Question on 301s
-
Hi Everyone,
I have a questions on 301 redirects, i hope someone can give me some help on this.
There was some 301 redirects made on some of the URLs at the beginning of the year, however we are now re-structuring the whole website, which means the URLs which had been given a 301 redirect are now getting another 301.
The question is, should i delete the first 301 redirect from the htaccess file?
Kind Regards
-
Ryan your analogy is fantastic. I totally understand this now and it really makes sense to do it this way.
Thanks for being patient with me
Again thanks all for your feedback on this.
Kind Regards
-
Every URL which is no longer active would require a 301 redirect to the proper page. In the situation you describe:
/a should redirect to /abc
/ab should redirect to /abc
I recognize this seems confusing so forget it's a website for a moment. Think of it as mail after you move.
You lived at 100 Main Street. That is where you received your mail. Now you move to 200 Elm Street. You put in a forward order with the post office (a real world equivalent to a 301 redirect). Now any mail addressed to 100 Main Street will be received at 200 Elm Street.
Now you move again to 300 Wall Street. You would put in another forwarding order so your mail from 200 Elm Street gets delivered to your new address. This solution is fine BUT, your mail from 100 Main Street would be delayed. First it would get forwarded to the 200 Elm Street post office, who would then have to forward it to 300 Wall Street. This process is inefficient (in seo terms, you lose link juice).
You want to change your 100 Main Street forward order to direct your mail to the 300 Wall Street address. Now all of your mail is taken to the proper location in a single hop.
I hope this analogy helps!
-
What happens to the URL
If there are external backlinks going to the URL, are these not going to get lost?
Because as we have mentioned on these 301s, there has been 3 URLs in question.
Hope that makes sense.
-
In the simplest terms, the old page should always be directed to the new page. Think of it as a non-stop flight.
-
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your feedback, however I am getting a little lost
So what your are saying if I understand is, the 301 should be this:
example.com/a is redirected to example.com/abc
Kind Regards
-
The only thing that concerns me is what CafePress had said "Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so."
You can offer 100 links on a page. All the links can be to "seomoz.org" and they will all be crawled even though the real URL is "www.seomoz.org" and all 100 links will get redirected.
What CafePress referred to is redirects for a single URL.
www.example.com/a redirects to /ab which redirects to /abc and so forth. A crawler will only follow a single URL so far through a chain of redirects before the PR is completely gone and it stops.
Therefore the preferred solution is to redirect any old or broken URLs to their new URL in a single redirect. I'll share an example based on your site:
Very old URL: example.com/a. It is redirected to example.com/ab
Old URL: example.com/ab. It is redirected to example.com/abc
You could leave these two redirects in place, as-is, and they will work, but it is not recommended. The reason is any traffic to /a will have a double re-direct. First the traffic will go to /ab then to the final destination of /abc. This double redirect is an unnecessary delay, it adds extra points of vulnerability and is a waste of SEO link juice. The preferred solution would be to modify the /a redirect to point to the /abc page directly.
I hope that makes sense.
-
Also, if a page is indexed, which is highly likely (due to XML sitemaps, Google Analytics, Google Toolbar etc), then just removing the 301 redirect (links or no links) means that when this page disappears due to the site changes then you will have an indexed page resulting in a 404 error.
I maintain that you should have single hop 301 redirects on all of the pages that will not be there or will have been moved due to the site updated.
I also agree with what Ryan Kent says about links - you may have some links that have been discovered but not yet recognized pr picked up. If there is a chance that the content has been indexed then it should have an appropriate redirect.
-
Hi Ryan,
The only thing that concerns me is what CafePress had said "Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so."
I have another issue regarding the 301 re-directs:
We have:
/abcd http://www.example.com/abcde this is actually a 301 on a product page, however we have the same product in a shop page /shop/abcd which we have decided to do away with the shop directory, is it best practice to also do a 301 from the /shop/abcd to /abcde?
Hope that makes sense.
Kind Regards
-
I don't agree with the recommendation to simply delete the 301 due to no visible links. There are two reasons why:
1. It is more work for you to go and research the links to each page
2. There can always be links you are not aware of such as bookmarks, e-mail links, links which don't show up for various reasons, etc.
Just simply modify the 301 to point to the correct URL and you are all set.
-
Thanks for the fantastic feedback.
An example of what has happened on the .htaccess:
/abc http://www.example.com/abcd - This is the 301 that was made in March this year.
/abcd http://www.example.com/abcde - This is the new 301
If i notice that there are no links going to /abc using Open Site Explorer should i just delete this 301?
Kind Regards
-
I would change the original 301 redirect to the new location.
I would then add an additional 301 redirect to the secondary page (the old redirect) to the new location.
So you will have your original URL and the older redirected URL both 301 redirected to where the content now resides. This way you only have one hop on the 301 redirects and you have both old URLs pointing to the new one.
-
should i delete the first 301 redirect from the htaccess file?
The best results would be achieved if each URL had a single 301 redirect to the target page. To that end, yes, you should delete the old 301 redirect and create a new one.
-
+1
Totally forgot about mentioning the inbound links part. Thanks for picking it up, Rick!
-
Hey Gary,
I partially agree with Cafe. However, I wouldn't remove any redirects for URLs which may have backlinks. Maybe it would be a good idea to figure out if any of the redirects which you are removing are from URLs that have earned links? An Open Site Explorer link export would help you figure out if any of those URLs still have value.
-
Hi Gary,
Yes, it is always a good idea to cut down the number of 301 redirects (or any redirects in general) because if I remember correctly, Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so. You also lose another 10% link juice for each additional redirect.
Lastly, don't forget to 301 redirect the URLs from the beginning of the year to the new re-structured website.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Questions about the DA,PA of website
I am counting on some more ads on the site https://gogoanime.city/, is it a problem if I add some ads about sex, porn ..., to make a little more money. So does it affect the PA DA score. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | gogoanimetp0 -
I am trying to generate GEO meta tag for my website where on one page there are multiple locations My question is, Can I add GEO tagging for every address?
Am I restricted to 1 geo tag per page or can i add multiple geo tags ?
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
H1 Tags the same as Title Tags and other meta questions
I run an ecom store that has about 800 live products. When everything got set up, no one set up the title tags correctly. So I am going through to update them in bulk. What I was going to do was to take the product name (which serves as the H1 tag), use that with a postfix | CompanyName. If length is an issue I trim it down. But the question is, will having essentially duplicate information in here be an issue? Also, when someone was setting up meta descriptions, they often used basically the product name or a half sentence. Would it be better to remove the descriptions and allow google to decide? I even had some that were literally just the brand name of the product, which I already removed.
Technical SEO | | ShockoeCommerce0 -
Site Migration Questions
Hello everyone, We are in the process of going from a .net to a .com and we have also done a complete site redesign as well as refreshed all of our content. I know it is generally ideal to not do all of this at once but I have no control over that part. I have a few questions and would like any input on avoiding losing rankings and traffic. One of my first concerns is that we have done away with some of our higher ranking pages and combined them into one parallax scrolling page. Basically, instead of having a product page for each product they are now all on one page. This of course has made some difficulty because search terms we were using for the individual pages no longer apply. My next concern is that we are adding keywords to the ends of our urls in attempt to raise rankings. So an example: website.com/product/product-name/keywords-for-product if a customer deletes keywords-for-product they end up being re-directed back to the page again. Since the keywords cannot be removed is a redirect the best way to handle this? Would a canonical tag be better? I'm trying to avoid duplicate content since my request to remove the keywords in urls was denied. Also when a customer deletes everything but website.com/product/ it goes to the home page and the url turns to website.com/product/#. Will those pages with # at the end be indexed separately or does google ignore that? Lastly, how can I determine what kind of loss in traffic we are looking at upon launch? I know some is to be expected but I want to avoid it as much as I can so any advice for this migration would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sika220 -
Subdomain question for law firm in Indiana, Michigan, and New Mexico.
Hi Gang, Our law firm has offices in the states of Indiana, Michigan, and New Mexico. Each state is governed by unique laws, and each state has its own "flavor," etc. We currently are set up with the main site as: http://www.2keller.com (Indiana) Subdomains as: http://michigan.2keller.com (Michigan) http://newmexico.2keller.com (New Mexico) My client questions this strategy from time to time, and I want to see if anyone can offer some reassurance of which I haven't thought. Our reason for setting up the sites in this manner is to ensure that each site speaks to state-specific practice areas (for instance, New Mexico does nursing home abuse, whereas the other states don't, etc.) and state-specific ethics law (for instance, in some states you can advertise your dollar amount recoveries, and others you can't.) There are so many differences between each state that the content would seem to warrant it. Local citations and listings are another reason these sites are set up in such a fashion. The firm is a member of several local state directories and memberships, and by having these links go directly to the subdomain they reference, I can see this being another advantage. Also, inside each state there are separate pages set up for specific cities. We geo-target major cities in each state, and trying to do all of this under one domain for 3 different states would seemingly get very confusing, very quickly. I had thought of setting up the various state pages through folders on the main domain, but again, there is too much state specific info to make this seem like a logical approach. Granted the linking and content creation would be easier for one site, but I don't think we can accomplish this in a clean way with the offices being in such different locales? I guess I'm wondering if there are some things I'm overlooking here? Thanks guys/gals!
Technical SEO | | puck991 -
URL Structure Question
We are building a job board website that will have a decent amount of "career resources" type content and want to make sure we set up our url structure correctly. After researching on Google and here I have an idea how to structure it but would like some insight if we are on the right track. We are using Wordpress for the content part of our website. We will have about 5 content categories (like resume-tips, job-interviews, job-search etc.) The two options we are considering; www.domain.com/career-resources/index.html As content start page www.domain.com/career-resources/resume-tips/index.html category start page www.domain.com/career-resources/resume-tips/top-5-resume-mistakes.html article name is the /career-resources/ folder really needed or can we go something like; www.domain.com/career-resources/index.html As content start page www.domain.com/resume-tips/index.html category start page www.domain.com/resume-tips/top-5-resume-mistakes.html article name Are we on the right track... and is one way better for SEO that the other? Thanks! Shaun
Technical SEO | | aactive0 -
Title Length Question?
So we have a lot of UGC on our site and so the title of pages is often created by the user and this has created about 400 pages with over 70 characters and I was just wondering what people think. I know typically keeping them short and sweet is the best thing, but what about when it's the user doing it? Should I go ahead and cut off the titles at 70 characters or keep them? I don't see it hurting traffic so I'm basically just looking for opinions right now.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0