301 redirects in Wordpress vs. making old posts that you no longer want your audience to see private.
-
I'm working on Wordpress at the moment changing the content of a page on my website.
The page has a lot of educational information and each section is unique. I had to go through and edit each section on google documents and now I'm posting all the new pages and making the old pages private on wordpress. Is this a good idea?
I'm worried google will still crawl my private education pages and think these are duplicates since the new pages somewhat resemble the old. Also, should I be 301 redirecting all the old education pages to the corresponding new ones even if they are private on wordpress?
I understand that the 301 redirect should only be used if you want the old page to go to a new one. What i don't understand id weather this will still be relevant or work if I've already made the old page private on wordpress.
Thank You!
-
You can delete it as long as the 301 redirect still occurs.
301 signals to search engines "hey, this page has permanently moved to this new location so whatever signals you had for this page, send over to the new location and ignore any content on the old url"
So be sure to set your 301 redirects at the server level (via htaccess on Linux or via IIS on Windows servers) if you plan on deleting the page. I know yoast SEO plugin has an option to redirect to another page in their settings for the post/page (in this scenario, you wouldn't delete the post/page).
-
Thanks Oleg
The same hold true if I choose to delete a page on wordpress right? Or will google no longer be able to crawl a page if I delete it?
-
Yes, you should 301 redirect to the new pages. Otherwise, you will lose all of the authority you built to your old pages.
Even though the page is private, Google will continue still visit the link from any links on the web/history of crawling.
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
-
Selectively 301 redirects
Hi there: We are developing a pretty typical 301 redirection strategy. We basically are moving blog posts from a former sub-domain to the top level of our new designed site. We've pulled a site crawl of the old sub-domain and want to make sure we redirect any posts with a significant backlink profile to their current counterparts. Most other posts are just going to be redirected to the main 'front door' of our new blog. Is there a way to selectively redirect a certain number of posts and then 'globally' redirect everything else to a single URL? I would assume this would be a pretty common task, but can't find an easy way to do what we want to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
How do I redirect my old PHP website to my new Java website?
Please could you help? My old website is written in php. I've created a new design of the website in Java. I'll be using the same domain name though. example.com and I'd like to pass my link juice to my new redesigned website. When I turn the domain name to point to my new website how do I make sure pages that are ranked in google that don't exist on my new website transfer 301 from my old website to a similar page on my new website. Old Website Example example.com/bootcampuk.php New Website Example example.com/bootcamps.jsp Many Thanks, Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | puamethod0 -
Irrelevant backlinks - will 301 redirect cleanse the relationship?
My client has thousands of clients for whom they provided websites that used to reside in a subdirectory of their own domain. They moved them to their own domains but there are tens of thousands of backlinks on those sites pointing back to the original domain. Those backlinks are completely irrelevant and are probably hurting them by sending the wrong signals to Google on what this site really is about. My question is will the 301 redirect be enough to cleanse the relationship between my client and all their clients' sites or should I ask the client to clean up all those backlinks on their clients' sites and remove their domain from the target urls? That's a huge job, obviously.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
Whats the best way to revive a directory that was 301'd and now I want to remove that?
Last year i 301'd one of my directories on my site, pointing everything to a different directory. Long story short I am going to sell this product line again and would like to just remove the 301 to that original directory, but I am reading that the 301s are also cached in most browsers for a long time. Has anyone successfully done this and if you did what was it that you had to do? Thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SandyEggo0 -
301 Redirect To Another 301 Redirect
Hi, We have a client with an old domain that they want to redirect to their primary domain. They also have a few older domains pointing to the old domain. Do you recommend leaving them as redirects that point to the old domain? This will create a redirect to a redirect situation. Or, is it better to go ahead and redirect those older domains to the primary one's, removing one layer of redirect? Thank you! Jessie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessieT0 -
Home page url 301 redirect suggestion
Hello, In our site we have already done 301 redirect from http:// to http://www. However, the home page links are still coming in 2 ways http://www.mycarhelpline.com/ http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=search&Itemid=2 Need suggestion We have already use rel canonical is another 301 redirect to be used for maintaining the home page pr from seo point of view. Does google still takes both urls as separate url and finds duplicate content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Is there a way to find out how many 301 redirects a site gets?
If you do a search on "personal loans" on Google the first non-local/personal result is onemainfinanical.com. They have far fewer links showing in OSE and YSE than the other sites. I know onemainfinanical.com is a Citbank site so I'm trying to determine if they are ranking so high b/c they are getting 301 link juice from old Citibank.com authority pages. Is there anyway to check to see what sites are sending link juice through a 301 redirect instead of a direct link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fthead90