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
-
My site auto redirects http to https. This is causing redirect chains. What can I do?
I noticed that Moz flags a lot of redirect chain issues on my site. I realized that this is mostly because the site automatically redirects http to https, and when I create a new URL (when a URL changes, for example) it is automatically flagged as a chain. Example: http://www.example-link Auto directs to: https://www.example-link Which is then redirected to: https://www.example-link-changed (when the address actually changes) I don't seem to have any control over changing where the initial http redirect goes. Any advice on fixing this problem?
On-Page Optimization | | baystatemarketing0 -
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 -
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
301 Redirect to external site
Hi guys, We have a client who is getting their website redesigned through us. They are discontinuing couple of their services which will not get featured in the new site. They are fairly well ranked for these services and my client wishes to 301 redirect these pages to an external site owned by his friend so that they benefit out of the ranking. The question is: Will my client's website's general ranking get affected due to 301 redirecting to an external site? The external site is not spammy or red-flagged by Google (at the moment, at least). Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | RameshNair
Ramesh Nair0 -
Noindex child pages (whose content is included on parent pages)?
I'm sorry if there have been questions close to this before... I've using WordPress less like a blogging platform and more like a CMS for years now... For content management purposes we organize a lot of content around Parent/Child page (and custom-post-type) relationships; the Child pages are included as tabbed content on the Parent page. Should I be noindexing these child pages, since their content is already on the site, in full, on their Parent pages (ie. duplicate content)? Or does it not matter, since the crawlers may not go to all of the tabbed content? None of the pages have shown up in Moz's "High Priority Issues" as duplicate content but it still seems like I'm making the Parent pages suffer needlessly... Anything obvious I'm not taking into consideration? By the by, this is my first post here @ Moz, which I'm loving; this site and the forums are such a great resource! Anyways, thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | rsigg0 -
Missing meta descriptions on indexed pages, portfolio, tags, author and archive pages. I am using SEO all in one, any advice?
I am having a few problems that I can't seem to work out.....I am fairly new to this and can't seem to work out the following: Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂 1. I am missing alot of meta description tags. I have installed "All in One SEO" but there seems to be no options to add meta descriptions in portfolio posts. I have also written meta descriptions for 'tags' and whilst I can see them in WP they don't seem to be activated. 2. The blog has pages indexed by WP- called Part 2 (/page/2), Part 3 (/page/3) etc. How do I solve this issue of meta descriptions and indexed pages? 3. There is also a page for myself, the author, that has multiple indexes for all the blog posts I have written, and I can't edit these archives to add meta descriptions. This also applies to the month archives for the blog. 4. Also, SEOmoz tells me that I have too many links on my blog page (also indexed) and their consequent tags. This also applies to the author pages (myself ). How do I fix this? Thanks for your help 🙂 Regards Nadia
On-Page Optimization | | PHDAustralia680 -
E-Commerce product pages that have multiple skus with unique pages.
Hey Guys, With the recent farm/panda update from google i'm at a cross roads as to how I should optimize product pages for a project i'm working on for a client. My client sells tires and one particular tire brand can have up to 15 models and each model can have up to 30 sizes. IE: 'Michelin Pilot Sport Cup' comes in 15 different sizes. Each size will have it's unique product page and description bringing me to my question. Should I use the same description on every size? I do plan on writting unique content for each tire model however i'm not sure if I should do it for every size. After all the tire model description is the same for every size, each size doesn't carry any unique characteristics that I can describe. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | MikeDelaCruz770 -
301 redirect (www.domain.com/index to www.domain.com)
Hello, Please let me know what are the exact right steps in order to get rid of the duplicate content issues related with: www.domain.com/index.html same as www.domain.com without creating an infinite loop. Do you have a step by step guide posted within seomoz including 301 redirect for non www to www for all urls and index.whatever to main domain name without going into a infinite loop ? btw how to you spot the loop ? is it obvious like never ending refresh of the home page ? thanks a lot !
On-Page Optimization | | eyepaq2