Implementing Large-Scale Redirects

[ResponseMine]

Hello All,

I have a situation with my site where a vendor created a local directory of locations on a sub-domain of my site. This sub-domain has approximately 2000 pages. It is a PR3 and a good backlink profile (not many links. Mostly citations. Not spammed). It get decent traffic but 80% of the traffic is driven by ppc.

We have created a new local section on the main page of our website and we are trying to weigh the benefit of redirecting all of those pages on the old sub-domain. We anticipate that this new section will begin to replace the old sub-domain in serps. Additionally, when our deal with the company that manages this sub-domain ends in three months, the pages will no longer exist.

Is it worth redirecting the pages (you might need more information to give good insight into that)? Also, if we do implement approx. 2000 redirects, what effect will that have on the main site from an SEO perspective. Is it possible that Google might ignore this large scale redirect effort? Will the value also be limited by the fact the redirect might only be live for a month before the original pages are deleted?

Any help/insight with this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[ResponseMine]

Thanks. I appreciate the help with this. Yeah we are more concerned with user experience rather than passing link authority. The concern was just that implementing that many redirects could potentially hurt the main site from a Google perspective but I definitely appreciate the input. Makes my decision a bit easier.

[grasshopper]

Hi Jordan,

It's definitely worth your while to get those 301s in place.  2K URLs is quite a small batch of redirects, in the larger scheme of things.  I've worked with sites that have had to redirect millions of URLs, and because they were planned, QA'd, and executed correctly, they went off without a hitch.

By correctly executing these redirects, you're actually helping engines maintain a more orderly index, so they will not "ignore them", to your question.

I think the trickiest aspect of the redirect plan is that the subdomain URLs are going to go 404 after the redirects are in place.  Ideally, 301 redirects should remain in place in perpetuity, but having them in place for 3 months should be more than adequate to get them crawled, and have engines recognize the redirects.

Since you've said that there aren't that many external links to these subdomain URLs, you won't be doing this redirection for the link authority boost, rather to maintain a good user experience for people who have previously visited the URLs, and attempt to go back to them.  If 80% of your traffic is PPC, you'll be surprised how many people have visited via paid search, bookmarked the URL, and then go back to it.  Technically that's a Direct visit, but analytics will likely track it as a paid search clicks, since the URL will have all of the paid search parameters appended.

There's no down-side to getting the 301 redirect from subdomain to sub-folder in place, and keeping them in place until the subdomain URLs go 404.  Just make sure that you're doing a good job of creating a 1-to-1 mapping of the redirects.

Hope that helps!