Tricky 301 question
-
A friend has relaunched a website but his web guys (he didn't consult me!) didn't do any 301s and now traffic unsurprisingly has tanked.
The old site and database no longer exists and there are now 2000+ 404's.
Any ideas how to do the 301s from old urls to new product urls WITHOUT it being a massive manual job?
-
That's my point, you only need to worry about the pages that had external links
Thanks -
Thanks
-
Pages dont just get equity from external links of course. If a category page has 10 links to it the product pages linked to on that page benefit. The wholesale drop in rankings isn't because every page had an external link to it.
-
I don't know what you mean about link equity, if there is no link pointing to the page then there is nothing lost.
As for search engines finding a lot of 404s, they will remove them from the index after a while, no problem there, you are returning the correct status code, that's what they want. This will allow them to clean up there index and stop crawling the pages. -
If the majority of URLs have no logic, then it makes things a bit tricky in regards to minimizing the amount of work.
I once had a very active and large website with about 500-1000 single lines of rewrite code (1 for each URL) in my htaccess. Surprisingly, it did not slow the server down at any noticeable rate, unless you are very sensitive to milliseconds and even then, one trial to the next could easily differ from regular internet congestion. My point is, nobody ever noticed.
Here's a few ways that I would handle this job to get through it as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
The more aggressive and time consuming approach:
I would output all the URLs that were changed from phpmyadmin or whatever mysql administration tool you might use to a spreadsheet. From that spreadsheet, I would add the original URL.
Then with the old URL (A1) and new URL (A2) I would write a formula to output the correct rewrite (A3.) Then simply copy and paste that formula down all the rows that it applies to. You might need to break up the URLs to grab the right pieces for your formula.Of course use, regex where you can, and keep your .htaccess rewrites to a minimum.
If that is still too much work, hire someone to do it through elance.com
The somewhat sloppy pace-yourself-approach:
Another approach you could take is to just monitor google webmaster tools for all the page not found errors. And once a day or once a week, grab those URLS, create the rewrite, and mark it as fixed in webmaster tools.
The reason I say this is somewhat sloppy is because, you might find that you could have used regex in a lot of instances to better handle all those missing URLs.
But it may be a good way of staying on track with google, and handling the issues only as they arise so it does not feel like such a mammoth task.
-
Thanks Alan, yes they have good external links to many pages. They retail a very niche product and have a lot of forum, review, social type links. It might be though if need be they just have to focus mostly on 301s for the pages with those links. As best practise I am in favour of 301'ing regardless of external links as the link equity gets messed up and causes ranking issues, as in this case, as well as sending a signal to the engines about the amount of wasted resource they will use crawling a site with 1000s of 404s.
-
Thanks Donna & Luis. Luis is right i'm looking for a way for this not to be a mammoth manual task for their developer.
-
Thanks, the regex is a good idea and might be part of the solution for some urls at least but there seems to be some discrepancies in logic between old and new product urls and some of the new product urls are actually still the same as the old (which of course is fine).
-
Thanks Luis, unfortunately neither 1 or 2 are ideal.
1. I don't think there is much logic in the change of url structure between old and new product urls which makes that idea impossible.
2. Thats going to be a last resort
Andy
-
do you know if they had any external links?
If they don't have external links then I would just let them 404.
some people have some wired thoughts of what 301's do. They simply redirect a request, so a request o A is told to remake the request to to B, so the crawler will follow it that way and award the pagerank to the new page with a small loss on each request.If no external links what is there to gain? don't complicate your site with unnesasary redirects, there is a small argument that the pages may have been bookmarked at old url, but I think that argument is so weak I would not bother
-
Yeah. I heard him. I guess I'm saying "probably not".
I like how you're keeping us honest though Luis. I don't like it when people respond with what they want to say rather than with an answer to the specific question.
-
Donna,
Andy has been very specific about this: "WITHOUT it being a massive manual job" hehe
thanks for supporting my answer.
Luis
-
It really depends on the nature, link and traffic patterns of your site Andy. If the vast majority of those 2,000+ 404's are coming from pages that should never have been indexed in the first place, you can probably get away with Luis's 2nd suggestion. If they're differentiated, valuable, and show evidence of incoming links and traffic, you've got some work ahead of you.
You might be able to streamline the process by inventorying and grouping like pages, then doing group redirects. But I suggest you do some analysis first to determine whether the effort is warranted.
-
2000+ is a lot of URLs to work through. But you can most likely get through them quickly with a few good regular expression 301 redirects in your .htaccess
If you have a pretty consistent form from the old url to the new one, this will be a piece of cake.
ex:
old URL: this/was/coolnew URL: this/is/cool
However, if there is really no rhyme and reason to the newly formed URLs, this could end up taking a considerate amount of time.
I would look into writing 301 redirects with regular expressions in .htaccess (I'm assuming your server is and uses .htaccess)
There are a number of resources for doing this, and even one here at moz.com
https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection -
Hello Andy,
1. Try this: http://webdesign.about.com/od/htaccess/ht/redirect-an-entire-site-using-htaccess.htm
2. Second/faster solution. You could add this line of code to your .htacess file (and all the current "404's users" will go to the homepage):
ErrorDocument 404 /
But pay attention... 404's are perfectly normal if the page no longer exists, for user experience you should only ever use a 301 redirect if the page that no longer exists is going to a equal page.. i.e about cars to cars, about rabbits to rabbits. Maybe the only solution is creating a 404 specific landing page for this (with links to different sections of your site)
Hope this helps,
Luis
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
-
Google Is Indexing my 301 Redirects to Other sites
Long story but now i have a few links from my site 301 redirecting to youtube videos or eCommerce stores. They carry a considerable amount of traffic that i benefit from so i can't take them down, and that traffic is people from other websites, so basically i have backlinks from places that i don't own, to my redirect urls (Ex. http://example.com/redirect) My problem is that google is indexing them and doesn't let them go, i have tried blocking that url from robots.txt but google is still indexing it uncrawled, i have also tried allowing google to crawl it and adding noindex from robots.txt, i have tried removing it from GWT but it pops back again after a few days. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cuarto7150 -
Pages that 301 redirect to a 404
We are going through a website redesign that involves changing URL's for the pages on our site. Currently all our pages are in the format domain.com/example.html and we are moving to stip off the .html file extension so it would just be domain.com/example We have thousands of pages as the site deals with news so building a redirect for each individual page isn't really feasible. My plan is to have a generic rewrite rule that redirects any page that ends .html to the stripped off version of this. A problem I can see with this is that it will also redirect pages that don't exist. So for example, domain.com/non-existant-page.html would 301 to domain.com/non-existant-page which would then return a 404 status. What would the SEO repercussions be for this? Obviously if a page doesn't exist already then it shouldn't show up in the search engine indexes and shouldn't be a problem but I'm a bit worried about how old pages that currently legitimately 404 will be treated when they start to 301 redirect to a 404 instead. Not sure if there any other potential issues from this that I've missed either? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbb0240 -
Question about using abbreviation
Hello, I have this abbreviation inside my domain name, ok? now for a page URL name, do you recommend me to use the actual word (which shortened form of it is inside domain name) in a page name? Or when have abbreviation in domain name, then using its actual word in a page name is not good? It's all about how much google recognize abbreviation as the actual word and gives the same value of word to it? do I risk not using the actual word? Hope made myself clear ) thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mdmoz0 -
301 page into a 404
Hi I have a job board site and the way the site is built means that I cant 404 job pages once they have expired. To combat this Im looking to 301 the pages into a 404 page.Do any of you have any experience with this? Are there any potential pitfalls to doing a 404 this way? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewAkesson0 -
Duplicate Content Question
We are getting ready to release an integration with another product for our app. We would like to add a landing page specifically for this integration. We would also like it to be very similar to our current home page. However, if we do this and use a lot of the same content, will this hurt our SEO due to duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NathanGilmore0 -
301 or 302 Redirects to Mobile Site
When it's detected that a mobile device is accessing the site it has the ability to redirect from www.example.com to m.example.com. Does it make more sense to employ a 301 or 302 redirect here? Google says a 301 but does not explain why (although usually I stick to "when in doubt, 301") . It seems like a 302 would prevent passing link juice to the mobile site and having mobile-optimized results also showing up in Google's index. What is the preference here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTGT0 -
Spammy Link Profile Questions. What do you think?
I'm trying to dilute the link profile for a website. But have a couple of questions on the best way to achieve this. Current link profile, www.mysitename.com Keyword 1 Keyword 2 Keyword 3 Keyword 4 Keyword 5 Keyword 6 Keyword 7 Keyword 8 Keyword 9 Keyword 10 Keyword 12 Keyword 13 Keyword 14 Keyword 14 Keyword 15 mysitename.com Desired link profile, www.mysitename.com mysitename.com www.mysitename.com http://www. mysitename.com/ My Site Name http://mysitename.com Click Here my site name More Info mysitename.com/ www.mysitename.com/ Keyword 1 Keyword 2 Keyword 3 Keyword 4 Keyword 4 Keyword 5 Questions 1. Do you think Google looks at this on a domain level? Or do you think this needs to be done with every page on the site? 2. What would be a good way to build links fast to the pages, need to build lots of links to be able to dilute the profile. I was considering Dripable, or a similar service, but decided i really don't want to create more spam.What would you do? 3. What would you say the % threshold for anchor text is, i have read on different sources that at least 40% - 60% of links should be branded, url, or generic anchor links. Do you think this is accurate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 858-SEO0 -
Tread of backlinks after 301
After 301-ing a domain to a new domain, how should we tread the changing of the backlinks to the old domain? We might be able to have a certain amount changed rather quickly. Should we consider the new domain as a "new" domain, and in this sense, not have them changed quickly, (afraid to trip any filter) Or wil Google see the new domain (after indexing) with the authority of the old domain, so , if the backlinks are direct or coming through a 301 will make no difference? Hope my question is clear and excuses for my english 😛 Thanks for reading and hoping for input,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elgoog0