Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
-
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys.
In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL.
This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
-
Keri,
You never cease to be able to recall the good stuff. Funny, its been a busy week so am just getting to some of this. Great post here, thanks.
-
Thanks guys. For the record these pages do not have back links so I am going to be using the 301 redirect.
-
Very well put. (As usual) Thanks so much,
David, hopefully you will see EGOL's reply. Best of luck.
-
Thanks Robert,
I think that this is a question of weighing an improvement in optimization against a loss of external authority (backlinks from other websites).
If these are brand new pages with no accumulated external authority then there is very little loss in redirecting and a gain in optimization. That means DO IT NOW - before any valuable external authority accumulates.
However, if there are a lot of external links into these pages then a percentage of that accumulated authority will evaporate through the redirect. The more powerful these pages, the greater the loss. In this case the decision to redirect becomes more difficult. Only google could calculate the value of the improvement in URL optimization compared to the loss of external authority. If it was my site I would value the external authority much more than changing a url from /toys/ to /chew-toys/
So, I would give two different answers to this question based upon the characteristics of the website webpages involved.
-
EGOL,
You make a great point. My question is this: David says above that: None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
I think his assumption is that by changing the url's to something (that appears to be from his example) more query oriented and optimized he will be able to impact this. Given that and given that a 301 will transfer 90% plus of the link juice, do you think he is served in making the change?
Curious as I respect your opinions.
-
David,
Have you read Dr. Pete's post about Should I Change my URLs for SEO? He talks about this very topic.
-
How much ranking power do you think that an optimized URL delivers to a page? Consider that title tag is enormous, links are enormous..... URL is probably tiny tiny tiny.
Now consider that the authority that these pages carry will pass through your site.
So, if this was my site I would be asking... How much of my external linkjuice is hitting these 20 pages. If none then I would not expect to lose very much by redirecting the pages. But if these pages had lots of offsite assets pointing to them the URLs would have to be really fugly before I redirected them.
-
David,
First, as to your last sentence, I am assuming you are redirecting 20 urls that are "not optimal" to 20 new urls that are optimized. Such that your example above is one and another would be http://www.dog.com/food to http://www.dog.com/organic-raw-dog-food, etc. for approximately 20 urls.If these follow the best practices (301's url to url in the .htaccess file) you should have no issue with the change. Understand that if the "poor" url /toys is ranking number 8 on page 1 of Google, and you do the redirect, it does not mean that you will rank for /chew-toys in the same place. For a short while you will likely continue to rank and then likely will fall off quickly.
Your new page will gain the link juice but not the ranking of the old.
We do a lot of site redesigns to bring them to SEO and CRO standards and therefore use a lot of 301's to maintain PA and grow it. We typically see the juice move over two to three months or more in a gradual fashion. An example is a site that we transferred every url for in late Aug. had about 170 links to its home page. Two months later, when looking at the old url there were only a couple showing and the links were showing on the new. So, it will change but not overnight.
Hope this helps
-
Hi David,
From what you describe, you will have no negative effects from using 301 redirects to a new URL structure. Thats what 301's are for
Rankings may dip for maybe 3-7 days (depending on which pages are ranking, etc) if at all, but after that you should be good.
-
According to SEOMoz's article on redirection, 301 redirects DO pass on the page authority ("about 90-99%") however it will take time. This number varies depending on who you listen to, but there is evidence that it does eventually pass through Google.
Depending on how often your pages get crawled, this may take a while but if you're not going for rankings, this won't affect too much.
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
-
Infinite 302 redirects on a site using Angular JS
I'm not quite sure what I'm seeing here. It's a site that uses Angular JS (version 1) and the crawl is showing infinite 302 redirects, but the redirects are all to the same URL? Here's an example: https://www.razoo.com/us/story/Armco-Park-Foundation Has anyone seen this before? What causes it and how do I counsel the client on how to fix it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KatherineWatierOng0 -
301 Externally Linked, But Non-Producing Pages, To Productive Pages Needing Links?
I'm working on a site that has some non-productive pages without much of an upside potential, but that are linked-to externally. The site also has some productive pages, light in external links, in a somewhat related topic. What do you think of 301ing the non-productive pages with links to the productive pages without links in order to give them more external link love? Would it make much of a difference? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Domain forward or 301 redirect
My company recently acquired another company including their web presence. We are soon ending their website and will be either 301 redirecting their domain to our domain or pointing their domain to our nameservers. Their domain authority is only 25 while our domain authority is 32. Their domain was created in 1998 while ours was created in 1999. So to keep our domain authority up or enhance it, should we do a 301 redirect or a domain forward. And that is if there is any difference? Thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | topsailislander0 -
301 Redirects?
We have an e-commerce website with about 4500 products for sale. About 1200 of these items were not showing up in the Google PLA ads because they were $0 dollar items, so we made those products invisible. Then Set 301 Redirects for each of the 1200 items. My question is this; we want to turn back on the 1200 items, should we delete the 301 redirects that are in place for them.? Will it hurt SEO performance by having them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Goriilla0 -
301 redirects
Hello, I want to ditch about 1000 pages of a 2000+ page site. I believe the 301 redirect thing is the way to go but my expertise is limited. Is there a way to do a blanket redirect ie if a user or search engine looks for a page thats not there it all gets redirected to the index page or do I have to do each one manually? Thanks Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
I have encountered some issue with 301 redirect and htaccess file. I need to redirect the following url: http://www.domain.com/?specifications=colours/page/3 to: http://www.domain.com/colours The 301 redirect command I wrote in htaccess file is as follow: Redirect 301 /?specifications=colours/page/3 http://www.domain.com/colours And it doesn't work at the moment. What is the correct way to set up 301 redirect here? Your help will be sincerely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0 -
How many pages to 301 Redirect
Hi Mozzers, My site has 11,200 pages indexed in Google and I'm looking to remove some of the lesser content which should probably have been picked up by Panda. However these pages work out to about 1,100 in total and I'm not sure whether to remove these bit by bit or just do it in one fell swoop? Does Google not like a site's indexed pages fluctuating too quickly? Are there any other considerations I should be aware of? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | panini0 -
Targeting Keywords at Home page or 301 URL?
Background info This is a new site and I am using Wordpress for a CMS not a blog and I have set a static page as the home page. The problem is when I configure the home page as a static page in wordpress it sets a 301 redirect to that page, which is this domain.com/software-consultancy (so the software-consultancy page is now domain.com). I thought about creating a separate Home page but I didn't see the point as the pages would be almost identical. **"Should I target keywords to the home page?" ** If I start link building using the phrase "software consultancy" to the home page should I link to domain.com or the 301 redirect URL domain.com/software-consultancy ? My thoughts are that if the URL has the keywords I am targeting in it will help with SEO. Or should I create a separate home page and just link the company name back to the home and have a separate page for "software consultancy" my thought is that having exactly what the company does on the home page would be better. But I don't want to lose out on search engine traffic by not having the keywords in the URL I am going to be link building for. I guess if I link build to the 301 redirect URL I can always revert back to this URL if I want to change? FYI here is my site structure: The site is for a small software consultancy and I have the following structure: domain.com/software-consultancy -- (Set as Wordpress static Page so essentially a 301 redirect to / ) domain.com/software-consultancy/areas domain.com/software-consultancy/areas/london domain.com/software-consultancy/areas/new-york I would really appreciate some feedback on this, even if it's experience / advice and there is no exact answer. Many Thanks, J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0