When is it time to kill 301 redirects
-
3 months we updated our site design design and as such lots of page urls changed. At the time we 301 redirected about 100 pages. (All pages are on the same domain - 301 redirects like .com/about-us/company to .com/company)
Anyhow my question is should I leave these redirects active indefinitely or kill them assuming value has passed through by now?
Your Thoughts are welcomed.
Thanks,
Glen.
-
Hi EGOL,
Thanks a mill for the reply really appreciate it. Based on your suggestion I will keep the redirects in place simply just in case in case there is links on other website leading to our pages and I don't want them going to a 404.
Cheers,
Glen
-
If I have a link from a page on my site to a page on your site and you kill the redirect then my visitor will hit a 404 on your page. That is how site-to-site traffic is handled.
Now, search engines could remember that a page is redirected - but I would not bet any money on that. So, I leave my redirects up forever.
I have a site that produces a lot of temporary content. We redirect thousands of URLs each year. To make that easy to manage we use subfolders such as mysite.com/sports/2012/egol-hits-grand-slam/. When we are ready to abandon the content for /2012/ we will find some that is pulling traffic, redirect it to related page, then all files that have no links or no traffic can be redirected to a single location. The order of commands in .htaccess allow that to be done easily.
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
-
Selectively 301 redirects
Hi there: We are developing a pretty typical 301 redirection strategy. We basically are moving blog posts from a former sub-domain to the top level of our new designed site. We've pulled a site crawl of the old sub-domain and want to make sure we redirect any posts with a significant backlink profile to their current counterparts. Most other posts are just going to be redirected to the main 'front door' of our new blog. Is there a way to selectively redirect a certain number of posts and then 'globally' redirect everything else to a single URL? I would assume this would be a pretty common task, but can't find an easy way to do what we want to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Adventurous 301 redirection chain
Picture this - if you have a spirit for adventure! Client builds Alpha****Domain.com Then builds a number of backlinks to Alpha****Domain.com Client also creates a number of 301 redirects from several older domains to AlphaDomain.com Client then changes Alpha****Domain.com to Beta****Domain.com They create 301 redirects from Alpha****Domain.com to Beta****Domain.com But then... they 'park' Alpha****Domain.com (ie. no longer accessible)! About one year later, client changes a whole bunch of URLs on Beta****Domain.com without keeping track of changes. Thankfully, the hosting service (Shopify) automatically creates some redirects, but it's more by accident than design! Questions: After step 6 above, are the 301 redirects created in steps 3 and 5 now totally redundant and broken? If AlphaDomain.com no longer exists, surely all redirects to and from this domain are broken? Or can they be recovered? What happens to all the backlinks originally created in step 2? Finally, can anything be done to recover lost URLs in step 7? Yes. What a mess!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Suggested approach (support) for 301 redirects in event of an acquisition
If an agency has recently been acquired by a new organisation, it will need to be redirected to the new organisation's website as soon as possible. We are aware of the need to 301 redirect all pages (domain authority) across to the current domain of the new organisation's website. The new organisation has less pages than our Agency site however, so we cannot point 301 redirects at page level. Would you therefore advise, A, B or C?: A) Redirecting all pages including all blog posts/services pages etc across from the agency site to the new organisation's domain? * new organisation does not have /blog or /services pages. -Will we lose authority if redirecting from pages of our agency site to the new organisation's top level domain? B) Ensure that the new organisation secures hosting of the agency website, and place a holding page on the Agency website directing visitors through to the new organisation for the interim, until we have a /blog, /services page on the new organisation's site? C) Place 301 redirects from agency across to new organisation, and look moving forward (when pages have been put in place on new organisation website) to retrospectively repoint 301 redirects from top level domain of new organisation's site to the new pages which have just been created on the new organisation's site? Any pointers here would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tangent0 -
Multilingual Redirection
Hey there awesome Mozzers, I have a site that it automatically redirects people by using geolocation ( i know that probably is not good ) to the various languages of the site. I just wanted to know Is 301 or 302 the best option? ( I've heard that for language re-directions 302 is the best case scenario ) My main page for example is www.example.com and it automatically redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en for any language that is not there. What is the best case scenario? Leave it to redirect to /en or just leave it go to the root page www.example.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Tags: 301 Redirect, Rel Canonical, or Leave Them Alone?
The title is pretty self explanatory ... we have cornerstone pages ( such as a page for "Widget A") that rank for a certain keyword and then relevant articles that all link to that particular cornerstone page. Each of those articles has the same tag ("Widget A") to tie them together. If you click on that tag, it creates a list of all articles with that tag. We think that this may be siphoning off some of that keyword Google Juice from our Widget A cornerstone page. Our question is, should we 301 redirect that tag to point to the Widget A cornerstone page, use a rel canonical pointing to the Widget A cornerstone page, or just leave it alone like we are doing now? Our goal is to have the Widget A cornerstone page receive the most Google Juice possible and not be diminished by the tags. Note* - We don't want to stop Google from crawling the tags because some of our tags rank highly for other keywords. Also, we tried 301 redirecting the tags before and our ranking dropped significantly ... however, we made a lot of site changes at the same time so we are not sure if the drop in rank was due to redirecting the tags or the site changes. Help please ... thanks in advance 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Humanovation0 -
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 -
302 redirects in the sitemap?
My website uses a prefix at the end to instruct the back-end about visitor details. The setup is similar to this site - http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=sf with a 302 redirect from the normal link to the one with additional info and a canonical tag on the actual URL without the extra info ((the normal one here being http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com,) However, when I used www.xml-sitemaps.com to create a sitemap they did so using the URLs with the extra info on the links... what should I do to create a sitemap using the normal URLs (which are the ones I want to be promoting)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Redirect a temporary IP
I was performing some development work on a client's site recently under a temporary location on the host's server, for example: http://11.22.33.444/~accountname/folder/page.html Google managed to index a couple of pages using this url 😞 I have updated DNS to the correct domain and the site is live, but I am a bit confused in regards to the correct way to create a 301 Redirect for this example or at least a way point it to our 404 page. I am hoping someone more proficient with htaccess can help me out a bit... Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0