What if my developers tell me they can only handle a certain amount of 301 redirects?
-
We recently launched a new site and I felt the need to redirect all of our old site URLs to the new site URLs. Our developers told me they would only be able to do about 1000 before it starts to bog down the site. Has anyone else came across this before? On top of that, with our new site structure, whenever our content team changes a title (which is more often than i had hoped), the URL changes. This means I'm finding i have many other redirects I need to put in place, but cant at the moment. Advice please??
-
This would only work if the old site is still live, you need to place the canonical tag in the old page pointing to the new page to transfere link juice.
You can only transfer link juice thought a request (eg: a link)if no links point to old pages, there is no need for the link juice
-
Hello,
I assume you want the 301 redirects so that you can carry over any SEO goodness the old site had to the new site. I wouldn't recommend using redirects for your entire site, the benefit is not often worth it. This is what I'd recommend:
I'd place 301 redirects on the old homepage (to new homepage) and same for top entry points of secondary pages only. All other pages I'd use canonical links (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en) from old site to new site. And, be sure to use Google Webmaster Tools to inform of the new domain name. Over next few months go to the websites that drive high levels of traffic to your website (i.e. referral sites) and ask them to change the domain name from old to new.
If your CMS is up for it you can also build into the platform a canonical module which can stop the URL changing when the title of the page changes. Highly recommend you sort this particular issue quickly.
Hope that helps,Davinia
-
301's do take resources, but very little, but there has to be a limit, 1000 is a lot.
why do you need so many?
With your old site see what pages had external links, and 301 them, there is no reason to 301 those that do not.
-
It seems to me that your developers are placing the 301 redirect rules in something like a .htaccess file. In this case, it is better to have fewer redirect rules to keep the size of the file down.
But why don't they store the original URL and new URL in a database - which can be queried and the appropriate 301 header initiated to allow the redirect to take place (if appropriate)? This way you could easily add a few thousand without any performance issues.
As far as the titles/urls are concerned, the system shouldn't change the URL every time the title changes. This will cause problems in the future. I'd ask the developers to change this.
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
-
Removing Multiple 301 Redirects
During my last redesign (and migration to Drupal) some of the updated SEO friendly url's on the new site were misspelled. Rather than updating the 301 redirects to point to the correct page the developer just added an additional 301 redirect. So it was redirected like this website.com/oldpage (301 to) website.com/new-paige (301 to) website.com/new-page Instead of website.com/oldpage (301 to) website.com/new-page I'll be finishing another redesign and updating to https soon, should I remove the redirect to the misspelled domain and just have one 301 from the original page? These multiple redirects have been up for over a year. Thanks for any specific advice!
Technical SEO | | talltrees0 -
Redirect 302 status code to 301 status code
Dear All, According to Mozz crawling report our site (www.rijwielcashencarry.n) have a few medium priority problems. There are 302 temporarly direct which i would like to redirect to 301 (because of the linkjuice). What is the proper way to do this?
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry040
I keep looking for it, but i can't seem to find the right solution. Thanks for your help!0 -
301 redirect chains
Hi everyone, I've had my site for a while now and have changed the structure a number of times. I'm confident my 301's work well and am not concerned about dead ends on my site. My question is, is there a way to find 301 redirect chains? i.e. can I export my link data from webmaster tools and run it through some software that tells me how many steps my 301's are taking to get to the final page? I don't know for sure that there are long 301 chains in my link structure, but I have a suspicion and it's very hard to check by going through them manually. Thanks in advance Will
Technical SEO | | madegood0 -
301 redirects reverting to 302 redirects
We recently built a new website with a new site structure. To prevent there being a load of 404's I redirected the old pages to the new relevant pages with 301 redirects. A few days later the SEOmoz crawl report alerted me to a load of 302 redirects. When I looked into this for some reason all of the 301 redirects I set up are reverting to 302 redirects. I did a test by 301 redirecting a made up URL to an existing page and the same thing happens - it 302 redirects. I can't find any settings in WordPress to possibly explain why this is happening. Has anyone got any ideas why this could be?
Technical SEO | | Tone_Agency0 -
301 redirects and seo..
I bought a domain and it has nice traffic. It only has about 5 main pages in php When i got the site i switched to html because php was overkill. I did the 301 and google deleted the php files and replaced with html version when i check site:domain.com It has been about 7 days. I DID NOT use 301 for each of the 5 pages to go php to html instead is used this code RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | samerk
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com
RewriteRule (.) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RedirectMatch 301 (.).php$ http://www.mydomain.com$1.html So basically if you load php it will load the html version. dog.php > dog.html Is this OKAY? or should it be done differently.... worried! Thanks !0 -
301 Redirect for 3 Domains into 1 New Domain
So I wanted a quick sanity check on the htaccess syntax for migrating 3 domains into 1 new domain. For example, we're migrating 3 sites abc.com, def.com and ghi.com, all into 1 new site on ghi.com. Here's the htaccess we're placing on the root of ghi.com: redirect 301 http://www.abc.com/wines.html http://www.ghi.com/wines redirect 301 http://www.def.com/trade.html http://www.ghi.com/trade
Technical SEO | | cmaseattle
redirect 301 http://www.ghi.com/winery-tours.html http://www.ghi.com/visit/taste On the DNS side of things, we're parking abc.com and def.com on the ghi.com server. I'm not seeing examples of htaccess files for this scenario, and none that use any domain info on the "from" side of the redirect 301 syntax. Any suggestions before we pull the trigger? Thanks!0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
301 Redirect question www to root.com
I have a site that has been up for a few weeks now and is currently in a www format and i am considering changing it to just mydomain.com I also have quite a few directory listings (including google places/bing) for this site w/ the www. url. If i do this, change it in my google analytics, and update my wordpress internal page + htaccess file. Will i lose any of the link juice i had from my www pages? Would this be something that would be advised since i've registered for many sites, or is there a potential that this could end up hurting me? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0