Which is better, a directory 301 redirect or each page in the directory?
-
A customer of mine has a site with lots of articles and they are all quite spammy. They have not been affected by penguin yet so they asked what to do. I suggested losing the articles directory and 301 redirect to either the home page or another important page.
Would a 301 redirect on the entire directory to a single page be the way to go or add redirects from each page within the directory and spread out redirects to various pages in website?
Or do you have a better suggestion?
-
Hi Anthony,
First of all, it is always better to redirect URLs to individual pages than perform sitewide 301 directs. But in this case, if the individual pages aren't getting much traffic, it may not make much difference.
If the articles are truly low quality, and you are worried about a future penalty, you may want to simply remove them without a redirect at all. Serve a 410 HTTP response (gone) instead, and carefully watch your traffic/rankings to make sure nothing drops.
It's most likely Google is simply ignoring these pages. The best defense is to build up an offense of quality material so the bad doesn't outweigh the good.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.
-
No, I would only do this for articles that have a good "inbound" link profile. 301 redirects can slow down the servers, so having too many isn't good either.
-
Thanks MargaritaS, good point on the spammy links and redirecting with them. To clarify, it is the article content that is not well written and just about keyword stuffed, but not terribly. The articles look like someone use a boiler template and just replaced keywords and a sentence here and there and called it a new article.
I was thinking the best thing to do would be to bury the evidence (haha!!) and apply redirects to valued pages. Then I would have them start writing good original content in a blog.
So should I apply 40+ individual redirects? or just redirect whole directory to a single page?
Thanks again for your feedback.
-
Anthony,
This sounds tricky. When you say "spammy" are you talking about their inbound links, or are you referring to the content within those articles? I think there is an important difference there. If you do indeed have articles that look spammy because of the content itself (ex: keyword stuffing) but actually happen to have decent inbound links from reliable sources, then I would say to individually 301 redirect those. If you mean spammy as in the case that the inbound links pointing to these individual articles, then I would say lose them because you don't want to pass those bad links onto this "other" important page on your client's site.
Hope this helps!
MS
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
-
301 to canonical
I'm doing some work on a website, they have a very popular product search where you enter a specific part code (6 digits) and it takes you to the product. So for example Search: 123456 Page redirected to domain.com/product/123456 With a canonical of domain.com/product/this-is-the-product-title Would it be beneficial to redirect from /product/123456 to /product/this-is-the-product-title Google seems to be indexing both versions. For some of these products a reasonable amount of links are built.
On-Page Optimization | | ThomasHarvey0 -
My home page URL http://seadwellers.com/ redirects to http://www.seadwellers.com/. Is this a problem?
"The URL http://seadwellers.com/ redirects to http://www.seadwellers.com/. Do you want to crawl http://www.seadwellers.com/ instead?" I was given this when I tried to crawl my home page using MOZ software. I was not aware of this, do not know if it could be a problem concerning any aspect of SEO, etc? :
On-Page Optimization | | sdwellers0 -
How to rank well on 2 keywords - 2 separate pages or 1 combined page
Hi, I have a website about allergy. We ar developing new content, and through keyword research I have discovered that "dog allergy" and "cat allergy" are both very common searches. However, the cause, and symtoms are very alike for these 2 types of allergy so it would make sense to combine the two allergies on one page. So my question is: What do I choose to increase my chances to ranke the best I can for both "cat allergy", and "dog allergy"? Should I develop 2 separate pages for cat & dog allergy or should I do a combined page? (We would of course review the texts so no duplicate content/text would be used if we chose to have 2 pages) I would be so greatful for your advice!! Kind regards, Jeanette
On-Page Optimization | | Mylan-GDM0 -
Redirecting https pages
If I add 301 redirects from the https versions of the root domain to the http:www.website.com (canonical version), will this prevent users from being able to access the https version? I believe the https version is only accessed once users log into the site. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | HiddenPeak0 -
Redoing a site - 404 redirect or 301 redirect
I'm redoing a website, should i 404 the old pages, or 301 redirect to the main page? what is better? (around 100 pages)
On-Page Optimization | | mkmedia0 -
Why are some of page indexed and others not
I have created a site structure like this: domain/for-sale/brand domain/for-sale/brand-model domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg1 domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg2 domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg3 etc.... I cannot understand why the domain/for-sale/brand-model does not seem to be indexed, yet the domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg6 is? This is a new site, but I cannot understand why this URL would be indexed without the others... Any ideas? My home pages has links to the domain/for-sale/brand, this page has links to domain/for-sale/brand-model1, domain/for-sale/brand-model2 etc, each of these pages have links to domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg1, domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg2 etc...
On-Page Optimization | | MirandaP0 -
Www redirect
I get the following message when I try to start a new campaign. "We have detected that the domain www.shewula.nl and the domain shewula.nl both respond to web requests and do not redirect" In the q&a I found answers to this problem and tried to fix it. No success yet. This is what I have in my old ht.access file: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.shewula.nl$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/STICHTING_SHEWULA/ RewriteRule (.*) /STICHTING_SHEWULA/$1 [last] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^shewula.nl$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/STICHTING_SHEWULA/ RewriteRule (.*) /STICHTING_SHEWULA/$1 [last] I changed it to ( got it from the answers 😞 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^shewula.nl
On-Page Optimization | | thomasfasting
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.shewula.nl/$1 [R=301,L] This gave me a 500 internal error in the server header checker tool. Does anybody know how I can fix this? The website is in a folder in the root of my other website www.fastingfotografie.nl Could this give me a problem? Thanks. Thomas0 -
Authority of a page
What factors contribute towards the authority of a page ? No. of links to a page ?
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_20050