301 Redirects?
-
We have an e-commerce website with about 4500 products for sale. About 1200 of these items were not showing up in the Google PLA ads because they were $0 dollar items, so we made those products invisible. Then Set 301 Redirects for each of the 1200 items. My question is this; we want to turn back on the 1200 items, should we delete the 301 redirects that are in place for them.? Will it hurt SEO performance by having them?
-
I don't think there is a problem in removing the 301s. You are not doing anything underhand. The 301 is in place because for whatever reason you have decided it is better for your visitor to reach the redirected page. There could be many valid reasons why the original pages are now valid, you aren't always to know a redirect is definitely temporary. Just in the same way you may need to amend a 301 to a new URL.
However, I would introduce the URLs back in small batches and monitor rankings and traffic.
-
Hello,
301 redirects are meant to be a permanent redirects, Google may think you are trying to be shady and give you a penalty. I recommend a 302 redirect in future to help avoid this. You could try switching them over slowly to help avoid this if you did want to turn them off.
It will hurt your SEO the question is for how long really.
Good luck!
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
-
Will URLS With Existing 301 Redirects Be as Powerful As New URLS In Serps?
Most products on our site have redirects to them from years of switching platform and merely trying to get a great and optimised URL for SEO purposes. My question is this: If a product URL has alot of redirects (301's), would it be more beneficial to me to create a duplicated version of the product and start fresh with a new URL? I am not on here trying to gain backlinks but my site is tn nursery dot net (proof:)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tammysons
I need some quality help figuring out what to do.
Tammy0 -
Can 301 redirects that are inaccurate cause Google suppressions on rankings?
In an interesting study by DeganSEO titled 'Negative Impact of 301 Redirects - A Case Study' a drop of rankings was observed when popular blog posts were redirected to product pages. One hypothesis is that the suppression is due to topical difference between the redirected pages (blog posts) and the target page. The topical difference issue is an interesting one when you consider it in the context of website migrations. We always recommend that 301 redirects are done at a page level and that if an equivalent page doesn't exist to just 301 anyway but to the most logical page. If you think about it Google are likely to frown on this because a) it's not a good experience for the user - 404 would be more accurate for them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QubaSEO
b) it's lazy - if you have good content that has gained authority/trust then create the same content on the new site don't trytp pass that to an entirely different page. Thoughts? Experiences?0 -
Can I undo 301 redirects to purchase site
A website I am thinking of buying has 301 redirected all pages on his site to one page that explains the site is closing down. If I tell him to change the 301 to 302s will I be able to recover the old pages on the site and keep the authority, rankings and link power of the old pages and not the "Closing page"? Is all i have to do is undo the 301 redirects and everything will go back to how the site was before the 301s were in place? Or will I lose all the link power on individual pages because they already transferred to the "Closing page"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline0 -
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
301 Redirect from ASP.NET to PHP...Is it possible?
Hi all, I'm trying to migrate my current website over to wordpress however my current website is ASP.NET and obviously Wordpress uses PHP. Is it possible to perform a 301 redirect from a asp.net to a php? Or do you need to convert the asp.net language into php? Or something different? I welcome your thoughts? Regards, Thomas Rochford
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoGri0 -
Ranking EMD to 301 for branding is it better to leave it as or 301 it?
We have a client about to enroll with us for SEO. The client has about 50 EMD sites, out of which 9 are ranking. An EMD has [Exact] match anchoring naturally, the sites in question are all EMDs the link profiles show it. The client wants to 301 the EMDs to a brand page.. We would want to 301, 9 EMD sites to the new site. Here is the thing, if the site domain has an exact match to the anchor text profile, when we 301 the page to www.brand.com/EMD will the link profile matter? One of the EMDs is on page one spot 2 if we do this change, will Google look at the new brand page (www.brand.com/EMD) as an unnatural link profile?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Duplicate Title Tags & Duplication Meta Description after 301 Redirect
Today, I was checking my Google webmaster tools and found 16,000 duplicate title tags and duplicate meta description. I have investigate for this issue and come to know about as follow. I have changed URL structure for 11,000 product pages on 3rd July, 2012 and set up 301 redirect from old product pages to new product pages. Google have started to crawl my new product pages but, De-Indexing of old URLs are quite slower. That's why I found this issue on Google webmaster tools. Can anyone suggest me, How can I increase ratio of De-Indexing for old URLs? OR any other suggestions? How much time Google will take to De-Index old URLs from web search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Redirecting Powerful Domains
What do you do if you have a client that never implemented a 301 redirect on their domain? For example here are the OSE stats for the URLs; http://url.com PA: 48 DA: 50 LRD: 65 TL: 1,084 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 http://www.url.com PA: 51 DA: 50 LRD: 165 TL: 2,271 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 G+1:3 My first instincts are to redirect the first one to the second one, but is it too late for that? Will that screw up all of their established stats? Any input or examples of past experiences with this would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0