Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Get found
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?

    Technical SEO
    3
    5
    4139
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Squall315
      Squall315 last edited by

      Hi, please someone help!

      We have two identical websites, say A & B. Because of the not so good SEO establishment, site B was built and site A was 301 redirected to site B weeks ago. For some reasons, we have to reuse site A, which means we have to cancel the 301 redirection. (Sound a little crazy)

      So the question are:

      1. Can we conduct the action?

      2. If we cant, what's the reason?

      3. If we can, what would be the best practice?

      Thanks for help in advance!

      Plus: we also CARE what would happen to site B if the 301 is cancelled? Will it grow healthy like a new site?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Squall315
        Squall315 @irvingw last edited by

        Thank you! Sorry for the late reply. It does help.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Squall315
          Squall315 @blacey last edited by

          Thanks!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • irvingw
            irvingw last edited by

            it depends on the PR of the site, if site A is a aged well established site with good PR that you want to be passed to site B then keep the 301s.

            If site B is a brand new site, understand that cancelling the 301 will negatively affect site B and if site A pages are still indexed and getting a lot of traffic you will lose that traffic.

            If you are creating a new site A, and the existing site A has good PR then your new site A will hit the ground running since it's aged, just 301 the pages internally to the new url structure so you don't 404 internal pages with PR.

            Squall315 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • blacey
              blacey last edited by

              For you to use Site A as its own entity again I would suggest cancelling the 301 redirect as you've said, creating all the pages for Site A, making sure they're optimised on-page with good internal links to the other pages,

              Once that's been done, generate an XML sitemap and submit that to Google, Bing, Yahoo etc

              Then its just a waiting game for the search engines to update their index with the new pages on Site A.

              Squall315 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • Alviau

                Are on-site content carousel bad for SEO?

                Hi, I didn't find an answer to my question in the Forum. I attached an example of content carousel, this is what I'm talking about. I understand that Google has no problem anymore with tabbed contents and accordeons (collapsible contents). But now I'm wondering about textual carousels. I'm not talking about an image slider, I'm talking about texts. Is text carousel harder to read for Google than plain text or tabs? Of course, i'm not talking about a carousel using Flash. Let's say the code is proper... Thanks for your help. spfra5

                Technical SEO | | Alviau
                0
              • Cocoonfxmedia

                301 Redirect non existant pages

                Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.

                Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia
                0
              • AL123al

                Redirect URLS with 301 twice

                Hello, I had asked my client to ask her web developer to move to a more simplified URL structure. There was a folder called "home" after the root which served no purpose. I asked for the URLs to be redirected using 301 to the new URLs which did not have this structure. However, the web developer didn't agree and decided to just rename the "home" folder "p". I don't know why he did this. We argued the case and he then created the URL structure we wanted. Initially he had 301 redirected the old URLS (the one with "Home") to his new version (the one with the "p"). When we asked for the more simplified URL after arguing, he just redirected all the "p" URLS to the PAGE NOT FOUND.  However, remember, all the original URLs are now being redirected to the PAGE NOT FOUND as a result. The problems I see are these unless he redirects again: The new simplified URLS  have to start from scratch to rank 2)We have duplicated content - two URLs with the same content Customers clicking products in the SERPs will currently find that they are being redirect to the 404 page. I understand that redirection has to occur but my questions are these: Is it ok to redirect twice with 301 - so old URL to the  "p" version then to final simplified version. Will link juice be lost doing this twice? If he redirects from the original URLS to the final version missing out the "p" version, what should happen to the "p" version - they are currently indexed. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

                Technical SEO | | AL123al
                0
              • Oxfordcomma

                Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?

                Hi all, I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time. I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site. I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take. Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?

                Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma
                0
              • ulefos

                Remove html file extension and 301 redirects

                Hi Recently I ask for some work done on my website from a company,  but I am not sure what they've done is right.
                What I wanted was html file extensions to be removed like
                /ash-logs.html to /ash-logs
                also the index.html to www.timports.co.uk
                I have done a crawl diagnostics and have duplicate page content and 32 page title duplicates. This is so doing my head in please help This is what is in the .htaccess file <ifmodule pagespeed_module="">ModPagespeed on
                ModPagespeedEnableFilters extend_cache,combine_css, collapse_whitespace,move_css_to_head, remove_comments</ifmodule> <ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header set Connection keep-alive</ifmodule> <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews</ifmodule> DirectoryIndex index.html RewriteEngine On 
                 # Rewrite valid requests on .html files  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html?rw=1 [L,QSA] 
                 # Return 404 on direct requests against .html files RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .html$  
                RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !rw=1 [NC]
                 RewriteRule ^ - [R=404] AddCharset UTF-8 .html # <filesmatch “.(js|css|html|htm|php|xml|swf|flv|ashx)$”="">#SetOutputFilter DEFLATE #</filesmatch> <ifmodule mod_expires.c="">ExpiresActive On
                ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 years"
                ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 years"
                ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 years"
                ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 years"
                ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 years"
                ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 years"
                ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 years"
                ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 years"
                ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 years"</ifmodule> <files 403.shtml="">order allow,deny allow from all</files> redirect 301 /PRODUCTS http://www.timports.co.uk/kiln-dried-logs
                redirect 301 /kindling_firewood.html http://www.timports.co.uk/kindling-firewood.html
                redirect 301 /about_us.html http://www.timports.co.uk/about-us.html
                redirect 301 /log_delivery.html http://www.timports.co.uk/log-delivery.html redirect 301 /oak_boards_delivery.html http://www.timports.co.uk/oak-boards-delivery.html
                redirect 301 /un_edged_oak_boards.html http://www.timports.co.uk/un-edged-oak-boards.html
                redirect 301 /wholesale_logs.html http://www.timports.co.uk/wholesale-logs.html redirect 301 /privacy_policy.html http://www.timports.co.uk/privacy-policy.html redirect 301 /payment_failed.html http://www.timports.co.uk/payment-failed.html redirect 301 /payment_info.html http://www.timports.co.uk/payment-info.html

                Technical SEO | | ulefos
                1
              • Alick300

                301 redirect using javascript

                Can I use javascript code to redirect(301) a webpage?

                Technical SEO | | Alick300
                0
              • IM_Learner

                301 Redirect on a PDF, DOCX files?

                Hi, I have to rename many pdf and docx files. How can I implement 301 redirect on them as they are linked from 'n' number of places? Regards, Shailendra Sial

                Technical SEO | | IM_Learner
                1
              • pbrothers24

                How many jumps between 301 redirects is acceptable?

                For example, I have a page A that should be redirected to page D, but instead A redirects to B, B redirects to C and C redirects to D. It's something I came across and wondering if its worth the dev time to change it. Thanks!

                Technical SEO | | pbrothers24
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2026 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.