Consolidating 301 Redirects to Decrease Page Load Times - Major Concerns?
-
Hello,
I am being pushed to consolidate our over 6k redirects that have accumulated over the course of 4 years. These redirects are one of the many factors causing extensive load times for our website. Many to most or over a year old, have not been used, or simply redirect back to the home page. Other than looking to keep the pages that have external links (also looking for recommendations/tools), are there other best practices from an SEO stand point to ensure there are no major hits to our website.
A little more info, I am looking to pair 6K down by
- Removing all Redirects that have not been used
- Removing all redirects that are over 1 yr+
- Remove all redirects that redirect to simply the home page or a smaller big bucket subfolder
This should take the number from 6K to around 300.
Are there any major concerns?
Pat
-
How did this go? I'm doing this myself.
The main concern would be loss of backlinks. But otherwise this is a good practice
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
-
Ranking for non-existing content which is 301 redirected
Hey there, In the beginning of this year I've made complete site migration from Dutch language to English. All the old Dutch URL's were 301 redirected to the English versions. I naturally lost rankings for all Dutch keywords during the next month. On the website there is no Dutch content anymore. But what happened now is that five months later the website started to rank for the Dutch keywords again. The page snippets in SERP are in English but the URL's shown are in Dutch (ending with .nl) and whenever a user clicks on the snippet he/she gets 301 to the correct English version. Any ideas what could be the reason for re-ranking of non-existing pages which gets 301 in SERP?
Technical SEO | | benesmartin0 -
Will a Robots.txt 'disallow' of a directory, keep Google from seeing 301 redirects for pages/files within the directory?
Hi- I have a client that had thousands of dynamic php pages indexed by Google that shouldn't have been. He has since blocked these php pages via robots.txt disallow. Unfortunately, many of those php pages were linked to by high quality sites mulitiple times (instead of the static urls) before he put up the php 'disallow'. If we create 301 redirects for some of these php URLs that area still showing high value backlinks and send them to the correct static URLs, will Google even see these 301 redirects and pass link value to the proper static URLs? Or will the robots.txt keep Google away and we lose all these high quality backlinks? I guess the same question applies if we use the canonical tag instead of the 301. Will the robots.txt keep Google from seeing the canonical tags on the php pages? Thanks very much, V
Technical SEO | | Voodak0 -
How best to fix 301 redirect problems
Hi all Wondering if anyone could help out with this one. Roger Bot crawler has just performed it's weekly error crawl on my site and I appear to have 18,613 temp redirect problems!! Rather, the same 1 problem 18,613 times. My site is a magento store and the errors it is giving me is due to the wishlist feature on the site. For example, it is trying to crawl links such as index.php/wishlist/index/add/product/29416/form_key/DBDSNAJOfP2YGgfW (which would normally add the item to one's wishlist). However, because Roger isn't logged into the website it means that all these requests are being sent to the login url with the page title of Please Enable Cookies. Would the best way to fix this be to enable wishlists for guests? I would rather not do that but cannot think of another way of fixing it. Any other Magento people come across this issue? Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
Redirect a 301 Redirect
Does any link juice get passed from a permanent redirect to a new 301 redirect? If so, are there any studies which indicate an estimated percentage?
Technical SEO | | RedCaffeine0 -
Suddenly Many 301 Redirects captured by SEOMOZ
On April the 7th SeoMOZ captured 6000 301 redirect on my site, but I cant seem to understand how SEOMOZ finds these links Example http://www.iphonegadget.dk/dk/apple-tilbeh-r-36/ipad-tilbeh-r-219/bilholder-239/index-2-4a.html Makes a 301 Redirect to the following page beneath SEOMOZ says http://www.iphonegadget.dk/dk/apple-tilbeh-r-36/ipad-tilbeh-r-219/bilholder-239/index-2.html The weird thing is that both urls work, but if i browse my site in a normal matter this link will never be created i that way. The -4a in the end os the link is not the normal link structure on the site and has never been like that before. So how does SEOMOZ Create that link? http://www.iphonegadget.dk/dk/apple-tilbeh-r-36/ipad-tilbeh-r-219/bilholder-239/index-2-4a.html Also google only has the right one that are this one beneath http://www.iphonegadget.dk/dk/apple-tilbeh-r-36/ipad-tilbeh-r-219/bilholder-239/index-2.html People would normal come to the category with this url http://www.iphonegadget.dk/dk/apple-tilbeh-r-36/ipad-tilbeh-r-219/bilholder-239/ And page 2 would be http://www.iphonegadget.dk/dk/apple-tilbeh-r-36/ipad-tilbeh-r-219/bilholder-239/index-2.html AND NOT http://www.iphonegadget.dk/dk/apple-tilbeh-r-36/ipad-tilbeh-r-219/bilholder-239/index-2-4a.html Can anyone find out what is going on?
Technical SEO | | noerdar0 -
Is my 301 redirect working?
Very simple question here . I've redirected a bunch of older pages with decent ranking to some newer pages on my site, using the Thesis theme's built-in redirect function. However, in the SERPS, the older pages (and, importantly, older titles) still show up. When clicked on, they redirect to the new page, but it's still irritating because the older titles make the site look out of date. Is this Working As Intended, or have I or my theme done something wrong? And if it's the latter, what's the best way to achieve a redirect, preferably with a Wordpress plugin?
Technical SEO | | Cairmen0 -
Any issues with lots of pages issuing 301 redirects?
Hi all, I'm working on a site redesign and it is possible the new site could issue a lot of 301 redirects as we may migrate from one forum solution to another. Is there any issue with crawlers getting a lot of 301 redirects from a site? Thanks Nick
Technical SEO | | nickswan0 -
301 lots of old pages to home page
Will it hurt me if i redirect a few hundred old pages to my home page? I currently have a mess on my hands with many 404's showing up after moving my site to a new ecommerce server. We have been at the new server for 2 years but still have 337 404s showing up in google webmaster tools. I don't think it would affect users as very few people woudl find those old links but I don't want to mess with google. Also, how much are those 404s hurting my rank?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao1