help the situation. The first thing that came to mind was to use cross-domain canonicals: Essentially this would be creating locale specific subfolders on mysite.com and duplicating the ccTLD sites in there, but using a cross-domain canonical to tell Google to index the ccTLD url instead of the locale-subfolder url. For example: mysite.com/fr-fr has a canonical of mysite.fr
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatello
mysite.com/fr-fr/a-propos has a canonical of mysite.fr/a-propos Then I would change the links in the mysite.com footer so that they wouldn’t point at the ccTLD URL but at the sub-folder URL so that Google would crawl the content on the stronger domain before indexing the ccTLD domain version of the URL. Is this worth exploring with a test, or am I mad for even considering it? The alternative that came to my mind was to do essentially the same thing but use a 301 to redirect from mysite.com/fr-fr to mysite.fr. My question is around whether either of these suggestions might be worth testing, or am I completely barking up the wrong tree and liable to do more harm than good?0 -
Adventurous 301 redirection chain
Picture this - if you have a spirit for adventure! Client builds Alpha****Domain.com Then builds a number of backlinks to Alpha****Domain.com Client also creates a number of 301 redirects from several older domains to AlphaDomain.com Client then changes Alpha****Domain.com to Beta****Domain.com They create 301 redirects from Alpha****Domain.com to Beta****Domain.com But then... they 'park' Alpha****Domain.com (ie. no longer accessible)! About one year later, client changes a whole bunch of URLs on Beta****Domain.com without keeping track of changes. Thankfully, the hosting service (Shopify) automatically creates some redirects, but it's more by accident than design! Questions: After step 6 above, are the 301 redirects created in steps 3 and 5 now totally redundant and broken? If AlphaDomain.com no longer exists, surely all redirects to and from this domain are broken? Or can they be recovered? What happens to all the backlinks originally created in step 2? Finally, can anything be done to recover lost URLs in step 7? Yes. What a mess!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Used Alternate Domain for Print Material But not Showing up in SERPs
Used an alternate domain name to send print advertising traffic to so we could measure effectiveness. The domain does not have any content on it and only forwards to our actual domain. The issue is neither domain shows up when people search the alternate domain name without .com. The question is, will putting up content under that domain, including meta data, and submitting the site to Google as well as running fetch as Google make the alternate domain name to show up... it's an extremely unique domain name and there's basically zero competition for it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dom4410 -
301 redirecting staff Domain to Company Domain
My colleague owns a domain (A) for about 10 years that he does not use. The domain's content is the same as my company's website (B) content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
Question: Can I 301 redirect domain A to domain B's homepage or is it better he just closes down his website since this would not be SEO best practices? thank you0 -
Primary Domain or Redirect?
We are starting a new travel guide for a resort town. I have bought an expired domain with decent related links and PR (which seems to have survived the transfer (4 months ago). Beofre we launch the new site I am trying to decide if we should use this expired domain as the primary URL for the new site or just do a permanent redirect and buy a new domain that better matches the theme of the site. I am obviously concerned with starting from scatch with a new domain. I am confident we can build some good rellevant links in a short time but this space is very competetive. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Locals0