301 redirects in Wordpress vs. making old posts that you no longer want your audience to see private.
-
I'm working on Wordpress at the moment changing the content of a page on my website.
The page has a lot of educational information and each section is unique. I had to go through and edit each section on google documents and now I'm posting all the new pages and making the old pages private on wordpress. Is this a good idea?
I'm worried google will still crawl my private education pages and think these are duplicates since the new pages somewhat resemble the old. Also, should I be 301 redirecting all the old education pages to the corresponding new ones even if they are private on wordpress?
I understand that the 301 redirect should only be used if you want the old page to go to a new one. What i don't understand id weather this will still be relevant or work if I've already made the old page private on wordpress.
Thank You!
-
You can delete it as long as the 301 redirect still occurs.
301 signals to search engines "hey, this page has permanently moved to this new location so whatever signals you had for this page, send over to the new location and ignore any content on the old url"
So be sure to set your 301 redirects at the server level (via htaccess on Linux or via IIS on Windows servers) if you plan on deleting the page. I know yoast SEO plugin has an option to redirect to another page in their settings for the post/page (in this scenario, you wouldn't delete the post/page).
-
Thanks Oleg
The same hold true if I choose to delete a page on wordpress right? Or will google no longer be able to crawl a page if I delete it?
-
Yes, you should 301 redirect to the new pages. Otherwise, you will lose all of the authority you built to your old pages.
Even though the page is private, Google will continue still visit the link from any links on the web/history of crawling.
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
-
If I 301 redirect a sub-page that is #1, will I risk losing SERP?
I have a site that for some reason Google decided to rank one of our articles #1 for a fairly competitive term. The article is kind of a BS blog post and I want to 301 it to our page about the topic as that's designed for conversion. If I do this, will we risk losing the ranking? If so, what are other options? Can I change the content of the ranked page to something closer to our landing page? Any advice is welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dk80 -
Unintentional wildcard 301 Redirect?
I have migrated a client's site to a new domain. I used Yoast tools to add 301 redirects for all active site pages from old domain to new domain in the .htacces files as neither the client nor I have access to hosting server via FTP (long story). Redirects are working as I intended, and we didn't lose too much in our rankings. Unfortunately, as soon as I saved the .htaccess file in Yoast, old-domain.net/wp-admin began redirecting to new-domain.net/wp-admin. I can no longer login to the wordpress site on the old domain. I did not enter a redirect for /wp-admin. Any thoughts on how this is happening or if there is some other way to get back in? Without server access, I'm pretty stumped. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | c_estep_tcbguy0 -
CNAME record for WWW to Non-WWW Vs. 301?
I was just chatting with the person who set up our site on our domain hosting and they said they added in a CNAME record to transfer the www version of my site to the Non-www version. Shouldn't this be set up as a 301 redirect? I have hundreds of links built to the www version and only a few to the non-www version. Or Could I just add in a 301 in addition to the CNAME record? This is not my wheelhouse and need a little advice. Thanks in Advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Setting up redirects from non wordpress
Hi, we are rebuilding our site which was built on WordPress. The old permalink structure was /%post_id%/%postname%/ The new site is a custom build (not Wordpress), however, we are using WordPress for blog posts. The URL structure is www.customewebsite/blog/ As the custom site is not WordPress, we do not know how to create a redirect to push the WordPress url /%post_id%/ to the /blog section of the new site. What we currently get is page not found. Can anyone help with the htaccess redirect code? Many thanks one and all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
How to get rid of two 301 redirects?
I have two 301s from http://www. to https://non-www version of my site. I wonder how can get rid of one so it will look like this: 301-200 instead of 301-301-200 All other combinations work fine and give me 301-200 status codes. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lovemozforever0 -
When is it time to kill 301 redirects
3 months we updated our site design design and as such lots of page urls changed. At the time we 301 redirected about 100 pages. (All pages are on the same domain - 301 redirects like .com/about-us/company to .com/company) Anyhow my question is should I leave these redirects active indefinitely or kill them assuming value has passed through by now? Your Thoughts are welcomed. Thanks, Glen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdvanceSystems0 -
301 redirect a old site that has been "dead" for a while?
Hi guys, A quick question. I have a client who has an old business website that had some great links (Forbes.com, CocaCola.com, etc). The problem is that he knew nothing about SEO and let the hosting expire. He still owns the domain, but the site is no longer listed in Google. He did no SEO, so I am not worried about being hit by any artificial anchor text penalties, since the links are as natural as it gets. So my questions is, would there be any benefit from 301 redirecting that site to his new business? The new business is in almost exactly the same niche as the old site. I am thinking of 301'ing to a sub-page which will refer to his past venture with the old business, not to the homepage of the new site. Thanks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
How to conduct catch 301 redirects & have the separate 301 redirects for the key pages
Hi, We've currently done a site migration mapping and 301 redirecting only the sites key pages. However two GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) is picking a massive amount of 404 areas and there has been some drop in rankings. I want to mitigate the site from further decline, and hence thought about doing a catch 301 - that is 301 redirecting the remaining pages found on the old site back to the home page, with the future aim of going through each URL one by one to redirect them to the page which is most relevant. Two questions, (1) can I do a catch 301 and if so what is the process and requirements that I have to give to the developer? (2) How do you reduce the number of increasing 404 errors from a site, despite doing 301 redirects and updating links on external linking sites. Note: The server is apache and the site is hosted on Wordpress platform. Regards, Vahe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vahe.Arabian0