What is the longest you would go back to ressurrect links that should have been 301's?
-
I have never thought of anything beyond a site that was possibly developed a month or two ago, but an interesting possible client has come along and begs a question.
They had their site "redesigned" in April 2014 and it appears whomever did the work did not realize what a 301 was for. Using ahrefs or MajesticSEO, they have gone from roughly 15,000 referring pages to 500 and the time line perfectly intersects the redesign. Sooooo, just wondering if any of you geniuses has ever gone back that far to try and pull off a 301.... I am actually just thinking of a link building / content marketing plan but thought it was an interesting question.
Thanks for the help,
Robert
-
This link is about using a compass
-
The link in this reply is to a website about "cheap goalkeeper gloves"
-
...a man can dream,....
My favorite is taking the time to explain followed by silence...not awkward at all!
-
Think about it... They did a poor UI/UX site, none or few redirects from a fairly well ranked and high DA/PA site... do you really think they would even consider a custom 404 page? I think we spend more time trying to explain to clients that not everyone gets good design, SEO, etc. No matter what the name of their company says.
Best -
LInda,
I think the point about it being anecdotal really is what I was looking for. There is no clear direction from the search engines on this so that is one of the things that makes Moz so strong. Good SEO's sharing anecdotal and other evidence/ideas.
Thanks so much,Robert
-
Very good point Ash, very good. I have seen it continue to crawl for a year or more as well. Checking for the 404s as a comparison and redirecting to fix the 404's is a good explanation. Well done.
-
Tom,
Great points. I am not as concerned with content relevance as we are fairly careful with that. The issue was it was a new site but used old content and they did not do redirects. I am going to give it a try with what I find to be the most relevant pages from the old, but not with all as I do not want to "overdo" it.
Thanks
-
Great story.
That reminds me of one... I know of a small adsense site that went offline and the owner didn't realize. A few months went by before they realized that the hosting was not responding. The site was brought back online, popped back into the SERPs and resumed making money.
-
When I first started my current job, I found out that in the past there had been a separate, small website for one of the products, which had been abandoned a couple of years before that. (The site, not the product.)
The site still seemed to have some good links pointing to it, so for the heck of it I 301'd it to the main page on the current site for that product. That page quickly grew to be one of the strongest pages on the current site.
This is just one anecdotal data point but based on my experience if it's not a huge amount of work, I'd try redirecting, at least for the pages with the best links.
-
Really hope that they had a custom 404 page at least!
-
What? You callin me a fruit picker???
There are worse things
-
I've been in a similar situation. My recommendation is to look in Google Webmaster Tools in 'Crawl > Crawl Errors' and if it is reporting them as 404 pages, what's the harm in redirecting them?
Google can crawl old URLs which 404 or provide another error for years (as in my case - it was an old website redesign from A LONG time ago).
-
Hi Robert,
I would do an archive.org take a look at the site structure the best you can that way. Then I would figure out if there are any links that are valuable to the site and relevant to the pages that exist.
It is still very risky I have a friend who changed his domain and redirected 35,000 URLs to a site of half 1 million URLs however the links from the old domain that were very high page rank still did not benefit the site very much at all.
I would export from Ahrefs upload to Deep Crawl see the similarities between the old URL's content in the new URLs
considering that they have already been checked and confirmed that the links are not bad.
ttp://moz.com/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools
http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/check-server-headers-tool/
I hope this is of some help,
Tom
-
I don't know the answer to your original question.... but I would be jumping to redirect anything from April 2014.
Nobody really "knows" the answer to this... but I think there is a good chance that google will continue to crawl these connections. Even if some of them are still good.
-
What? You callin me a fruit picker???
Actually I am pondering it quite a bit. Really a shame these people did this to them. And...bad job on the site as we must rebuild.
Thanks Andy.
-
Hi Robert,
I have never gone back that far myself (30-40 days max), but I can see no reason why this isn't worth a shot. There could still be a lot of potential hanging around out there for the grabbing. Grab any low hanging fruit with both hands
-Andy
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
-
Is it still necessary to have a "home" page button/link in the top nav?
Or is it not necessary to have a "home" tab/link because everybody by this time knows you can get to the home page by clicking on the logo?
Web Design | | FindLaw0 -
Too Many Links on One Page - What to Do?!
Hello Geniuses, Prodigies, and Experts of the Field, My website pages for www.1099pro.com have too many links on one page, something like 150-175, and I understand that each page should ideally be under 100. Most of these links, approx 105, come from dropdown navigation options in the header toolbar or the footer links. It is my take that these links make our site easier to navigate but I'm sure that they are hurting my pagerank / SERPs. Is there a best way to handle a situation like this? I'd really prefer not to alter the header/footer layout of the entire site by removing 50-75 navigational links. The only other idea I have is below but I have no idea if it would work. For any link that I do not care to pass pagerank, institute a "nofollow" parameter. This would be my favorite option if it is viable.
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
How to bounce back after a new url & new site design?
About a month ago, my company changed domains (from the long-established www.imageworksstudio.com to the new www.imageworkscreative.com) and also did a complete overhaul of our site. We tried to do everything necessary to keep Google happy as we went through this change, but we've suffered a drastic loss of both rankings and traffic. I know that can happen as a result of a redesign AND as a result of a new domain, but I'm wondering how long you would expect it to take before we bounced back and also, what can we do in the meantime to improve?
Web Design | | ScottImageWorks0 -
301 Redirect from Old Domain to New Domain
I am building a new website and I plan to 301 Redirect my Old Domain (olddomain.com) to a brand new Domain (newdomain.com) in the upcoming months. To do this I was planning to update the htaccess file on both the old and new domains. The htaccess file on the old domain would look to 301 redirect all pages on the old domain to the new domain. The htaccess file on the new domain would detail any specific URL redirects I want to implement (ie. olddomain.com/EXAMPLE/TEST will redirect to newdomain/TEST) - this will ensure link equity is retained and bounce rates are kept at a lower level. Does this sound like the right approach? Also, what do I need to do with the old domain going forward? Do I need to keep this forever in order for the 301 redirect to work or can I eventually just forward the domain to the new one permanently?
Web Design | | DHS_SH0 -
Changing Links that Show Up when I Google Brand (Site) Name
Hi SEOmoz Community, A quick question for you all. I've added an attachment for reference. When I google my brand name, say for example, Applied StemCell, I see six links as well below the description. Oddly though, these links seem to be chosen at random, or at least I'm not sure how Google decides on them. When I click on one of the links that is the company's name, Applied StemCell it brings me to a PDF document! Is there any way I can choose which ones to display there? Thanks! OF2oVVN.png
Web Design | | swzhai0 -
Sub-pages with more links than homepage - bad?
Hi,
Web Design | | rayvensoft
I am working on merging a number of my niche websites into a larger site (301 redirects, phased in over a few months). My question/concern is whether google will penalize the main site when it sees that the homepage has almost no links to it, and that about 10-15 sub-pages have a lot of links back to it. Does anybody have experience with this kind of scenario? Will it create a problem? Theoretically I could spend a year or so building up links to the new main page - building the brand - before doing the 301's. The smaller pages still bring in clients, but it is getting hard to maintain that many micro sites. Thanks in advance for any help.0 -
Number of links per page?
I'm confused by the number of links that we should put on a page. Our site has a high domain authority but SEOmoz tool and others, plus Google WMT suggests much much less than other sites have - look at Dailymail.co.uk or the Huff post site for example. our site is www.worldtravelguide.net and I'm thinking specifically about the /destinations and each continent like /europe Our site has thousands of pages, trying to create an effective internal linking structure with the limitation of 150 or so links is nearly impossible and ends up with too many navigational pages. We were hit hard by Panda (even though all our content is original, professionally written frequently updated) in favour of bigger brands and considering Google suggests that sites should be designed for users and not SEO these two ideals conflict. Does anyone have any data on what the link limit is? Any other tips or observations would be gratefully received. Thanks, John
Web Design | | JohnFinlayson0