301 Redirects... Redirect all content at once or in increments?
-
Hello,
I have been reading a lot about site migration and 301s and sometimes get confused with conflicting suggestions from different sources... So, in a site migration. Should I 301 redirect all old URLs to the news at once or little by little?
I've see this Google handout that suggests doing it all at once (minute 13)
https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cfco632lor7bl55j3tg1g8332l0But also have read the opposite in other forums...
-
Guys,
Thank you very much. I really did appreciate the fast response and it did help me clear a few doubts and misconceptions.
Koki
-
The only time I could imagine staging is if the existing site is in a mess and there are spurious redirect chains already going on. So it might be worth working out the true 'original' URLs, remove the existing redirects, implement the new redirects, test and then mop up anything left over. But as I say I can only imagine in that kind of scenario.
-
Koki,
I'm very curious where you might have gotten the idea of doing it in stages?
Kristen brings up an excellent point - not doing all the 301's at once can confuse search engines. Along the same lines of timing, the sooner you get the redirects in place and get rid of the old data, the sooner you benefit from updated links and "juice" from the links.
Here a good post from a few years back that brings up a good warning about multiple 301's - https://moz.com/community/q/2-stage-301-redirects
Good luck.
-
Thank you Kristen.
That is pretty much my feeling too.
Koki
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 Redirect from query string to new static page
If i want to create a redirect from a page where the slug ends like this "/?i=4839&mid=1000&id=41537" to a static, more SEO friendly slug like "/contact-us/", will a standard 301 redirect suffice? Thanks, Nails
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matt.nails0 -
Putting my content under domain.com/content, or under related categories: domain.com/bikes/content ?
Hello This questions plays on what Joe Hall talked about during this years' MozCon: Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing. My Case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
So.. we're working out guidelines and templates for a costumer (sporting goods store) on how to publish content (articles, videos, guides) on their category pages, product pages, and other pages. At this moment I have 2 choices:
1. Use a url-structure/information architecture where all the content is placed in one subfolder, for example domain.com/content. Although it's placed here, there's gonna be extensive internal linking from /content to the related category pages, so the content about bikes (even if it's placed under domain.com/bikes) will be just as visible on the pages related to bikes. 2. Place the content about bikes on a subdirectory under the bike category, **for example domain.com/bikes/content. ** The UX/interface for these two scenarios will be identical, but the directories/folder-hierarchy/url structure will be different. According to Joe Hall, the latter scenario will build up more topical authority and relevance towards the category/topic, and should be the overall most ideal setup. Any thoughts on which of the two solutions is the most ideal? PS: There is one critical caveat her: my costumer uses many url-slugs subdirectories for their categories, for example domain.com/activity/summer/bikes/, which means the content in the first scenario will be 4 steps away from the home page. Is this gonna be a problem? Looking forward to your thoughts 🙂 Sigurd, INEVO0 -
Where/how do you set up 301 redirects when keeping the same domain and not preserving the filename?
Hi there, I'm just reaching to to ask for some help in understanding where 301 redirects should be set up on a website when keeping the same domain but not preserving the original filenames? Essentially what is happening is an old website is being completely overhauled and brought up to date from a technical and usability standpoint. While the SEO isn't great naturally many of the pages have been indexed by google over time. A few pages have decent statistics and I don't want to lose the juice from them, but they do still need a lot of improving. So my question is this, would all the redirection take place in the .htaccess file only in this case? From reading here on Moz I think this is the case, but I need to confirm that. I was reading this article which has thrown me slightly: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection but this seems more complex as the website was actually moving domains. Open to any insight and if you need further clarification or information let me know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODarren0 -
301 redirect recommendations
One of our clients we are working on have two sites the main with a PR5 and a separate one with a PR4. We are planning on doing a 301 from the PR4 to a page on the PR5 Is it best to do: www.PR4.com ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page or www.PR4.com/page ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page Most pages on the PR4 site can fit into one PR5 page logically. However the PR4 has an about us, contact us, blog/with posts, FAQ, Applications, Legal Resources which are all pretty out dated.. The PR4 site is kinda messy and we are not sure if it will be easy to 301 each page individually with the user in mind. can we do a sitewide 301 redirect from the root PR4.com to a page PR/5.com/releveantPR4page and also do deeper 301's? PR4.com/PR4page ---> PR5.com/releveantPR4page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Cannot 301 redirect, alternatives?
Hi, the company has changed it's name so now under a different domain. All pages have been 301 redirected on a 1:1 basis apart from the home page. For some reason IT cannot 301 redirect the old home page to the new website home page. At suggestions? Perhaps canonical it? Meantime the old home page copy has been changed to say the company name has changed and a link to the new website. Any help greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Richard5550 -
301 redirects.
Hi everyone, I am having some issues with an a few dynamic URLs that are not redirecting; Example: http://www.example.com/shop-online?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_images.tpl&product_id=69164&category_id=303 I first tried to carry out a standard 301 which looked like this; Redirect 301 /longurlwith&category_id=303 http://www.example.com/new-url Which didn't work. After a little bit of research I added the following into the htaccess file; RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]RewriteRule ^/shop-online$(.*)$ http://www.example.com/shop-online$ [NE,L,R=301] Which caused the website to error 500 (Not cool). So now I am stumped. Any help would be really appreciated as I'm sure it's an easy fix but I can't quite my finger on it. Thanks in advance :).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AduroLabs0 -
Sites with dynamic content - GWT redirects and deletions
We have a site that has extremely dynamic content. Every day they publish around 15 news flashes, each of which is setup as a distinct page with around 500 words. File structure is bluewidget.com/news/long-news-article-name. No timestamp in URL. After a year, that's a lot of news flashes. The database was getting inefficient (it's managed by a ColdFusion CMS) so we started automatically physically deleting news flashes from the database, which sped things up. The problem is that Google Webmaster Tools is detecting the freshly deleted pages and reporting large numbers of 404 pages. There are so many 404s that it's hard to see the non-news 404s, and I understand it would be a negative quality indicator to Google having that many missing pages. We were toying with setting up redirects, but the volume of redirects would be so large that it would slow the site down again to load a large htaccess file for each page. Because there isn't a datestamp in the URL we couldn't create a mask in the htaccess file automatically redirecting all bluewidget.com/news/yymm* to bluewidget.com/news These long tail pages do send traffic, but for speed we only want to keep the last month of news flashes at the most. What would you do to avoid Google thinking its a poorly maintained site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ozgeekmum0 -
Multiple 301 redirects considered a redirection chain?
I need to redirect a ton of duplicate content, so I want to try redirect 301 /store/index.php /store redirect 301 /store/product-old /store/product-new redirect 301 /store/product-old1 /store/product-new1 redirect 301 /store/product-old2 /store/product-new2 redirect 301 /store/product-old3 /store/product-new3 redirect 301 /store/product-old4/file.html /store/product-old4/new4/file.html and then a whole bunch of old dead links to homepage. So we've had /index.php redirected to / on other parts of the site for awhile, and for the most part /store is a friendly URL, but then we have tons of dup content and work arounds that preceded my job here. I'm wondering if those redirects above would be considered a redirection chain? Since the all the redirects below the /index.php -> /store count on that one redirect. Thanks for any insight you may be able to give!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hondaspeder1