Broken links shall i put them in my htaccess file to generate juice
-
Hi, when i had to rebuild my website after my hosting company made an error, i lost over 10,000 pages and lost many thousands of links coming to my site. What i want to know is, instead of trying to recreate those pages again which would take me a long time, should i put them into my htacess file and have them point back into my site.
so for example, if i have a link coming to my site to an article which could be, holidays in benidorm are not selling well, would it be a good idea to have that link pointed at the main benidorm section which is benidorm news.
And if i had an article which was people are finding it hard to lose weight, instead of writing a new article could i have the link pointing to my health section?
If this is the correct way of doing it to grab back some link juice, would it slow my site down and how many links could i put in my htacess file. So what i am trying to say is, if i put in say 1000 redirects into my htaccess file, would it slow my site down and is this a wise thing to do or should i just let the links go.
-
cheers keri, i have read the information and i am now putting it in place and see how things move along. i have gone through all the 404s and i have found that i am losing around 9,000 links. it will take me a long time to get all the links in the htacess file. and i am just about to post a question about my hosting company as they are telling me that i need a new server over this so i am not sure if i should stick with them or move my site, but anyway, thanks for the help on this 404 problem
-
Well you could let the links go to the graveyard but why so - Have you time to manually rewrite specific content around the targeted keyword and associated link that points to that old location ?
Could you also use http://archive.org/web/web.php to get a source of most of your old site and manually rewrite the page content with a view to doing the above method.
Also you state the hosting company lost over 10,000 pages, im assuming you have closed all avenues about backups from them to source the website pages ?
Apart from the above i cant think of anything only to let those links go --
Rob
-
Stephanie Change of Distiled wrote a good post about dealing with expired content and lots of 404 pages, and what you should do with those pages. It's at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content. She talks about where you might want to redirect these pages to, how it should look to the user, etc.
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
-
Referencing links in Articles and Blogs
Hi I am wondering if the <sup>tag in html is picked up by google as a reference point?</sup> I.e when you put a superscript in word it puts a small number next to your sentence. Then you have a list of reference at the end of the blog/article does google recognise this?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Backlink Profile: Should I disavow these links? Auto-Generated Links etc
Hello Moz Community, At first I wanted to say that I really like the Q&A section and that I read and learned a lot - and today it is time for my first own question 😉 I checked our backlink-profile these days and I found in my opinion a few bad/spammy links, most of them are auto-generated by pickung up some (meta) information from our webpage. Now my question is if I should dasavow these links over webmasters or if these links shouldn't matter as I guess basically every webpage will be picked up from them. Especially from the perspective that our rankings dropped significantly last weeks, but I am not sure if this can be the real reason. Examples are pages like: https://www.askives.com/ -Auto-Generates for example meta descriptions with links http://www.websitesalike.com/ -find similar websites http://mashrom.ir/ -no idea about this, really crazy Or we are at http://www.europages.com/, which makes sense for me and we get some referral traffic as well, but they auto-generated links from all their TLDs like .gr / .it / .cn etc. -just disavow all other TLDs than .com? Another example would be links from OM services like: seoprofiler.com Moreover we have a lot of links from different HR portals (including really many outdated job postings). Can these links “hurt” as well? Thanks a lot for your help! Greez Heiko
Technical SEO | | _Heiko_0 -
Sitemap links
Hi, I´m running a sitemap using pro-sitemaps and I find several pages that shouldn´t be listed. How do I find how are these pages being generated? Can´t find the links the robot is following to get to those pages..
Technical SEO | | ceci27100 -
.htaccess redirect question
Hi guys and girls Please forgive me for being an apache noob, but I've been trawling for a while now and i can't seem to find a definitive guide for my current scenario. I've walked into a but of a cluster$%*! of a job, to rescue a horribly set up site. One of many, many problems is that they have 132 302redirects set up. Some of these are identical pages but http-https, others are the same but https-http and some are redirects to different content pages with http-http. A uniform redirecting of http to https is not an option so I'm looking to find out the best practice for reconfiguring these 302s to 301s within .htaccess? Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | craig.gto0 -
Links in Webmaster Tools that aren't really linking to us
I've noticed that there is a domain in WMT that Google says is linking to our domain from 173 different pages, but it actually isn't linking to us at all on ANY of those pages. The site is a business directory that seems to be automatically scraping business listings and adding them to hundreds of different categories. Low quality crap that I've disavowed just in case. I have hand checked a bunch of the pages that WMT is reporting with links to us by viewing source, but there's no links to us. I've also used crawlers to check for links, but they turn up nothing. The pages do, however, mention our brand name. I find this very odd that Google would report links to our site when there isn't actually links to our site. Has anyone else ever noticed something like this?
Technical SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Where to put 301 redirects in Magento?
I will be changing the URL structure in a magento store from "base/category/subcategory/product" to "base/product" which means i have to make over 1000 URL 301 redirects so our old links still work. Should i put the redirects in a .htaccess file so they stay intact no matter what or should i just put them in with all the other rewrites (in Magento 's URL rewrite manager)? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tilenkrivec0 -
Affiliate links
Is there a best practice for linking out to affiliates URLs post panda? I know some believe it can be a factor.
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Add to Cart Link
We have shopping cart links (<a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p"></a> <a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p">The SEOMoz site crawls are flagging these as a massive number of 302 redirects and I also wonder what sort of effect this is having on linkjuice flowing around the site. </a> <a href's,="" not="" input="" buttons)="" that="" link="" to="" a="" url="" along="" the="" lines="" of="" cart="" add="" 123&return="/product/123. </p">I can see several possible solutions: Make the links nofollow Make the links input buttons Block /cart/add with robots.txt Make the links 301 instead of 302 Make the links javascript (probably worst care) All of these would result in an identical outcome for the UX, but are very different solutions. What would you suggest?</a>
Technical SEO | | Aspedia0