301 redirect
-
We have just had an outside SEO agency report on our site: One of things brought up were arounf broken links, and how they class them as broken links.
Could any body tell me whether this statement holds true please, as I am not aware of this
"Our latest intelligence shows that google are downgrading ranking from sites that feature 301 redirects within the internal link structure".
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Regards
-
I need to 301-redirect about 25 product pages because I'm having a content management system installed in part of the site.
What's the definitive answer on this -- is some link authority lost along a 301 link? These page rank superbly & are high-traffic, so I can't afford to take unnecessary risks.
-
Thanks Sameer, I'll hav a look at those.
Regards
-
Sometimes the internal redirection issues will not show up on OSE. OSE data is not real time so it will take couple of weeks to get the most updated one (as per the last I heard from Rand in one of the webinar).
I generally use Xenu link Sleuth to identify all the redirection and page not found issues. Another tool that we use which is more advacned is Gsitecrawler.
-
Thanks Sameer,
They ahve provided us with a list of 301 directs: I cant find these on OSE though, and to be fair they don't really make sense {as to why we would want a 301on these links in the first place}
Sameer i look after the SEO for my agecny and their clients: If indeed what they are saying is correct and we have 301's on internal links I can't see them, and the case they are pointing out I would use rel=canonical.
Should they show in OSE: I've tried this and it says we have zero, which is my thoughts, as i would have had to do them
Cheers
-
Have they provided you a report showing all the links from each page that are linking to a 301 link instead of directly linking to the destination page? I would not take their words unless they show you reports.
301 in the internal link structure should not directly impact the ranking so as to down grade rankings but it could impact your page rank juice flow. The concept is similar to having multiple hoops between origin and destination page. If you have a link on the page that is pointing to a 301 version instead of direct link then chances (based on page rank juice flow math) your are not allowing a complete flow of juice through those links.
Here are some great posts from Rand on page rank juice flow
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/determining-whether-a-page-site-passes-link-juice
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-science-of-ranking-correlations
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-juice-is-loose (although controlling page rank is not a good practice anymore but this post is highly educational for anyone to understand the page rank flow)
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Sameer
-
Me too Thomas. I have requested that they share their "latest intelligence" and correlation with lost rankings. when/If I get an answer I'll be sure to post it.
Big thanks for everyones input here, really appreciated.
-
The only thing I don't understand about their claim is that it is "our latest intelligence". If that holds true, they are very slow catching industry news
301 is never perfect, but almost always the best way to keep rankings when moving content.
Wpuld also love to hear their elaboration of their latest intelligence.
-
This is interesting, because I assume this to be true and yet I've encountered the opposite. I used a simple 301 to direct an outdated page to a more relevant page on the same topic. Both pages were well-optimised, and the (slightly) newer page had more, higher-quality backlinks. I vanished from the SERPs for my keyword, and 3 months later hadn't returned - despite expecting Google to simply replace the listing for the old page with the new one. When I removed the 301, the original page appeared in the same position in the SERPs.
Because of this, I think it's best to be careful when it comes to 301s.
-
Hi Sean, never heard of that or experienced it. Here is a usefull interview by Eric Enge with Matt Cutts that really goes into the effects of a 301: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml.
I guess what they mean is the situation that if you are on page A on your site and click on the link to page B, and a redirect takes you to page C. Basically you could have gone from A to C directly. As the 301 dilutes a little bit of the page rank, it is by definition that sites utilising 301 internally this way lose a very little bit.
-
So you are 301ing from one domain to another? I have noticed this to take a long time to transfer any link juice and rankings. Two months which I thought was forever!
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LR8H8pn1M
Typically passes, but it can't be guaranteed. Yeah, that helps. Thanks Matt
-
Hi Sean,
As already mentioned Matt Cutts does talk about this and confirms that some link juice is lossed. You can catch his videos on YouTube at GoogleWebmasterHelp
I have personally not noticed any degregation in rankings due to using 301s. I will say that you should be careful with your 301s not to daisy chain them more than 3 times according to Matt if I remember correctly. Personally, I rather work my .htaccess file a bit more carfully not to 301 more than once or twice.
Cheers
-
Yes Matt Cutts also said that the anchor text value does not always go across or that Google does not guarantee it will work 100%.
-
Hello again Goodnewscowboy. I have just done exactly what you have said. I need to know obviously for future reference. I guess I was a little put out with some of the stuff they had put in there, which I thought didn't hold true.
Thanks for your time again, great to hear from you also.
Kind Regards
Sean
-
Thanks for the prompt reply Dejan, greatly appreciated. As far as I'm aware we haven't used 301's on internal linking. I have checked this in OSE and it doesn't show any?
My thoughts are the same as yours Dejan. We have recently had a redeisgn of the site { a couple of weeks ago} and to be fair I was looking at 301 ing some of the old content which held small amounts of link juice.
Thanks for our time again
-
Hey Sean: The only thing about 301'a and Google that I'm aware of is that 301's do lose a little "link juice" But this would be from any link, external or internal. I've not heard of a difference in ranking between the two.
Ask them to show you what that "latest intelligence" is and have them explain their rationale. If it's the real deal, they should be able to back it up with something.
-
The question is why use 301s for internal navigation? If it's for moved pages then it's appropriate.
Google in fact encourages 301 as a most robust solution for sorting out moved pages (apart from fixing it on the core level). Secondary to that would be use of canonical, some webmasters even go for meta redirect or good old 404.
By my observations there is nothing that can harm you, even chained 301s work - unless you manage to do something really exotic!
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 301 redirects a deal breaker for Migrating content or moving to new software?
I have this forum with about 2 million posts for 16 years on root of the domain. I am looking to switch softwares but the top ones won’t help setup 301 redirects. But I can still migrate all my members and all my content (threads/posts), would Google still reindex all our content or if we don’t setup redirects would it really kill our entire traffic for a long time or maybe just a month or so? I really want to migrate to software that isn’t forum based but rather something that offers courses, chat, live video streaming, subscription based etc. and this is the only way to do so OR to set it up on an entirely new domain OR subdomain but to me that is like starting all over from scratch? I could archive the forum to read only and set it up on subdomain or another root domain - then on the archived forum setup banners and a pop up linking to the new site or new subdomain? . This is such a hard decision for us as the current forum we have had for so many years has lost members posting from 1k a day to just a handful a day, our fb group though gets 1k a day so I’m trying to revive a site into something more modern and has all the training features we can offer as well.
Technical SEO | | vbsk0 -
301 Redirecting http to https
In the Moz Site Crawl issue, I was seeing an error that said we were temporarily redirecting our homepage to https URLs. So I changed the code in htaccess to make it 301 redirect but I'm still getting the same error. I implemented it last week and we just had a new crawl yesterday. Here is the new code: RewriteEngine on
Technical SEO | | Heydarian
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^heritagelawmarketing.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.heritagelawmarketing.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC] Does anyone know why I'm still getting 302 redirects? Thanks0 -
Redirect 301 issue. I changed my domain name and Google is killing me.
Hello SEO community: I have this problem, and I don't know exactly what to do. I recently changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com uclasificados.net was a free classified ads for USA in spanish, and was my most affortable site, so I wanted to convert it to .com because I thought it could get more popular with the .com domain. uclasificados.com was before a free classified ads website for Colombia, but was not very popular and had poor traffic so I moved the Colombian content to uclasificados.co. Since I changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com I have lost a lot of ranking, and l my traffic every day is getting lower. I have already checked the 301 redirections and they are working correctly, but even thought I keep getting less traffic and less money. I have also checked with moz tools both sites link juice, and it says that uclasificados.net have better reputation. So I was wondering if I change it back and redirect uclasificados.com to uclasificados.net but I worrie that if I do that, maybe I can make things worse. What do you recommend me?
Technical SEO | | capmartin850 -
301 redirects reverting to 302 redirects
We recently built a new website with a new site structure. To prevent there being a load of 404's I redirected the old pages to the new relevant pages with 301 redirects. A few days later the SEOmoz crawl report alerted me to a load of 302 redirects. When I looked into this for some reason all of the 301 redirects I set up are reverting to 302 redirects. I did a test by 301 redirecting a made up URL to an existing page and the same thing happens - it 302 redirects. I can't find any settings in WordPress to possibly explain why this is happening. Has anyone got any ideas why this could be?
Technical SEO | | Tone_Agency0 -
Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?
Hi, please someone help! We have two identical websites, say A & B. Because of the not so good SEO establishment, site B was built and site A was 301 redirected to site B weeks ago. For some reasons, we have to reuse site A, which means we have to cancel the 301 redirection. (Sound a little crazy) So the question are: 1. Can we conduct the action? 2. If we cant, what's the reason? 3. If we can, what would be the best practice? Thanks for help in advance! Plus: we also CARE what would happen to site B if the 301 is cancelled? Will it grow healthy like a new site?
Technical SEO | | Squall3150 -
Trailing Slashes In Url use Canonical Url or 301 Redirect?
I was thinking of using 301 redirects for trailing slahes to no trailing slashes for my urls. EG: www.url.com/page1/ 301 redirect to www.url.com/page1 Already got a redirect for non-www to www already. Just wondering in my case would it be best to continue using htacces for the trailing slash redirect or just go with Canonical URLs?
Technical SEO | | upick-1623910 -
301 redirects twice
We currently have some 301 redirects set up on our site however sometimes a page will redirect twice before reaching the final location. Is this OK from an SEO perspective to have a page redirect twice or should we concentrate on reducing it to one?
Technical SEO | | JohnHillman0 -
I think I'm stuck in a 301 redirect loop
Hi all, I'm trying to correct some of my duplicate content errors. The site is built on Miva Merchant and the storefront page, /SFNT.html, needs to be permanently redirected to www.mydomain.com This is what my .htaccess file looks like: #RedirectPermanent /index.html http://dev.mydomain.com/mm5/merchant.mvc? RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^dev.mydomain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://dev.emydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301] DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php /mm5/merchant.mvc redirect 301 /SFNT.html http://dev.mydomain.com/ RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Screen=SFNT&Store_Code=MYSTORECODE [NC] When I use this code and navigate to http://dev.mydomain.com/SFNT.html the URL gets rewritten as http://dev.mydomain.com/?Screen=SFNT So I believe this is what's called a "redirect loop".... Can anyone provide any insight? I'm not a developer, but have been tasked with cleaning up the problems on the website and can use any input anyone is willing to offer. Thanks, jr
Technical SEO | | Technical_Contact0