Which is better, a directory 301 redirect or each page in the directory?
-
A customer of mine has a site with lots of articles and they are all quite spammy. They have not been affected by penguin yet so they asked what to do. I suggested losing the articles directory and 301 redirect to either the home page or another important page.
Would a 301 redirect on the entire directory to a single page be the way to go or add redirects from each page within the directory and spread out redirects to various pages in website?
Or do you have a better suggestion?
-
Hi Anthony,
First of all, it is always better to redirect URLs to individual pages than perform sitewide 301 directs. But in this case, if the individual pages aren't getting much traffic, it may not make much difference.
If the articles are truly low quality, and you are worried about a future penalty, you may want to simply remove them without a redirect at all. Serve a 410 HTTP response (gone) instead, and carefully watch your traffic/rankings to make sure nothing drops.
It's most likely Google is simply ignoring these pages. The best defense is to build up an offense of quality material so the bad doesn't outweigh the good.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.
-
No, I would only do this for articles that have a good "inbound" link profile. 301 redirects can slow down the servers, so having too many isn't good either.
-
Thanks MargaritaS, good point on the spammy links and redirecting with them. To clarify, it is the article content that is not well written and just about keyword stuffed, but not terribly. The articles look like someone use a boiler template and just replaced keywords and a sentence here and there and called it a new article.
I was thinking the best thing to do would be to bury the evidence (haha!!) and apply redirects to valued pages. Then I would have them start writing good original content in a blog.
So should I apply 40+ individual redirects? or just redirect whole directory to a single page?
Thanks again for your feedback.
-
Anthony,
This sounds tricky. When you say "spammy" are you talking about their inbound links, or are you referring to the content within those articles? I think there is an important difference there. If you do indeed have articles that look spammy because of the content itself (ex: keyword stuffing) but actually happen to have decent inbound links from reliable sources, then I would say to individually 301 redirect those. If you mean spammy as in the case that the inbound links pointing to these individual articles, then I would say lose them because you don't want to pass those bad links onto this "other" important page on your client's site.
Hope this helps!
MS
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
-
Redirect chains and rankings
Hi All, I've got interesting question for Moz community today. Has redirect chain got any impact on rankings or not? Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Optimal_Strategies0 -
Repetition of Location on A Page
I was wondering if there was a certain number of times you had to repeat a location to help your page rank well. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | OOMDODigital0 -
Losing Page Rank after 301 redirect from http to www
Hi Guys I have site-wide redirected all http// to www and all the category pages lost their page ranks (except home page). I would like to know if this is normal and is it one of the possible causes in losing keyword ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | ilovebodykits0 -
On-page SEO optimization
hi there! Is it possible not to be in the first 20 or 30 positions in the SERPs after executing onpage SEO actions (keyword optimization, metatags, ....) even for keywords for which there's not "too much" competition? Is there a way of visualize the pages indexed by the google bot? (the pages especifically, not the number) in order to discard indexing problems? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr1 -
How do I do a 301 Redirect in IIS 7 from http://www.freightmonster.com/index.html to http://freightmonster.com/index.html when I don't have a physical page to redirect?
I'm trying to get rid of my Rel Canonical links and use the 301 Redirect instead.
On-Page Optimization | | FreightBoy0 -
On Page Optimisation Reports
Firstly sorry if this has already been answered - I did look I promise.
On-Page Optimization | | Jock
Secondly sorry if the answer to this is blatently obvious! In the process of trying to optimise my landing pages, I am using On Page Optimisation reports. I have several (ok lots) with F grades which is not surprising as the landing page is not the landing page optimised for a certain keyword. If I change the landing page to the one that I have for a certain keyword then hey presto A or B grade (clever me)! Now here's the thing - presumably the landing page that is listed by default is the one that Google "sees" for a particular keyword. How do I change this if I can or do I have to be patient or am I just being plain daft?! Many thanks0 -
Pages not cached
Sorry for all the questions. I have dozens of article pages that are not cached by google. How can I get them cached?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0 -
Page title
So if we have a main category page on our site (mines an ecommerce site), do we go for more than that main keyword phrase for that category of products, or is it better to just keep it by itself, and not utilize the 65-70 characters available?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0