Too many 301s?
-
Hi there, If there is a website that has accidently generated say 1,000 pages of duplicate content, would the seo be hurt if all those pages were re-directed to the origional source of the content?
There are no plans to re-write the 1,000 duplicate pages, they are already cached and indexed by Google.
I thought about canonical tags but as they have some traffic and a little seo value i thought 301 re-direct would be more appropiate to the relevant pages?
I am also right in thinking you would be able to remove the 301 in the .htaccess file once the index has updated?
Also once removed the 301 - i could use those urls later from scratch if i wanted?
Any info much appreciated.
-
Great insight Highland!!!
-
If they had links, I would 301 the pages with links. Everything else I would 404
-
How are these pages generating traffic? Are they being found in the search engine?
The real question, do these pages have links to them?
There is little value to a 301 redirect if you are not moving link traffic in the direction you are pointing. If you are out ranking the original content, then perhaps a 301 could help. How well does the original content rank?
-
Ha, yes you can my friend.
-
But you can do it, yes?
-
Bringing back URL's that you didn't want and then decide that you do want is pretty annoying to Google...
-
I would see if they had links, and get rid of the rest, it may look to Bing that you are trying to be tricky. Its not natural
-
Ok, i probably wont but in what istance would you not recommend this?
I understand pa and pr etc will be back to nothing but its the keyword url i might want to use from scratch
-
Yes but I wouldn't really recommend this.
-
Also last one, if i wanted to revive the 301s say in a year i would be allowed to and the pages would index again?
-
Thanks highland.
-
I would 301 the pages and get them out of your site's index. Even if you canonical all of them Google will still have to index 1000 pages instead of 1. The 301 will transfer most of your rank to the new page and you'll improve your crawl budget.
Why take the 301s out? Just leave them in there in case there are links pointed to them.
-
Well they seem to be generating traffic.
In principal is what i intend on doing ok, will it hard the seo or be seen as ok do you know?
Many thanks,
-
That sounds weird! If you generated 1000s of pages automatically, and these are all duplicate content, why don't you remove them? Google will end up removing them from its cache as well after a short period!
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
-
How to add 301 for many urls
Hi I need to redirect many urls in a website and I was wondering if instead of doing it one by one there is a way to get it the other way round.... Redirect all pages but a few. I get a feeling this is not possible, but prefer asking just in case. Thanks for any feedback
Technical SEO | | turismodevino10 -
Anything new if determining how many of a sites pages are in Google's supplemental index vs the main index?
Since site:mysite.com *** -sljktf stopped working to find pages in the supplemental index several years ago has anyone found another way to identify content that has been regulated to the supplemental index?
Technical SEO | | SEMPassion0 -
301s - A Year Late
A website I recently was asked to help with was redesigned last year, but no 301s were setup. Looking at the old URLs 95% of the ones from early 2013 are 404s. Their traffic dropped from 50,000 per month to 10,000 and I believe this is one of the reasons. Now the question is: a year later, will it do any good to setup 301 redirects from those old urls. My current thought is that the old URLs have probably lost any link juice they had. But it should hurt anything to setup the 301s anyway. Any thoughts on whether this is worth my time and effort?
Technical SEO | | jkosarek0 -
404 from a 404 that 301s
I must be missing something or skipping a step or lacking proper levels of caffeine. Under my High Priority warnings I have a handful of 404s which are like that on purpose but I'm not sure how Moz is finding them. When I check the referrer info, the 404 is being linked to from a different 404 which is now a 301 (due to craziness of our system and what was easiest for the coders to fix a different problem ages ago). Basically, if a user decides to type in a non-existent model number into the URL there is a specific 404 that comes up. While the 404 error is "site.com/product/?model=abc123" the referrer is "site.com/product?model=abc123" (or more simply, one slash is missing). I can't see how Moz is finding the referrer so I can't figure out how to make Moz stop crawling it. I actually have the same problem in Google WMT for the same group of 404s. What am I just not seeing that will fix this?
Technical SEO | | MikeRoberts0 -
Many Pages Being Combined Into One Long Page
Hi All, In talking with my internal developers, UX, and design team there has been a big push to move from a "tabbed" page structure (where as each tab is it's own page) to combining everything into one long page. It looks great from a user experience standpoint, but I'm concerned that we'll decrease in rankings for the tabbed pages that will be going away, even with a 301 in place. I initially recommending#! or pushstate for each "page section" on the long form content. However there are technical limitations with this in our CMS. The next idea I had was to still leave those pages out there and to link to them in the source code, but this approach may get shot down as well. Has anyone else had to solve for this issue? If so, how did you do it?
Technical SEO | | AllyBank1 -
Too many internal links on one page
Hello All, I have just started using SEO moz. I had one quick question i would like answered. Currently SEOmoz is telling me that there are too many internal links. The recommendation is 100 links per page but the majority of my pages have 125+ links Will this effect the page when its crawled? Look forward to your comments. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TWPLC_seo0 -
I have found this on a site that i have seen many times where can i get one from
Hi i have seen this great map system that i have seen on many sites which i think makes a site look great but i have tried looking for the past few weeks but cannot find where i can get one from. http://www.hypnoslimmer.co.uk/consultant.html does anyone know how these sites do it and where you can get the product from. I use joomla for all my sites Any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Is there a penalty for too many 301 re-directs?
We are thinking of restructuring the URLs on our site and I was wondering if there is a penalty associated with setting up so many 301 re-directs.
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0