301 redirect recommendations
-
One of our clients we are working on have two sites the main with a PR5 and a separate one with a PR4.
We are planning on doing a 301 from the PR4 to a page on the PR5
Is it best to do:
www.PR4.com ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page
or
www.PR4.com/page ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page
Most pages on the PR4 site can fit into one PR5 page logically. However the PR4 has an about us, contact us, blog/with posts, FAQ, Applications, Legal Resources which are all pretty out dated..
The PR4 site is kinda messy and we are not sure if it will be easy to 301 each page individually with the user in mind.
can we do a sitewide 301 redirect from the root PR4.com to a page PR/5.com/releveantPR4page and also do deeper 301's? PR4.com/PR4page ---> PR5.com/releveantPR4page
-
Both Lance and CleverPhD have some good points. Really go page by page and map out the entire domain. Both on the PR4 and PR5 sites. Create excel spreadsheets to align up the location and destination of your 301 redirects.
Then, calculate the # of pages you have listed on the PR4 site that need redirecting but really don't have a home. IF the number is small enough, just redirect those pages/URL's for visitors to the homepage. Google doesn't like mass 301 redirects to the homepage, but if those pages have small inbound links, and some value - that will get pushed back to the main index URL.
You could also let it 404 as CleverPhD said, but what I would map out, is a kick-ass 404 redirect page. Include elements like a search function for people to look for new content, add a link to a form that people can fill out to advise of the 404 error. Offer up alternatives and/or pages-URL's that might offer something similar. Have fun with it and add some creativity to help convert those almost lost users to possibly visitors and then clients. Don't just let the 404 page be the end all of the site visit. I have found by really focusing on 404 error page improvements, you can improve both the bounce and exit rates of said pages, and as a result retain users that become clients in the end - all because you were able to take the time to build something that caught their attention, and thus - kept them inside the site
Some great examples of creative 404 errors might include this or some creatively funny ones like that. This is another one I liked here.
Hope some of that helps
Cheers!
-
I would consider the ROI of the redirect. If a specific page flows a bunch of link juice and on terms important to the business then redirect to the best page. After a point, the rest won't return enough value for your client to be charged at your hourly rate.
-
You want to go page to page (your second example) as much as possible. Google prefers more of a one to one vs a many to one relationship with 301 redirects. That said, if you have a bunch of garbage pages with garbage links with not much traffic to them, you may just want to let them 404 and die out of the index. Take some time looking at your Analytics and you may find you can just drop those pages.
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
-
Redirection Problem
I have a site that has 2,50,000 pages and I want to redirect to another domain. Is it good practice for SEO and google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari0 -
How long will old pages stay in Google's cache index. We have a new site that is two months old but we are seeing old pages even though we used 301 redirects.
Two months ago we launched a new website (same domain) and implemented 301 re-directs for all of the pages. Two months later we are still seeing old pages in Google's cache index. So how long should I tell the client this should take for them all to be removed in search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Liamis0 -
Penguin and 301 redirects...
Hi, I have several questions about starting a new domain due to Penguin. The site is: http://bajajlaw.com. Quick backstory: This site was hit every time Penguin rolled out. No clean-up was done until October 2015. At that time, I took over the project. My efforts include: (1) Remove'em, (2) manual removal, (3) and the Disavow Tool. The HP went from being at around #50 for the target KW (San Diego criminal defense attorney) to about #25. Never really moved higher than that. However, I redid the content for the internal pages (DV, Theft Crimes, etc.) and they are all ranking fairly well (first page or top of 2nd). In short, the penalty only seems to affect the HP, not the internal pages. Instead of waiting for Penguin to roll-out, client wants to move forward with new domain. My questions are as follow: 1. Can I use the same content for the internal pages and 301 from the old internal pages to the new? 2. Should I 301 from the old to the new domain for the HP, or not? 3. If I do a 301 from an internal page to a new internal page, does that have the same effect of doing a 301 from the old HP to the new HP? I have read various opinions on this topic. I'd appreciate feedback from anyone who has experience doing this sort of thing. Thanks. P.s. I'm inclined to wait for P4 to rollout, but given that nobody seems to know when that might be, it's hard for me to advise client to keep waiting for it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
How do i migrate from Volusion to Magento with the same domain using 301 redirect?
We are thinking about migrating our site from Volusion to Magento due to traffic reasons, our site's been growing and we're going way over the bandwidth limit (40gb) for Volusion every month. It only make sense for us to start on Magento CE where we can host it on our site and use our own bandwidth. We will be using the same domain, and changing our URLs to make things better (we were somewhat restricted by Volusion so we couldn't optimize some of our URL addresses). Here's comes the main question, since we are ranking pretty good for the keywords that we're targeting, we ABSOLUTELY DON'T want to lose any traffic or ranking from our pages, I know that there's something called the 301 redirect that we can use, but how can this be done? When we migrate the site, we will need to point our domain to Magento from Volusion, so basically Volusion store will be down... if we are changing domain names then the 301 redirect makes sense because we can have the original store live while it's redirecting to a completely new address. Is there any method to still setup this 301 redirect, or is there something else I can do to save our rankings??? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s2bkevin0 -
301 page into a 404
Hi I have a job board site and the way the site is built means that I cant 404 job pages once they have expired. To combat this Im looking to 301 the pages into a 404 page.Do any of you have any experience with this? Are there any potential pitfalls to doing a 404 this way? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewAkesson0 -
Redirecting a redirect - thoughts?
Hi! A client has just had 14k 404s pop up in his WMT. I think this is because a page that they redirected to had moved. My question is, can I clean these up by redirecting the page the original redirect was one? If so, will it have any negative impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Is it a problem to have too many 301 redirects within your site
my website is translated into 10+ languages, but our news articles are often only published in 1-2 languages. Currently, URLs are created in the unpublished news languages that then 301 redirect the user to main news page since the content doesnt exist in that language. Is this implementation okay or is there a preferred method we should be using so that we don't have a large number of pages on the site with redirects? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
301 or 404?
My client has a classified ads website with hundreds of thousands of classified ads. These ads expire quite fast. When the ad expires it gets removed. At the moment this results in a 404 page and thus hundreds of thousands of 404 erros in Webmasters Tools. From what I know this damages SERP results due to slow indexing of important sites and 404 being just plain bad SEO. I suggested doing a 301 from the expired ads to a upper category but this feels like cheating. The content hasn't actually moved, it has been removed. What would you suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PanuKuuluvainen0