Long term plan for a large htaccess file with 301 redirects
-
We setup a pretty large htaccess file in February for a site that involved over 2,000 lines of 301 redirects from old product url's to new ones.
The 'old urls' still get a lot of traffic from product review sites and other pretty good sites which we can't change.
We are now trying to reduce the page load times and we're ticking all of the boxes apart from the size of the htaccess file which seems to be causing a considerable hang on load times. The file is currently 410kb big!
My question is, what should I do in terms of a long terms strategy and has anyone came across a similar problem?
At the moment I am inclined to now remove the 2,000 lines of individual redirects and put in a 'catch all' whereby anything from the old site will go to the new site homepage.
Example code:
RedirectMatch 301 /acatalog/Manbi_Womens_Ear_Muffs.html /manbi-ear-muffs.html
RedirectMatch 301 /acatalog/Manbi_Wrist_Guards.html /manbi-wrist-guards.htmlThere is no consistency between the old urls and the new ones apart from they all sit in the subfolder /acatalog/
-
When I faced a situation with several hundred pages, I decided to to only list the most important ones. I determined the important ones by there presence in Google and the import of the page content.
I first Googled "site:www.example.com" to get a good idea of what was indexed.
I used Analytics to see if any pages were entry pages. If a page gets no hits as an entry page, the 301 redirect is never needed.
I made a list of about 100 redirects, then made the 404 error page a slight variation of my homepage.
Now if you have any pages that have links in, you will need to maintain those redirects.
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
-
Back link plan discussion
When you have a lot of keywords that you rank for say something like 15,000 or more. How do you develop a good back link plan? I was thinking to first look at the highest volume keywords we already rank for but aren't in the top 1-3 spots. To focus on those few words trying to obtain more high quality back links. But I'm not sure if this is the best plan . What would you do? What are some good consistent back link plans you can use to work on a keyword or lots of keywords? Thanks for the discussion, Chris
Algorithm Updates | | Cfarcher1 -
Can we ignore "broken links" without redirecting to "new pages"?
Let's say we have reaplced www.website.com/page1 with www.website.com/page2. Do we need to redirect page1 to page2 even page1 doesn't have any back-links? If it's not a replacement, can we ignore a "lost page"? Many websites loose hundreds of pages periodically. What's Google's stand on this. If a website has replaced or lost hundreds of links without reclaiming old links by redirection, will that hurts?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Which domain is better - a Long descriptive or Short Abbreviated?
I want to start a new company and have an option to have a long and descriptive domain or buy out the 5 letter Abbreviated domain for $2000. abstract example:
Algorithm Updates | | NikitaG
LegalMigrationServiceCapeTown.com
V.S.
LMSCT.com The advantage of the shorter domain is that it is 13 years old.
so now for the SEO - which one do you think is better? is Exact Match Domain a better thing for SEO or can I get away with a shorter domain? I can buy both, but which one should I build on as the main domain? any advice would be much appreciated, as well as the PROS & CONS of both.0 -
.htaccess and SEO
Hey Everyone, New to SEOMOZ and I have an important question: We launched a new version of our site about 6 months ago and had a TON of redirects in our HTCaccess file due to a change in our permalink structure (over 2000 easily). Anyways, recently we went back in and took 2000+ lines of individual htaccess redirects and consolidated them into a RegularExpression for the ones where we could find a pattern for and the others (30 or so) are just the actual redirect link. Since doing that, it appears our search engine traffic has dropped a bit. It's not crazy, but it's definitely noticeable. I'm not an SEO expert, so my question is this the reason why? How long will we see this decline before we're back at normal levels? We're seeing a lot less crawl errors since doing this, so I think it's a good thing. But I just wanted to check and see. The site is http://thetechblock.com if you want to take a look. Any help would be really appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | willwade260 -
What Does Penguin Look Like Long Term in Analytics?
Happy New Year Moz'ers! Our agency has recently had a number of new clients who were hit by the Penguin updates. These sites came to us over the last two months so they've been dealing with Penguin for months. Looking at Google Analytics for each client, I'm seeing a lot of the same patterns - mostly a large first drop in traffic after the update and then a long, steady decline in organic traffic over the months that follow. I have seasonal factors for traffic dips for each client but I'm curious as to what other Moz'ers are finding long term. Do you see a large traffic drop followed by a sustained plateau? Do you see a large traffic drop followed by a long, slow decrease over the weeks or months that follow? Do you see something else? Thanks! <jason @sonray=""></jason>
Algorithm Updates | | DragonSearch0 -
Sudden drop after 301 redirection
Hi Experts We did a 301 redirect from an old site to a new site to get rid of any bad link juice. We recently found a big drop in rankings and traffic after google last indexed the new web pages. We did 301 using asp at page level coding. The website had 4000 approx. pages and we did 301 section by section. This is how we did as per one of the blog post in seomoz. Create a sitemap for your old domain. Create content (contact information, description of your company, indication of future plans) and something link worthy for the new domain. (You should start trying to build links early) Setup the new domain and make it live. Register and verify your old domain and new domain with Google Webmaster Tools. Create a custom 404 page for old domain which suggests visiting new domain. Old Domain error checking and fixing In a development environment, test the redirects from the old domain to the new domain. Ideally, this will be a 1:1 redirect. (www.example-old-site.com/category/sexy-mustaches.html to www.example-new-site.com/category/sexy-mustaches.html) 301 redirect your old domain to your new domain. Submit your old sitemap to Google and Bing. The submission pages are within Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Center (This step will make the engines crawl your old URLs, see that they are 301 redirects and change their index accordingly.) Fill out the Change of Address form in Google Webmaster Tools. Create a new sitemap and submit it to the engines. (This will tell them about any new URLs that were not present on the old domain) Wait until Google Webmaster Tools updates and fix any errors it is indicated in the Diagnostics section. Monitor search engine results to make sure new domain is being properly indexed. We also did a press release with prweb to announce the new launch. We followed the steps recommended in one of the I am not sure what to do next. Can anyone suggest if its normal to see a drop and we should wait for some time or if we did something wrong? We are loosing business with every single day. Please help !
Algorithm Updates | | ITRIX0 -
Google Dropped 3,000+ Pages due to 301 Moved !! Freaking Out !!
We may be the only people stupid enough to accidentally prevent the google bot from indexing our site. In our htaccess file someone recently wrote the following statement RewriteEngine On
Algorithm Updates | | David_C
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301] Its almost funny because it was a rewrite that rewrites back to itself... We found in webmaster tools that the site was not able to be indexed by the google bot due to not detecting the robots.txt file. We didn't have one before as we didn't really have much that needed to be excluded. However we have added one now for kicks really. The robots.txt file though was never the problem with regard to the bot accessing the site. Rather it was the rewrite statement above that was blocking it. We tested the site not knowing what the deal was so we went under webmaster tools then health and then selected "Fetch as Google" to have the website. This was our way of manually requesting the site be re-indexed so we could see what was happening. After doing so we clicked on status and it provided the following: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Length: 250
Content-Type: text/html
Location: http://www.mystie.com/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
MS-Author-Via: MS-FP/4.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 02:27:49 GMT
Connection: close <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> Moved Permanently The document has moved here. We changed the screwed up rewrite mistake in the htaccess file that found its way in there but now our issue is that all of our pages have been severely penalized with regard to where they are now ranking compared to just before the indecent. We are essentially freaking out because we don't know the real time consequences of this and if or how long it will take for the certain pages to regain their prior ranks. Typical pages when down anywhere between 9-40 positions on high volume search terms. So to say the least our company is already discussing the possibilities of fairly large layoffs based on what we anticipate with regard to the drop in traffic. This sucks because this is peoples lives but then again a business must make money and if you sell less you have to cut the overhead and the easiest one is payroll. I'm on a team with three other people that I work with to keep the SEO side up to snuff as much as we can and we sell high ticket items so the potential effects if Google doesn't restore matters could be significant. My question is what would you guys do? Is there any way we can contact Google about such a matter? If you can I've never seen such a thing. I'm sure the pages that are missing from the index now might make their way back in but what will there rank look like next time and with that type of rewrite has it permanently effected every page site wide, including those that are still in the index but severely effected by the index. Would love to see things bounce back quick but I don't know what to expect and neither do my counterparts. Thanks for any speculation, suggestions or insights of any kind!!!0 -
301 redirect question
So I have an employer who owns a retail site and his category URLs are horrible. So, I am suggesting to him to create a new page with a pretty URL and 301 redirect the old page to the new page. I am suggesting this to him, because this will help increase CTR for the targeted keyword & help him rank higher for the term. He is apprehensive about this cause he thinks this will cause him to drop in ranking. Does anybody know any resources or have any past experiences that will back up my suggestion or his for that matter?
Algorithm Updates | | Cyle0