Will "internal 301s" have any effect on page rank or the way in which an SE see's our site interlinking?

[TinkyWinky]

We've been forced (for scalability) to completely restructure our website in terms of setting out a hierarchy.

For example - the old structure :

country / city / city area

Where we had about 3500 nicely interlinked pages for relevant things like taxis, hotels, apartments etc in that city :

We needed to change the structure to be :

country / region / area / city / cityarea

So as patr of the change we put in place lots of 301s for the permanent movement of pages to the new structure and then we tried to actually change the physical on-page links too.

Unfortunately we have left a good 600 or 700 links that point to the old pages, but are picked up by the 301 redirect on page, so we're slowly going through them to ensure the links go to the new location directly (not via the 301).

So my question is (sorry for long waffle) :

Whilst it must surely be "best practice" for all on-page links to go directly to the 'right' page, are we harming our own interlinking and even 'page rank' by being tardy in working through them manually?

Thanks for any help anyone can give.

[TinkyWinky]

Thanks Everett - sorry about delay in coming back to your response.

This 301 issue was one if the things we were worried about (along with a ton of others) so we can at least be a little self-assured that we're prgressing on all fronts and not leaving a gaping problem that will continue to dog us.

Cheers

W

[Everett]

I'm just going to answer your question directly. This was your question:

"Whilst it must surely be "best practice" for all on-page links to go directly to the 'right' page, are we harming our own interlinking and even 'page rank' by being tardy in working through them manually?"

Short Answer: As long as you are working to update those internal links, and you have 301 redirects in place during the meantime, you should be fine.

Technically speaking, it is best practice to link directly to the page internally, rather than relying on 301 redirects. Yes, it is true that a very small (very, VERY small so as to be virtually undetectable) amount of pagerank is lost when redirecting, it only becomes an issue when you begin adding redirect on top of redirect. Keeping your house clean, so-to-speak, by not relying on redirects to fix your broken internal links will keep this from happening, and is exactly what the tiny amount of pagerank loss is said to be created for (to discourage webmasters from relying on redirects to fix broken internal links) - if you believe Matt Cutts.

With that said, you may indeed have many other issues to deal with, as do most sites that have a geotargeted, deep URL structure like the one you have outlined. Panda slammed a lot of sites like that pretty hard. But all of that is beyond the scope of this question.

I hope you find whatever is wrong and get your traffic back. Good luck!

[TinkyWinky]

Hi Chris

Thanks - I 'love' the loose MC videos - "it is - but it isn't an issue".

That was my gut that there may be a temporary loss of link juice, but it would re-adjust after a period. Which means we have other issues.

Cheers

W

[TinkyWinky]

Thanks for your advice - amended the question so it is simpler to read. sorry about that.

Well that's what I thought - but anecdotal evidence ( as well as past experience ) is making me wonder whether we're losing a significant passing of link juice. We put the 301s in place about 6 or 7 months ago so any loss of link juice between pages should have come back by now.

Maybe we have some other issues?

W

[CleverPhD]

Agree with Chris, thumbs up. I would just add that "ideally" you would have manually gone through all the links ahead of time and had the 301s in place prior to launch.    That way there is no downtime/confusion to Google on what they are supposed to do with these pages.  If you think about it you have 600 pages that are in limbo and so after a while Google will just say, well, I guess those pages are dead and start to crawl them less often and eventually drop them.

I would make it a priority to go through those pages and setup the new 301s ASAP.  Google will keep trying a old page for a while (few months) if it 404s or even if you have a 301.  It knows that mistakes happen.  So in the case of the 301, it will still crawl the old URL for a while even after it sees the 301 the first time, just to make sure that the 301 is really permanent.  You have a bit of a grace period so take advantage of it to get things cleaned up quickly.

[GPainter]

Hiya,

First off let me post this video from Matt Cutts regards to 301 redirects  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw

As long as the 301 is pointed towards either the same page or a page of equal value (content wise) you should be good. Whilst going through them manually may loose you a bit of rank over time at least you can know you are directing to the correct pages.

short answer

manual - Short term rank loss long term benifit

Auto - visa vesa

Hope this helps

[mbulox]

Hello,

I don't quite understand your question, if you are adding more category pages, you should have more pages instead of less, just make sure to 301 redirect every single old page and you shouldn't have a problem.

I had to do something similar to one of my sites like 3 months ago and I did loose pagerank on some pages but ranking got better so I wouldn't worry much about pagerank.

Cheers