301 Directs
-
We have found a lot of 404 error pages that we have transferred with 301 directs.
My questions is, should these 301 directs be marked as a NF (nofollow)?
-
Haa!
I love that infographic Greg! We have a printed version on our war room wall
-
- No you should not use NF (nofollow) on your 301 redirects. Make sure when redirecting your 404's that you are redirecting them to a relevant page.
- Never NoFollow 301s unless it an affiliate link if for instance you had the site that allowed someone to sign up and you are compensated financially for that person signing up on your website then you would use the nofollow tag. Here is it URL discussing what I'm talking about Example of affiliate links
- If you did add NoFollow on your code change it ASAP an instance of when you may see it used is when somebody puts a URL in the comment box of any major blogging platform for instance no follow is built into comments on WordPress but that's all automatic. Meaning you do not have to add the no follow I bring this up only if this involves you checking your code.
- You should never know follow a link that is internal you would destroy your ability to be found online. Outside of the affiliate link scenario I gave above.
Greg
-
Google will eventually get rid of them. If you have similar pages to the ones that are 404 errors, then you should redirect them. If you don't then best practice is to let them fall off.
However, if you had key terms ranking on page 1 or 2 on those pages I would definitely redirect them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp5Nf8ANfOw This is a video by Matt Cutts where he kind of tells you how to handle these errors effectively
-
No, you don't want to NoFollow 301s. The point of a 301 permanent redirect is for "everyone to be redirected" - users, search bots, & link juice - but adding NoFollow would prevent this.
-
We have had 404 errors for over a month now through Moz. These are of high priority to be taken care of as well, so leaving it for Google to get rid of sounds very discouraging. These links are not ones we use on our site anymore and that is why we've been re-directing.
-
I think 404's should be 404's as if someone is linking to pages that don't exist, a 404 is the best response. Google and bots will see a 404 and remove that url.
301's are more useful when reorganizing a site and traffic (inbound links, search traffic) come in to old urls. To just redirect all 404s as a 301 us not usefull I would say.
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 there any benefit to changing 303 redirects to 301?
A year ago I moved my marketplace website from http to https. I implemented some design changes at the same time, and saw a huge drop in traffic that we have not recovered from. I've been searching for reasons for the organic traffic decline and have noticed that the redirects from http to https URLs are 303 redirects. There's little information available about 303 redirects but most articles say they don't pass link juice. Is it worth changing them to 301 redirects now? Are there risks in making such a change a year later, and is it likely to have any benefits for rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAdeit0 -
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
301 Redirect Dilemma - Website redesign
Hi Guys, We are redesigning a clients ecommerce site. As part of the process, we're changing the URL structure to make it more friendly. I have put together a provisional 301 redirect plan but I'm not sure just how far I need to go with it. So far I have extract all the pages from the existing site that Google Webmaster Tools says have links pointing at them - this totals 93 pages. I have matched each page like for like to the new website structure. My next step was to pull the landing pages report from Google Analytics, I have extracted the pages that received entrances over the last 6 weeks. This totals 553, less the redirects I have already done and cleaning up some Google Translate pages I have circa 410 pages left. Many of these pages has more than 1 URL pointing to that page. I'm debating how important it is that that all of these remaining 410 pages have individual redirects set up for them one by one. I have to rule out regex because there is no pattern that makes sense given that I have already set up redirects for the first 93 pages that have external links. My question therefore is how important are 301 redirects on pages that have no external links and receive less than 10 entrances over a 6 week previous period? Do I need to 301 every single product on the old site to it's corresponding page on the new site? Also, I'm not sure how to treat pages that have mutliple URL's on the old site, the existing URL structure is such a mess that in some instances I have 5 URL's for one product page? I could feasibly create 5 seperate redirects but is this necessary? Also what about speed considerations, the server is going to have to load these redirects and it may slow the site down. I'm sitting at 100 odd so far. Any answers are most appreciated. Thanks Derek.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseo0 -
301 redirect w/ dynamic pages to static
I am trying to redirect old dynamically created pages to a new static one (single page). However, when I implement the redirects, it still uses part of the old dynamic url. For instance... dynamic.php?var=example1 dynamic.php?var=example2 dynamic.php?var=example3 should all redirect to: static.html. However, they are redirecting to: static.html?var=example1 static.html?var=example2 static.html?var=example3 The page is resolving fine, but I don't want google to misinterpret the new static page as numerous page with dup content. I tried this in PHP on the dynamic.php page as follows, but it the problem above persisted: header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude
header('Location: http://www.mysite.com/static.html'); I tried doing it in my .htaccess file as follows, but the problem persisted: redirect 301 /info/tool_stimulus.php?var=example1 http://www.mysite.com/static.html
redirect 301 /dynamic.php?var=example2 http://www.mysite.com/static.html Can anyone solve this in PHP or w/ htaccess? Help!!! 🙂0 -
Do my redirects on my homepage need to be 301?
Our domain name is something like www.I-am-cool.com but most people just type in iamcool.com After doing some research I found that those are 302 redirects and I think they should be 301. If I am correct do I need to redirect www.iamcool.com and iamcool.com or just one or the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
301 of EDM domains
If I buy a keyword EDM domain and 301 redirect it to my site, will I rank better for that keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creaturmedia0 -
301 Redirect using rewrite rule in .htaccess
Hi guys, I have these types of URLs with the format below that are seen as duplicate contents http://www.mysite.com/index.php?a=11&b=15&d=3&c=1 I wanted to permanently redirect them to my homepage. I am thinking if this is possible in .htaccess using rewrite conditions? Thanks in advance...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trigun0 -
Is it possible to 301 re-direct an entire subfolder on a subdomain?
So, for example, subdomain.domain/folder subdomain.domain/folder2 Is it possible to set up a 301-re-direct for an entire folder on a subdomain? If so, how? What is the correct code for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0