undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
4
4
2.0k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • kirbyf
    kirbyf last edited by Sep 21, 2015, 2:45 PM

    I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to:

    • keep each page’s content exactly the same

    • keep the same domain name

    • 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url

    The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content.

    The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls.

    I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.”

    Here’s my question:

    1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic?

    2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url?

    3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months?

    Thanks.

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Version
      Version last edited by Sep 22, 2015, 9:09 AM Sep 22, 2015, 9:09 AM

      Hi,

      I had and experience for moving not only the file structure, but also the whole domain (domain name change). We have created the 301 redirect from the old site to the new one (from every single old page to the new one). It's not the same as your case, but the general approach is exactly the same.

      So it looked like

      olddomainname.com/aaa > 301 >newdomainname.com/aaa

      in your case it going to be as yourdomainname.com/aaaa >301> yourdomainname.com/site-collection/aaaa

      Google reindexed all our new pages (about 1500 000 pages) within about 6-8 months, but we still (after more than 18 month) have old domain pages  being indexed by Google (about 10 000 pages).

      Once the domain name was changed, we had started to monitor all our backlinks to be sure they all are still alive, and we've been checking them every week.  This part was the hardest to deal with, coz in spite of setting the 301 redirect, some links were lost. The problem was not connected to the re-direction from oldsite.com/aaa to newsite.com/aaa, but  to the problem that end-pages were out-dated (products out of stock etc). When we discovered this problem (shame on us!!), we had started to monitor back links more heavily. Now we do it every week to be sure we are not losing traffic due to this stupid problem.

      As far as I know, there are some free apps for Shopify, dealing with 301 redirects, e.g. https://apps.shopify.com/atomseo-404-error-broken-link-checker, https://apps.shopify.com/redirectify

      good luck!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • CleverPhD
        CleverPhD @DirkC last edited by Sep 21, 2015, 11:40 PM Sep 21, 2015, 11:40 PM

        Great answer.  A good tool to use for testing the 301s in bulk is Screaming Frog.  Save a CSV list of your old URLs before you migrate.   When you update sites, set Screaming Frog in list mode and it will show you where all the old URLs 301 to.  Makes it really easy to test.

        If you do have any sort of staging site to do this with, that would be optimal before you go live.  If you do go live, I would make this the first thing you do to check those 301s.  Screaming frog will quickly check a ton of them and give you some peace of mind.

        Side note, the only way link juice is lost in a 301 is if you 301 to a page that does not have semantically related content to the original page.  i.e. if you have a page on Red Widgets and you 301 it to a page on Blue Bangles, Google will not pass the juice as it sees you trying to manipulate the link juice.    As you are using 301 redirect to a new URL with the exact same content, you should be fine, assuming the other points that Dirk mentions.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • DirkC
          DirkC last edited by Sep 21, 2015, 4:59 PM Sep 21, 2015, 4:59 PM

          I have migrated several sites - including changes of urls (and even domains). If done well (meaning that all pages are properly redirected from the old to the new url) there should not a be an issue. In 80% of the migrations, you couldn't even notice that there had been a migration if you looked at the search engine traffic. In the 20% where traffic was lost, it wasn't related to link juice but to other issues:

          - if you change the look & feel of your pages this can have an impact on your visitors (both positive and negative - check bounce rate, time on page, avg. pages/visit) - if it's negative you can quite easily loose positions in search (resulting in lower search traffic). If your pages stay exactly the same - this shouldn't be an issue.

          • Same goes with performance - if the performance of the new platform is worse than the old one - it could again have a negative impact on your users, and as a result on your position in the SERP's.

          • if you change your site structure - take care of you site depth. Sometimes changing you site can push important content deeper or cause less internal links to these pages, again having a negative impact on the site's performance in the SERP's.

          Nobody will be able to give you a definitive answer on your question, but as far as I know, link juice doesn't get lost with 301's, but a lot of other factors can have a severe impact.

          If you loose traffic, recovery can take a long time (up to 6 months) provided you find the root cause of the problem (and it won't be the link juice). If you don't - that traffic is gone.

          Hope this helps,

          Dirk

          CleverPhD 1 Reply Last reply Sep 21, 2015, 11:40 PM Reply Quote 3
          • 1 / 1
          1 out of 4
          • First post
            1/4
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          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.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • amberprata

            301 Redirects for Multiple Language Sites in htaccess File

            Hi everyone, I have a site  on a subdomain that has multiple languages set up at the domain level: https://mysite.site.com, https://mysite.site.fr ,  https://mysite.site.es , https://mysite.site.de , etc. We are migrating to a new subdomain and I am trying to create 301 redirects within the htaccess file, but I am a bit lost on how to do this as it seems you have to go from a relative url to an absolute - which would be fine if I was only doing this for the english site, but I'm not. It doesn't seem like I can go from absolute url to an absolute url - but I could be wrong. I am new to editing the htaccess file - so I could definitely use some advice here. Thanks.

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 27, 2020, 3:05 PM | amberprata
            0
          • MAdeit

            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 | Jan 21, 2019, 10:42 AM | MAdeit
            0
          • Kepass

            Cross Linking two related ecommerce websites

            Hi Guys, Hope you'll be able to help me with a technical problem I am facing right now. We are a company right ? We own 2 webistes. Let's say one sells car parts, the other one buys second hand car parts to refurbish them and sell them. (It is not our case, just an example very similar to ours). sellparts.com buyparts.com Both are ecommerce websites, with large catalogues (7000 skus). sellparts sells a lot and is a big actor in its market. buyparts.com doesn't work nad has a really low DA. My new SEO external consultant, which I am not too convinced about, is telling me to cross link the sites on product level using cross-linking extensions. He want have them do-follow. That would mean having hundreds or thousands of links with really similar linking patterns. buy [parts] [model ] [make] sell [parts] [model ] [make] That to me seems a bit too much and I am worried it compromises the sellparts site's SEO. So should i no-follow the links ? Or do it differently ?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 20, 2016, 3:33 PM | Kepass
            0
          • Angelos_Savvaidis

            Multilingual Site and 301 redirection

            Hey there awesome people of Moz I have this site that has many languages in it. The main language is English and my developer did the following www.example.com ( is the main site ) which redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en if your geo location is supported by our languages then you will automatically be redirected to whatever language you have in your country but does the first language with is english have to 301 redirect to www.example.com/en ? I thought that the right way is to just leave /en at the root file. Thanks in advance

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 2, 2015, 12:15 AM | Angelos_Savvaidis
            0
          • alecfwilson

            For URLs that require login, should our redirect be 301 or 302?

            We have a login required section of our website that is being crawled and reporting as potential issues in Webmaster Tools. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is - is it to make URLs requiring a login noindex/nocrawl? Right now, we have them 302 redirecting to the login page, since it's a temporary redirect, it seems like it isn't the right solution. Is a 301 better?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 30, 2014, 3:54 PM | alecfwilson
            0
          • sbrault74

            Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?

            I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today. I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care. My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again. Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 28, 2013, 6:29 PM | sbrault74
            1
          • bestone

            Redirecting one site to another for link juice

            I have two sites with same theme - buying cars.  I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain  OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 6, 2013, 10:25 PM | bestone
            0
          • Seamoose

            301 Redirection and apostrophes in URLs

            Hi I am experiencing trouble getting any redirects with apostrophes in the URLs to 301 redirect in order to eliminate 404 errors. I have tried replacing the instance of the apostrophe in the source URL field to %27 and variations of this but to no avail. The site is a wordpress site (the old URLS are legacies from the old Business Catalyst site) and I am using the redirection plug in. I have gone into some detail with a helpful soul here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-deal-with-apostrophes-in-source-url but unfortunately to no result. If anyone has any idea how to solve this puzzle I would be grateful for the help. Example: http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1%E2%80%93_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/

            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 1, 2013, 2:17 AM | Seamoose
            0

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.