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
-
301 Redirects from Subdomain to Location Pages
I have a client site that is getting redesigned. Its a multi location service provider. Currently (for whatever reason) the location pages are sub domains. https://<location-name>.site.com/ In the new design the locations will be on the main domain. https://site.com/locations/<location-name> We are considering using 301 redirects from the current sub domains to the new location pages on the main domain. The current sub domains are setup on a multi-site with A records for each one in our GoDaddy account. Would like to get feedback on any unforeseen SEO issues that anyone might have input on.
Technical SEO | | ColeBField12210 -
301 Redirects Showing As 307 Redirects
Hi, Our clients are adamant that they have set up 301 permanent redirects on their websites, but when we check using Screaming Frog and various online HTTP status code checkers they are showing as 307 temporary redirects. Examples;
Technical SEO | | Webpresence
http://www.lifestylelifts.co.uk/home-lifts/
http://www.terrylifts.co.uk/ Again, the client says they are seeing 301 redirects. Why are we seeing 307's? Who is right? Very puzzling, any theories would be very much appreciated 🙂 Thanks in advance. Lee.0 -
I have lose my ranking Via 301 Redirection - How To Recover?
Hey, Folks! I Have Used 301 Redirection Method to Increase My Rankings but When i applied this Method My Website Ranked Down To 55 Numbers. Can anyone Suggest me How to Recover it?
Technical SEO | | SumitJiGupta0 -
Questions about the Sandbox and 301 Redirects
Does the sandbox still exist? What if you have a brand new URL and do a 301 redirect from another website because the name of the service business changed? Thanks for any insight and help.
Technical SEO | | SDSLaw0 -
301 Redirect From Dynamic Page To Static
I want to 301 redirect all "id" and "type" numbers from my page dynamic.php page (I have thousands of IDs and thousands of Types) all to a single URL. So for example the following.... www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=1&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=2&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=3&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=1&type=6 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=2&type=6 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=3&type=6 ...would all be sent to: www.mysite.com/page.html How can this be done without doing a redirect for each ID/Type?
Technical SEO | | TheDude1 -
301 Redirect
Need a little bit of help on this one. I have a product page which actually has 3 products on the page in question: www.example.com/products I thought it would be best for each product to have a page on its own: www.example.com/product-1 www.example.com/product-2 www.example.com/product-3 however my question is: The page with the 3 products www.example.com/products where should the 301 go to? Can you do a 301 to all the new product pages? Hope that makes sense Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
301 Redirect & Cloaking
HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
301 Redirect Issue
I'm having an issue with 301 redirects: Let's see if I can verbalize my thoughts on this one... So we just recently moved our site to Wordpress. One of our new 301 commands is redirecting oursite.com/news to oursite.com/blog . However there are other links from our previous site that look like oursite.com/news/XYZ and the issue is that, because wordpress structures its links differently, that URL is not equivalent to oursite.com/blog/XYZ. Instead, it might look something more like oursite.com/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ or something. Does that make sense? The issue is that when I find an old link of ours on google that looks something like "oursite.com/news/XYZ" or "oursite.com/news/ABC" it is automatically replacing "news" with "blog". When I try to go in manually and redirect anything that says "/news/XYZ" to "/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ" it still doesn't work. It still just replaces "news" with "blog." Wow I realize that might not make sense to anyone but if it does - please advise!! Thanks!!!!
Technical SEO | | EntrustSEO0