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
-
Redirecting Pages During Site Migration
Hi everyone, We are changing a website's domain name. The site architecture will stay the same, but we are renaming some pages. How do we treat redirects? I read this on Search Engine Land: The ideal way to set up your redirects is with a regex expression in the .htaccess file of your old site. The regex expression should simply swap out your domain name, or swap out HTTP for HTTPS if you are doing an SSL migration. For any pages where this isn’t possible, you will need to set up an individual redirect. Make sure this doesn’t create any conflicts with your regex and that it doesn’t produce any redirect chains. Does the above mean we are able to set up a domain redirect on the regex for pages that we are not renaming and then have individual 1:1 redirects for renamed pages in the same .htaccess file? So have both? This will not conflict with the regex rule?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez0 -
Ranking without use of keywords on page & without use of matching anchor text??
Howdy folks. So, here is a dilemma. One of competitors of ours is somehow ranking for a keyphrase "houston chronicle obituaries" without any usage of these keywords on the page, without any full or partial anchor text match ("chronicle" is not used anywhere). The rest of competitiors' rankings make sense. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Redirects & Authority when Updating Product Pages
Hi Quick question on SEO & product pages. We're changing suppliers, so discontinuing their range, adding new - but the products will be very similar - almost identical in some cases. I don't want to lose authority built up from current product pages, the only way to reuse these pages is to reuse SKUs - which we can't do. If I am redirecting these pages to new products which are similar, I know page authority will be passed - so is this the best option? Our links on the website will actually point to the final URL, rather than going through a redirect - if this is the case will it still pass authority? Thank you Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Should I use a rel=canonical to the home page
Hi guys, I have a site where the homepage is ranking for the term 'industrial flooring' around position 30 and the actual level 2 industrial flooring page is ranking well below at around position 60. I'm happy for the homepage to rank for this term and would like to see it improve, so here are my questions: 1: Is the existence of the level 2 page preventing the homepage from ranking higher due to keyword cannibalization etc.? 2: Would the use of the rel=canonical tag pointing from the level 2 page to the home page have a positive or negative impact on the homepage's rankings for 'industrial flooring'? 3: Is there anything else I'm missing? Greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blaze-Communication0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
301 redirect and improved ranking
I was wondering if a 301 redirect will improve my ranking. My subpages use to redirect to my homepage ( all the subpages of my site redirecting to my homepage) and my homepage use to have no redirect from non www.to www. ( other than thru google webmaster tools. I am sure why it was like this for my subpages... I was wondering if I can expect some improvements in ranking now that the redirect goes from the none www. to the www version of each subpage and not to the homepage. By the way what was the issue ( was I telling google ) by re-directing all my subpages to the homepage ? was I making google think that my subpages and my homepage were all the same ? was I sending all the link juice from the subpages to my homepage ? etc... Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How do I 301 Redirect a complete folder?
Hi, I am want to delete a folder and all the contents. I then need to redirect anyone that is trying to reach a file in that folder to another page on my site. example: www.mydomain.com/folder/ (contains 50 pages) I want to delete the folder and all 50 pages. So if someone tries to reach www.mydomain.com/folder/page1.php the redirect would take them to a specific page on my site. Doing this to clean up old content. How would I do this on the .htaccess? I have redirected a page but not a folder. Thanks in advance! Force7
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Force70 -
Don't want to lose page rank, what's the best way to restructure a url other than a 301 redirect?
Currently in the process of redesigning a site. What i want to know, is what is the best way for me to restructure the url w/out it losing its value (page rank) other than a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marig0