Best Place to Redirect 301 to?
-
Hey Everyone!
I have an old site with hundreds of blog posts that are very spammy (duplicate content, keyword stuffed, and just plain bad content). I am going to redirect them and delete them from WordPress but I'm wondering where is the best place to redirect them to? Home page, other posts, other pages...?
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Thanks!
-
Adam, keep in mind that if that's low quality content... and you redirect those URLs to somewhere else, then you're passing any links and any potential quality factors over to the new URLs.
When Google Panda came out, keep in mind that one of the only ways to recover is to delete the low quality content from your site entirely. So why would you want to redirect that low quality content and pass that on to another URL or another site?
I agree with what the others here have said, Casey and Wesley. Think of the user experience.
-
There was a great Moz blog post on the whole re-direct issue by Cyrus Shepard which is well worth taking a look at.
-
User experience, which of course is paramount as been mentioned above. However, what hasn't been mentioned above is the clear need to PRUNE (remove completely) from your site low-quality content for Panda reasons. I personally would not want to redirect any page that has a 100% bounce rate or an average site visit of less than 20 seconds. I'm sure if you filtered these target pages the metrics would be even worse than this.
The problem with low quality or thin content is that even a small amount on the average site will drag down a site algorithmically. Google used to view websites as books, and the best practice was to continually add pages to that book so that you had more possible targets for Google to rank and send you long-tail search traffic referrals. That is no longer the case. Instead, anything that doesn't provide a high-quality user experience is just dragging you down and that includes exactly what you stated in your question "duplicate content, keyword stuffed, and just plain bad content."
So what should you do with these pages? I would certainly not 301 redirect them just for the sake of "redirecting them" nor do I believe that a "custom 404 page for a previous BAD piece of content" enhances user-experience. Instead, I would urge you to remove them completely by the site via a 410 GONE redirect. Google has already publicly stated that they process 410's faster and that this is the PREFERRED best practice to ensure these pages are completely removed from the index.
Hope that helps. Good luck with your project.
-
Absolutely agree here. Do not 301 for the sake of redirecting. Google would much rather someone landed on a good 404 page rather than to a page that had nothing to do with the original request.
Google also won't penalise you for having 404's on the site - this is commonplace and fully expected.
Have a read what Google say about it here and look at using Google's own 404 widget here.
-Andy
-
Think about the user experience when implementing a solution like this.
If your user expects to find a blog post about a certain topic make sure they are redirected to at least something which is connected to that.On a webshop selling clothing articles it would make sense to redirect a deleted shoe article to the category page for shoes or to show them a custom 404 page which helps them on their way to find more content.
If redirecting them to something relevant is not possible i would suggest creating a custom 404 page which explains that the page has been deleted but that certain pieces of your content may be interesting for them. (Link to those pieces of content.)
Just redirecting users to the homepage or other pages which are not relevant only annoys the user and gives them a negative association with your website.
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
-
Unsolved Temporary redirect from 302 to 301 for PNG File?
#302HTTP #temporaryredirect
Technical SEO | | Damian_Ed 0
Hi everyone, Recently I have faced a crawl issue with my media images on website. For example this page url https://intreface.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Horion-screen-side-2.png has 302 HTTP Status and the recommendation is to change it 301. I have read the article on temporary redirections here:
https://mza.bundledseo.com/learn/seo/redirection?_ga=2.45324708.1293586627.1702571936-916254120.1702571936
but its not written here how to redirect in my HTML 1 image url not the landing page.
Screenshot 2023-12-15 at 11.02.40.png
I have messaged to MOZ Support but they recommended to go for the MOZ Community!
Screenshot 2023-12-15 at 11.06.02.png Could you assist me wit this issue please? I can reach HTTML of the necessary page and change what I need for permanent redirection but firstly I need to understand how to do that correctly.0 -
Can I use a 301 redirect to pass 'back link' juice to a different domain?
Hi, I have a backlink from a high DA/PA Government Website pointing to www.domainA.com which I own and can setup 301 redirects on if necessary. However my www.domainA.com is not used and has no active website (but has hosting available which can 301 redirect). www.domainA.com is also contextually irrelevant to the backlink. I want the Government Website link to go to www.domainB.com - which is both the relevant site and which also should be benefiting from from the seo juice from the backlink. So far I have had no luck to get the Government Website's administrators to change the URL on the link to point to www.domainB.com. Q1: If i use a 301 redirect on www.domainA.com to redirect to www.domainB.com will most of the backlink's SEO juice still be passed on to www.domainB.com? Q2: If the answer to the above is yes - would there be benefit to taking this a step further and redirect www.domainA.com to a deeper directory on www.domianB.com which is even more relevant?
Technical SEO | | DGAU
ie. redirect www.domainA.com to www.domainB.com/categoryB - passing the link juice deeper.0 -
301 Redirect Question
I am working with a website and I ran a Screaming Frog and noticed there are 4,600 301's on the website (www.srishoes.com). It seems like the issue is between the www. and without it and they aren't working together. Is this something that the website provider should update and what type of impact might this have on the site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ReunionMarketing
Matt0 -
301 redirect from sites closing down
Hi We have around 10 supplementary sites that have links to our site which are now closing down but are out of our control. We could have access to their domains so how could we maintain the link juice from these old sites which are going to our new site? However there will be no websites left on these old supplementary just domain names
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
To avoid errors in our Moz crawl, we removed subdomains from our host. (First we tried 301 redirects, also listed as errors.) Now we have backlinks all over the web that are broken. How bad is this, from a pagerank standpoint?
Our MOZ crawl kept telling us we had duplicate page content even though our subdomains were redirected to our main site. (Pages from Wineracks.vigilantinc.com were 301 redirected to vigilantinc.com/wineracks.) Now, to solve that problem, we have removed the wineracks.vigilantinc.com subdomain. The error report is better, but now we have broken backlinks - thousands of them. Is this hurting us worse than the duplicate content problem?
Technical SEO | | KristyFord0 -
Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?
Hi all, I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time. I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site. I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take. Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
Simple 301 redirect a subfolder to another subfolder
Hi, I have a number of sub-folders that I have to move, each of which contains a number of files. subfolder A has files a, b & c subfolder B has files d, e & f
Technical SEO | | aactive
subfolder C has files g, h & i A, B & C folders need to be X, Y & Z Will the following work? RewriteRule ^subfolder-A/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-X/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-B/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-C/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Z/ [R=301,L] will this result in visitors to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-B/f.html being redirected to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/f.html? All on the same domain. in reality we are talking hundreds of sub folders and thousands of files so we don't want to have to reference every file individually in the htaccess. Thanks0 -
301 Redirects
Last year we merged 3 websites into 1 website and launched the new site in February. When developing the new site I created 301 redirects for all the pages from the old sites to the new site. Unfortunately when the new website was created the URLs were not optimised for search engines. I now need to optimised the page URLs. In theory I need to create new 301 redirects from this existing pages to the new optimised URLS. I am concerned that in a few years I might end up with a string of 301 redirects and if I break some links I might loose some ranking. How many redirects will link juice work for? I hope I'm clear here, if not I've attached a image showing what I'm doing. Thank you. unledfh.jpg
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0