301 Re-directing a page
-
Hi,
My website is appearing on page 1 of Google for a specific keyword, however when clicking on the search result, the page is out of date.
As a short term solution, I have 301 redirected the url to a more up to date page on my website and beginning to optimise the on page content of this new page
Is there any recommendations on what to do with the old page that appears on page 1 Google - as the page title, meta description and url displayed is out of date?
Any help, best practise would be great...
-
You can also add a canonical tag on the old page, using the new preferred page URL in that tag. This could help speed up the Google indexing issue as some have been testing this actually works faster than waiting for Google to change it out based on the 301 redirect.
Also, if there are any links pointing to that page, within your own site, or coming from 3rd party sites, it's a best practice to change them - the ones on your site you can take care of - the off-site inbound links can be more challenging - requiring reaching out to other site owners, who are not always responsive. Yet if you can do this, it helps provide more authority to the new page sooner.
-
Cheers Chris - good to hear I am following best practise!
-
You have done exactly what you should do. The 301 will let the search engines know that page is no longer there and has been replaced by the new one. Your new page should begin to show soon and the old page should drop out.
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
-
Product Page Links
I have a product category page at https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/s1000rr/ which currently has 38 products on it. Problem is, all the product titles start with the name of the text: "bmw s1000rr" (because that's what they are) - so that means there are 38 anchored internal links on that page, all starting with the same keyword. You can see how that might look to the Google crawler. Recently that page dropped from around 15 to outside the top 100, and Moz tells me that the page is keyword stuffed with "bmw s1000rr" (no suprise) so I'm guessing that may be the reason the page has disappeared out of the SERPs. I don't really want to change all the product titles (then they wouldn't make sense) so I'm just wondering if there is any way around this? Is there some way of telling Google that this is a product category page and therefore to ignore the anchor text in all of those product links? Can/should the links have some kind of markup on them? Or is the page beyond help? Basically I'm looking at a way of keeping the product titles as they are, but avoiding a page penalty from Google somehow. I'm a bit of a newbie, any suggestions would be most appreciated. Cheers, Graeme
On-Page Optimization | | graeme720 -
Which is better? One dynamically optimised page, or lots of optimised pages?
For the purpose of simplicity, we have 5 main categories in the site - let's call them A, B, C, D, E. Each of these categories have sub-category pages e.g. A1, A2, A3. The main area of the site consists of these category and sub-category pages. But as each product comes in different woods, it's useful for customers to see all the product that come in a particular wood, e.g. walnut. So many years ago we created 'woods' pages. These pages replicate the categories & sub-categories but only show what is available in that particular wood. And of course - they're optimised much better for that wood. All well and good, until recently, these specialist page seem to have dropped through the floor in Google. Could be temporary, I don't know, and it's only a fortnight - but I'm worried. Now, because the site is dynamic, we could do things differently. We could still have landing pages for each wood, but of spinning off to their own optimised specific wood sub-category page, they could instead link to the primary sub-category page with a ?search filter in the URL. This way, the customer is still getting to see what they want. Which is better? One page per sub-category? Dynamically filtered by search. Or lots of specific sub-category pages? I guess at the heart of this question is? Does having lots of specific sub-category pages lead to a large overlap of duplicate content, and is it better keeping that authority juice on a single page? Even if the URL changes (with a query in the URL) to enable whatever filtering we need to do.
On-Page Optimization | | pulcinella2uk0 -
Duplicate page content
Hi Crawl errors is showing 2 pages of duplicate content for my clients WordPress site: /news/ & /category/featured/ Yoast is installed so how best to resolve this ? i see that both pages are canonicalised to themselves so presume just need to change the canonical tag on /category/featured/ to reference /news/ ?(since news is the page with higher authority and the main page for showing this info) or is there other way in Yoast or WP to deal with this & prevent from happening again ? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How long should I leave an existing web page up after a 301 redirect?
I've been reading through a few of blog posts here on moz and can't seem to find the answer to these two questions: How long should I leave an existing page up after a 301 redirect? The page old page is no longer needed but has pretty high page authority. If I take the old page down—the one that I'm redirecting from—immediately after I set up the 301 redirect, will link juice still be passed to the new page? My second question is, right now, on my index.html page I have both a 301 redirect and a rel canonical tag in the head. They were both put in place to redirect and pass link equity respectively. I did this a couple years back after someone recommended that I do both just to be safe, but from what I've gathered reading the articles here on moz is that your supposed to pick one or the other depending on whether or not it's permanent. Should I remove the rel conanical tag or would it be better to just leave it be?
On-Page Optimization | | ScottMcPherson0 -
Search Pages outranking Product Pages
A lot of the results seen in the search engines for our site are pages from our search results on our site, i.e. Widgets | Search Results This has happened over time and wasn't intentional, but in many cases we see our search results pages appearing over our actual product pages in search, which isn't ideal. Simply blocking indexing of these pages via robots wouldn't be ideal, at least all at once as we would have that period of time where those Search Results pages would be offline and our product pages would still be at the back of ranking. Any ideas on a strategy to replace these Search Results with the actual products in a way that won't hurt us too bad during the transition? Or a way to make the actual product pages rank above the search results? Currently, it is often the opposite. Thanks! Craig
On-Page Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
Duplicate page
Just getting started and had a question regarding one of the reports. It is telling me that I have duplicate pages but I'm not sure how to resolve that.
On-Page Optimization | | KeylimeSocial0 -
Keyword Landing Page Transition
We are redesigning the site to launch soon. We are a manufacturer. Our most valuable keyword currently ranks around 8th on Google in a competitive market and responds with a link to our product selection page as the landing URL. This link / URL is currently listed on every site page in a right column menu with the keyword as the anchor text. My concern is that I have redesigned this product selection page, and would like to change its file name to include the keyword as well as use the same keyword anchor text. And to complicate the matter, for political reasons my boss has asked me to consider keeping the old product page available to alleviate board concern (not rational, but may be required). Since the old page shows similar information to the new selection page, if I keep it, I am considering calling it a "Visual Selector" as opposed to the "Product Selector" menu name for the new page. I will list both in a list under the keyword product name on the home page menu and then drop the old selector page link on all other pages to lower visitor confusion. So the alternative choices to proceed are as follows: 1. Keep old and new product selection pages a. Show both on all page menus (Keeps the old page visible to Google, duplicating the current presentation for current keyword landing page) b. Only show old product page on home page menu to alleviate the Board concerns (Keeps the old page visible to Google, but with one link) 2. Get rid of the old product page and redirect URL to new one (our primary keyword would be ranked on its own merit and the current Google ranked page would redirect to the new one) Number 2 is the logical method for users, but I am nervous about dropping and/or redirecting the current landing page which ranks my best keyword at 8th in a competitive market. Your recommendations or comments? What do you predict Google will do in these three scenarios? Hope you can follow this maze... Thanks! George
On-Page Optimization | | rhawk0 -
E-Commerce product pages that have multiple skus with unique pages.
Hey Guys, With the recent farm/panda update from google i'm at a cross roads as to how I should optimize product pages for a project i'm working on for a client. My client sells tires and one particular tire brand can have up to 15 models and each model can have up to 30 sizes. IE: 'Michelin Pilot Sport Cup' comes in 15 different sizes. Each size will have it's unique product page and description bringing me to my question. Should I use the same description on every size? I do plan on writting unique content for each tire model however i'm not sure if I should do it for every size. After all the tire model description is the same for every size, each size doesn't carry any unique characteristics that I can describe. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | MikeDelaCruz770