Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How long should I leave an existing web page up after a 301 redirect?
-
I've been reading through a few of blog posts here on moz and can't seem to find the answer to these two questions:
How long should I leave an existing page up after a 301 redirect? The page old page is no longer needed but has pretty high page authority. If I take the old page down—the one that I'm redirecting from—immediately after I set up the 301 redirect, will link juice still be passed to the new page?
My second question is, right now, on my index.html page I have both a 301 redirect and a rel canonical tag in the head. They were both put in place to redirect and pass link equity respectively. I did this a couple years back after someone recommended that I do both just to be safe, but from what I've gathered reading the articles here on moz is that your supposed to pick one or the other depending on whether or not it's permanent.
Should I remove the rel conanical tag or would it be better to just leave it be?
-
That's very helpful. And that article was a good read. Appreciate the help!
-
Hi Scott,
you should only have the canonical tag on the URL that represents the home page.
So if you are home page is www.mysite.com you would only have a canonical tag their
does that make sense?
Essentially you should not use the canonical tag on a page that is not going to be in Google's index
If you are already 301 redirecting your index.HTML using Regex or whatever method it will not need to tag in addition.
More info
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
http://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
All the best,
Tom
-
One thing I kind of left out is that on my home page (index.htlm) my canonical is just set to www.mysite.com, and the redirect is just to redirect non-www request to www request. So I just wasn't sure if I should remove that canonical since the redirect is already taking care of it? Both the canonical and the redirect have been there for approximately about 2 years so the redirect already kicked in a long time ago.
I don't think that leaving the canonical there would devalue the page at all, but just want to get another opinion.
-
Hi Scott,
If you are looking for somebody to confirm what Chris said I agree 100%.
If you are backlink has value keep it in place. As long as possible.
If you have done a redirect on a back link you know has no value meaning no one is going to it directly nor does it have any back links of any value pointing to it. Six months is a very safe cutoff time.
If you are doing a redesign you want to map your redirects
All the best,
Thomas
-
Scott,
Keep in mind that redirects happen at the server, before the user agent even gets to the page contents of a URL. That means that a rel=canonical tag on a page that has been redirected is not seen by the bot/user agent. So, once redirected, the page of content that had been available at a URL is no longer accessible by anyone or anything on the web. When Google sees the 301 redirect, it reassigns (most of) the value it had given to the original URL to the new URL.
If a URL has back links pointing to it and the URL is redirected, the redirect should stay in place for as long as the back link has value. If there are no back links pointing to a URL that has been redirected, 6 months is a safe bet for leaving the URL in place. Here's Mat Cutts on that topic...
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
-
Should I redirect a popular but irrelevant blog post to the home page?
Hi. I'm trying to get my website; www.ciphr.com , to rank for keywords relevant to "HR Software" in the UK. It's a highly competitive industry and we rank ~mid to low on page one for some of our ideal keywords that are highly relevant and high volume. Years ago we took the decision to blog about topics more loosely related to the world of work. One of our blog posts, about plants in the office https://www.ciphr.com/advice/plants-in-the-office/ is popular. It gets decent traffic and consistently builds backlinks to the post without any further effort on our part. The specific page has a PA of 46 and DA of 55 with >500 domains linking to it. This compares to our home page with a PA of 47 and 700 linking domains. It is typically the home page that ranks for our money keywords "HR Software" "HR Systems" in the UK. Because this blog post is so loosely related to our actual business, the traffic it generates is highly unlikely to turn into a customer of ours. I am considering redirecting the blog post to the home page to pass link juice to the home page. The concern I have is that, based on the anchor text and contextual signals from linking pages, Google might then infer that our home page is less relevant for our money keywords and more relevant for "plants". Are my concerns unfounded? What are your thoughts? Should I redirect the blog post to the home page? Another internal page? Keep the blog post live? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crichardson19922 -
Page Title Length
Hi Gurus, I understand that it is a good practice is to use 50-60 characters for the a page title length. Google appends my brand name to the end of each title (15 characters including spaces) it index. Do I need to count what google adds as part of the maximum recommended length? i.e.
On-Page Optimization | | SunnyMay
is the maximum 50-60 characters + the 15 characters brand name Google adds to the end of the title or 50-60 including the addition? Many thanks!
Lev0 -
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
301 vs 410
Hello everyone! I'm going through a large list of old 404 links that search console has given me and a lot of these links need to be 301'd. My question is, should I 410 some of these links if I can't find a good place to 301 to? Or is there another thing I should do that is better practice. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | KathleenDC0 -
After HTTPS upgrade, should I change all internal links, or a general 301 redirect is better?
I recently upgraded to https. Of course most internal links of my old posts are still http. So I set up a 301 redirect in order to make the old link works. In terms od SEO this is good or it is better to update all the internal links to https, manually? In that case can I do it in batch with a search/replace command in the phmyadmin database? any other suggested method? thank you
On-Page Optimization | | micvitale0 -
Page rank check
Hello everyone, How long should I wait to see if page rank for optimized pages have improved? cheers
On-Page Optimization | | PremioOscar0 -
301 Redirect to product page or category?
We manage an ecommerce website that sells health products. A few products have now been discontinued. I’m just wondering what would be the best practice in this case. Should we 301 redirect to a similar product or to a similar category page? ANY HELP IS GREATLY APPRECIATED!
On-Page Optimization | | odegi0 -
301 redirect and then keywords in URL
Hi, Matt Cutts says that 301 redirects, including the ones on internal pages, causes the loss of a little bit of link juice. But also, I know that keywords in the URL are very important. On our site, we've got unoptimized URLs (few keywords) in the internal pages. Is it worth doing a 301 redirect in order to optimize the URLs for each main page. 301 redirects are the only way we can do it on our premade cart For example (just an example) say our main (1 of the 4) keywords for the page is "brown shoes". I'm wondering if I should redirect something like shoes.com/shoecolors.html to shoes.com/brown-shoes.html In other words, with the loss of juice would we come out ahead? In what instances would we come out ahead?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0