Redirect or not to redirect
-
We are rebuilding a website and try to get rid of errors. The content remains exactly the same but we correct the code and make it load faster. The site has quite many backlinks and I can't decide whether to remove .html endings from the urls and 301 redirect to the new ones or leave them with the older ending. If I remove the endings how much of the link juice will be passed?
Anyone any idea?
-
in a year of 2, will you then decide to make the change? only you know that, it is better to do it sooner than later if you think you may.
As for leaking link juice, the best guess is 15% going from the original algo google published, every hop lost 15% I dont think they would of changes this much as changing it can mean huge amounts if calulating, I believe they got it right then and it would still be right.
If hops did not lose pr, the caculations of PR would be endless.
-
Thanks for your answer
-
Thanks for your answer
-
Agree, keep the .html
-
I can't decide whether to remove .html endings from the urls and 301 redirect to the new ones or leave them with the older ending.
If you redirect you will lose some linkvalue and some anchor text value.
I have learned to tolerate "untidy little things" that are very expensive to change. I don't want to put 5-10% (just tossing out a number) more effort into ranking my site just to get rid of .html endings.
-
Well 301's typically have a tiny falloff of link juice (I've heard somewhere in the 5% range anecdotally). But i would think about what makes sense to your users over that. Does having that .html make the urls harder to remember for a user to type in? Is it .htm or .html?
I don't use .html because it is an extra thing to remember. And by not using it, I can have shorter urls that focus more on being simple and having keywords.
As far as 301ing, you could probably write something in your .htaccess file that automatically does that for the entire site.
But I would be inclined to get rid of them.
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
-
Should we set up redirects for all deleted TAGS?
We recently found our site had 65,000 tags (yes 65K). In an effort to consolidate these we've started deleting them. MOZ is now reporting a heap of 404 errors for tag pages. These tag pages should not have links to them so not sure how come they're being crawled. Any suggestions from experience in this area would be useful.
Technical SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Is this a correct use of 302 redirects?
Hi all, here is the situation. A website I'm working on has a small percentage of almost empty pages. Those pages are filled "dynamically" and could have new content in the future, so, instead of 404ing them, we automatically noindex them when they're empty and remove the noindex once they have content again. The problem is that, due to technical issues we can't solve at the moment, some internal links (and URLs listed in sitemaps) to almost empty pages remain live also when pages are noindexed. In order not to waste Google crawler's time, sending it to noindexed pages through those links, someone suggested us to redirect those pages to our homepage with a 302 (not a 301 since they could become indexable again, so it can't be a permanent redirect). We did that, but after some weeks Search Console reported an increase in soft 404s: we checked it and it is 100% related to the 302 implementation. The questions are: is this a correct use of 302 redirects? Is there a better solution we haven't thought about? Maybe is it better to remove 302s and go back to the past situation, since linking to noindexed pages isn't such a big problem? Thank you so much!
Technical SEO | | GabrieleToninelli0 -
SSL redirect issue
Hi guys, I have a site that has some internal pages with SSL. Recently i noticed that if i put https://mydomain.com, this URL is accessible but all the design is messed up. My site is on wordpress and i use "redirection" plugin for all the 301 redirect. So i decided to add a new 301 redirect from https://mydomain.com to my actual URL version of home page http://mydomain.com. After doing that, my home page doesn't load at all. Does anybody know what happens? Thank you for advice!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
Redirecting Several Hundred Pages
As of May 21st 2013 (Penguin 2.0 update) we hit a triple-header and I think we can now officially dubbed the "KING OF GOOGLE PANALTIES"! 😞 -July 2012 - recieved 2 "Unatural Links" email -April 2012 - 20% traffic hit -May 21st 2013 - 35% traffic hit We have/had lots of very low quality links using the same anchor text as well as about 150 very low quality articles and almost 100 categories w/several hundred products that recieved little to no traffic. We have spent the last several weeks cleaning up our link profile and were highly successful in getting most of them removed and have kept detailed reports for our Reconsideration Request for the manual "Unatural Links" penalty. We have also went a step further and have completely redesigned the site that is now much faster/better on-page seo with new, high quality articles and are removing all the low quality articles, categories and products but we are unclear what to do with these. Which brings me to my question. Should we redirect these pages back to the home page or just let them go to 404 error? I have been doing lots of reading on this subject but there doesnt seem to be any good answers. From what I read, neither are good choices and I cannot decide between the lesser of the 2 evil's ..so any help with this would be greatly apreciated! Note:
Technical SEO | | k9byron
-These category and product pages have absolutly no inbound links (link benefit) and in my opinion are only sucking off link juice and generating little to no revenue. There are also no similar categories or products that these could be redirected to. For example, redirecting dog toys to the dog bed category just sounds like it would increase our bounce rate. -Again, the articles also have no link benefit and only a small handful of the articles actually generate any traffic to speak of (several thousand visitors per year) and the rest generate less than 1000 visitors per year. All have high bounce rates and low conversions. It would be nice to keep them live as I think some are okay and could be rewritten/re-purpose over time but maybe in light of our Panda penalty it might be better to just to save them offline, let them go to 404 errors and rewritten/re-purpose them another time? -We did create a very nice 404 page with category navigation and huge search bar so I am leaning more toward this option.
..
Thank in Advance!0 -
Redirect a page intended for iframe
we built an interactive calculator that gets iframe embedded in our blog and landing pages. the blog that embeds it is doing well the problem is that the iframe source html page is also indexed by google and is on the second page of results. which we don't want as it doesn't have any context/branding/call to action/etc. if i put a noindex meta tag on the iframe html source page, will that remove the indexing of the pages that consume it in an iframe?
Technical SEO | | icstars0 -
Redirects in site map
I have a site with the ace/sef ( creates friendly URLS) in a large data base site. It creates a site map dynamically. Yet I realize one issue which I am trying to think through. I recently changed my urls to include an ID number example: homepage/houses/1134-big-blue-house The prior url was: homepage/houses/big-blue-house the original url above redirects to the new one with the ID like I want. However the site map has both URLS in it which go to same page I am not sure but it seems rather stupid to have the new URL and OLD redirected URL in the site map. Yet beside stupid I am wondering if this is duplicate content and will cause a penalty from the google bot. What is your opinion ?
Technical SEO | | aimiyo0 -
Rel=cannonical + 301 redirect
Hi All I am currently working on a DotNetNuke site. I have enabled friendly URL's which have changed the url structure from the default setting of TabId=x to whatever the page name is set as. I will use the following page as an example - www.notarealdomain./graphicdesign.aspx Now I would like to know if it would be worth my time to change this to "/graphic-design.aspx through the use of a 301 redirect and/or a rel=can. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | masterpete0 -
Does redirect of domain alias help rankings?
Yes... It iz I again ;o) Here's one for you savy techies out there: So, I've got a primary domain which is live, optimized and running smooooth. And then I've got a couple of misspelled domains as well (17 to be exact). Will it have an effect if I 301 those misspelled domains? What's Best Practice for several domain aliases? Example.
Technical SEO | | nosuchagency
Primary domain: bryghusprojektet.dk
Alias domain 1: bryghusprojekt.dk (301 redirects to primary domain)
Alias domain 2: bryghus-projekt.dk (Hosting company infopage)
Alias domain 3: bryghus-projekter.dk (Not activated) Regards.1