Any downside to a whole bunch of 301s?
-
I'm working with a site that needs a whole bunch of old pages that were deleted 301'd to new pages.
My main goal is to capture any external links that right now go off to a 404 page and cleaning up the index. In dealing with this, I may end up 301ing pages that didn't have incoming links or may not have ever even really existed in the first place. These links are a mix of http and https.
Is there any potential downside to just 301ing a list of several hundred possible old urls that currently trigger the 404 page?
Thanks! Best... Mike
-
Hi Michael!
I recommend checking out this blog for more insight: http://searchengineland.com/how-many-301s-are-too-many-16960
The video on the blog linked above answers: Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site? How about how many redirects I can chain together?
Other things to watch out for with chained redirects:
- Avoid infinite loops.
- Browsers may also have redirect limits, and these limits can vary by browser, so multiple redirects may affect regular users in addition to Googlebot.
- Minimizing redirects can improve page speed
Hope this helps!
-
Thank you to everyone for chipping in their thoughts on this.
Logan, good article. It gave me a new idea and wanted to see what y'all thought.
If my main goal is to not have all these 404s from unpublished pages and to re-direct the incoming link value to pages that could benefit, what would you think of putting up a noindexed page that links to my top pages that I want to give greater authority to? Then, put in a request to de-index those old urls that have the noindexed (duplicate) content. That would mean not firing off a 404, just showing the same content on hundreds of noindexed/deindexed pages. Given your point about re-directs, chained re-directs and speed for mobile, would that do more for me than re-directing all of these old urls to new pages?
Compounding the problem a little, this particular site has a catalog that comes out twice a year where many product pages are constantly being unpublished. So, even if I re-directed the old unpublished pages to existing urls, some of those might be going away and need another re-direct to add to the chain shortly.
Any thoughts on this appreciated. Thanks! Best... Mike
-
301 redirects do have a significant impact on pagespeed on mobile devices since they are often connected to much less reliable networks. Varvy has a great article with more details: https://varvy.com/mobile/mobile-redirects.html
If Google has already reindexed all of your new URLs, then you don't need to worry about covering every single one of your old URLs - stick with the ones the had links pointing to them.
A good way to measure how many of your 301 redirects are being used is to append query parameters to the end of the resolving URL (ex. below) where you set the src parameter to the referring URL. This gives you some unique identifiers to apply filters to in your landing page report in Google Analytics.
/old-page >> /new-page?redir=301&src=/old-page
-
As I understand it, there is two aspects to 301 redirects.
- User experience
- Organic search
Matt Cutts says, there is no limit the number of 301 redirects, unless they are chained together. (ie. start_page > page1 > page2 > proper_page)
I don't expect it will impact on site speed much, nothing you couldn't regain with a bit of speed optimisation.
From a user perspective if you have moved an old page that has high traffic or some good quality links on it. It is very important to ensure that traffic N is back on the right page using a 301.
From organic search perspective (especially Google) again if you are using 301 is it will eventually update its own index to include the new page indicated.
There are two things you should be aware of: -
- By using a 301 from an old page, you could resurrect a bad back link
- A small amount of link authority is lost (only very small)
-
What happens when you have thousands? Is it sensible to remove 301's from say, two years ago?
-
I generally try to keep redirect lists for my clients under 100. You mentioned you had some links to 404 pages, I'd focus on those and add others as you see fit based on traffic volume to those old pages. I've never actually tested the threshold at which site speed starts to become a problem, I see some experimenting in my future!
-
Hi Logan,
Thanks for the insight. Would a few hundred re-directs be a site speed bummer for Shopify hosted site? I've worked on other sites that had decent speed and hundreds of re-directs. Firing off spitstorm of 404s on urls that used to be landing pages for links seems sub-optimal as well.
Best... Mike
-
Hi,
You should keep your 301s to a minimum. Every time a URL is requested, the server checks every single redirect you have to see if there's a match. The larger your redirect list gets, the more impact it'll have on site speed.
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
-
Are there any downsides to using a canonical tag temporarily?
I'm working on redesigning our website. One of the content types has a main archive page (/success-stories) containing all of the success stories (written by graduates of our program). Because we plan to have success stories for other people (non-graduates), I'm using category hierarchies (/success-stories/graduates and success-stories/nonprofits, for example). It will go one level deeper to organize graduates by graduation year (/success-stories/graduates/%year%). I think this will work out well. However, we won't have non-graduate success stories for a little while, probably at least a few weeks, which means that /success-stories and /.../graduates indices will contain the same content for a while. So my question is this: Will it hurt to use a canonical tag that points to /success-stories/graduates as the authority until the main archive page contains more than just graduates? Or would it be better to use a 302 redirect from /success-stories to /.../graduates until more diverse content is added?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bcaples0 -
Old URLs that have 301s to 404s not being de-indexed.
We have a scenario on a domain that recently moved to enforcing SSL. If a page is requested over non-ssl (http) requests, the server automatically redirects to the SSL (https) URL using a good old fashioned 301. This is great except for any page that no longer exists, in which case you get a 301 going to a 404. Here's what I mean. Case 1 - Good page: http://domain.com/goodpage -> 301 -> https://domain.com/goodpage -> 200 Case 2 - Bad page that no longer exists: http://domain.com/badpage -> 301 -> https://domain.com/badpage -> 404 Google is correctly re-indexing all the "good" pages and just displaying search results going directly to the https version. Google is stubbornly hanging on to all the "bad" pages and serving up the original URL (http://domain.com/badpage) unless we submit a removal request. But there are hundreds of these pages and this is starting to suck. Note: the load balancer does the SSL enforcement, not the CMS. So we can't detect a 404 and serve it up first. The CMS does the 404'ing. Any ideas on the best way to approach this problem? Or any idea why Google is holding on to all the old "bad" pages that no longer exist, given that we've clearly indicated with 301s that no one is home at the old address?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxclever0 -
URL Re-Writes & HTTPS: Link juice loss from 301s?
Our URLs are not following a lot of the best practices found here: http://moz.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls We have also been waiting to implement HTTPS. I think it might be time to take the plunge on re-writing the URLs and converting to a fully secure site, but I am concerned about ranking dips from the lost link juice from the 301s. Many of our URLs are very old, with a decent amount of quality links. Are we better off leaving as is or taking the plunge?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Periodic DNS Switching for Major Website Updates - Any Downsides?
A company is performing some major updates to a website and the proposal to go live with the updates was explained as follows: Once the updates are done on the testing environment and the site is ready to go live, we switch the DNS to the testing environment and then this testing environment becomes the production site. And the old production site becomes the new testing environment. Are there any potential negatives to this? Is there a name for this technique? Of course, we've already considered : additional hosting cost potential performance differences- reinstalling and setting up server settings - SSL, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Motava0 -
How to fix issues from 301s
Case: We are currently in the middle of a site migration from .asp to .net and Endeca PageBuilder, and from a homebrewed search provider to Endeca Search. We have migrated most of our primary landing pages and our entire e-commerce site to the new platforms. During the transition approximately 100 of our primary landing pages were inadvertently 302ed to the new version. Once this was caught they were immediately changed to 301s and submitted to the Google’s index through webmaster tools. We initially saw increases in visits to the new pages, but currently (approximately 3 weeks after the change from 301 to 302) are experiencing a significant decline in visits. Issue: My assumption is many of the internal links (from pages which are now 301ed as well) to these primary landing pages are still pointing to the old version of the primary landing page in Google’s cache, and thus have not passed the importance and internal juice to the new versions. There are no navigational links or entry points to the old supporting pages left, and I believe this is what is driving the decline. Proposed resolution: I intend to create a series of HTML sitemaps of the old version (.asp) of all pages which have recently been 301ed. I will then submit these pages to Google’s index (not as sitemaps, just normal pages) with the selection to index all linked pages. My intention is to force Google to pick up all of the 301s, thus enforcing the authority channels we have set up. Question 1: Is the assumption that the decline could be because of missed authority signals reasonable? Question 2: Could the proposed solution be harmful? Question 3: Will the proposed solution be adequate to resolve the issue? Any help would be sincerely appreciated. Thank you in advance, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FireMountainGems0 -
Should we move a strong category page, or the whole domain to new domain?
We are debating moving a strong category page (and subcategory, product pages) from our current older domain to a new domain vs just moving the whole domain. The older domain has DA 40+, and the category page has PA 40+. Anyone with experience on how much PR etc will get passed to a virgin domain if we just redirect olddomain/strongcategorypage/ to newdomain.com? If the answer is little to none, we might consider just moving the whole site since the other categories are not that strong anyway. We will use 301 approach either way. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Durand0 -
How to redirect whole site to home page without breaking wordpress
Hi all I had a phpprobid site which was heavily indexed but got hacked. I have deleted the old site and installed wordpress and a holding page. I can't work out how to 301 redirect all the old indexed pages to the home page without the existing wordpress redirect. Anyone care to help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RaceMedia0 -
I have 4,100 302 redirects; How can I change so many to 301s
hi, i have way to many 302 redirects, how can i bulk change these to 301 i have started in cpanel but i could be old by the time i finsih
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freedomelectronics1