301 a page and then remove the 301
-
I have a real estate website that has a city hub page. All the homes for sale within a city are linked to from this hub page.
Certain small cities may have one home on the market for a month and then not have any homes on the market for months or years. I call them "Ghost Cities". This problem happens across many cities at any point in time. The resulting city hub pages are left with little to no content.
We are throwing around the idea of 301 redirecting these "Ghost City" pages to a page higher up in the hierarchy (Think state or county) until we get new homes for sale in the city. At that point we would remove the 301.
Any thoughts on this strategy? Is it bad to turn 301s on and off like that? Thanks!
-
We all know that some of the link juice dies with 301's but I suspect that with a 302 you would keep the link juice.
-
Supposedly we have 6 cities, City A ~ City F
City A ~ C (3 cities) is a ghost city
We can easily make City A, showed additional results for City D and E, while City B shows additional results for City E and F, and of course City C showed results for City F and City D..
In reality, i think one city is surrounded only by 3 ~ 4 cities right? so there will be no city that will have exactly the same neighborhood
If you want you can even kick the additional listing into overdrive by giving some randomization
For example
http://www.stand-out.net/Movitel-Cuffed-Jeans-pr-7703.html (not my site)
You can see the "More From Humor" Section always randomized 3 more items that has Humor Brand (try refreshing the page to see the randomization)... there is no way that you will ever have a duplicate content this way
Again, dont try to built a page for SEO, but built them for your customer first, you will definitely have a very happy customer if you showed them additional result from nearby cities instead of just BLINDLY redirect them to another city
Good luck
-
Playing devil's advocate, should we worry about duplicate content? There would be 100s of pages that all had different titles/h1s, but very similar content (just different nearby cities).
In general, I like this idea.
-
Yea it is definitely a viable option. Just wondering if there would be an added benefit to passing the link juice through a 301, especially if there isn't a penalty for turning it off/on.
-
In my opinion, i think there is no problem ... But if you want to be on a safe side , why not filled it with useful information instead?
For example : I went to City X Hub Page... when it has absolutely no home at all, i think the visitor would be much more happier when they see certain information like "Duh... no one is selling home in this Ghost City, perhaps you would be interested in properties from nearest city around it such as Show some good home on City Y and City Z "
-
Wouldn't a 302 be a better option? Temporary vs permanent.
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
-
What to keep in mind: to 301 redirect every page in an entire online store
Hello, I've got to put a 301 redirect on every page in an entire online store. We're moving to a better premade cart. Who has experience with this? How do I not lose traffic, if that is possible? What do I need to keep in mind? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Site Merge Strategy: Choosing Target Pages for 301 Redirects
I am going to be merging two sites. One is a niche site, and it is being merged with the main site. I am going to be doing 301 redirects to the main site. My question is, what is the best way of redirecting section/category pages in order to maximize SEO benefits. I will be redirecting product to product pages. The questions only concerns sections/categories. Option 1: Direct each section/category to the most closely matched category on the main site. For example, vintage-t-shirts would go to vintage-t-shirt on main site. Option 2: Point as many section/category pages to larger category on main site with selected filters. We have filtered navigation on our site. So if you wanted to see vintage t-shirts, you could go to the vintage t-shirt category, OR you could go to t-shirts and select "vintage" under style filter. In the example above, the vintage-t-shirt section from the niche site would point to t-shirts page with vintage filter selected (something like t-shirts/#/?_=1&filter.style=vintage). With option 2, I would be pointing more links to a main category page on the main site. I would likely have that page rank higher, because more links are pointing to it. I may have a better overall user experience, because if the customer decides to browse another style of t-shirt, they can simply unselect the filter and make other selections. Questions: Which of these options is better as far as: (1) SEO, (2) User experience If I go with option 2, the drawback is that the page titles will all be the same (i.e vintage-t-shirts pointing to the page with filter selected would have "t-shirts" as page title instead of a more targeted page with page title "vintage t-shirts." I believe a workaround would be to pull filter values from the URL and append them to the page title. That way page title for URL t-shirts/#/?=1&filter.style=vintage_ would be something like "vintage, t-shirts." Is this the appropriate way to deal with it? Any thoughts, suggestions, shared experiences would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
GWT URL Removal Tool Risky to Use for Duplicate Pages?
I was planning to remove lots of URL's via GWT that are highly duplicate alike pages (similar pages exist on other websites across the web). However, this Google article had me a bit concerned: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1269119?hl=en I already have "noindex, follow" on the pages I want to remove from the index, but Google seems to take ages to remove pages from index, which appear to drag down unique content pages from my site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Should I merge these pages
I have this business and am not sure if I should have a separate page for all of the different roofing subservices or if i should put them all on one page. Even though they are separate, but related services, I feel they could end up competing against one another If I merge them I will also have more related and keyword rich content on one page that I could focus my efforts on.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
301 Redirection problems
A couple of days ago we did a restructure of our e-commerce site (wordpress + woocomerce) where some product categories needed to change names. I used Yoast SEO plugin to do 301 redirects in the .htaccess file.Today I noticed that we had two hits in the SERP on the phrase "dildos med vibrator". See the attached screenshot (first two results).One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibrator/ which is the right URL. One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildosdildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ which is a corrupt URL that has never been in use. The old one we did a redirect from was /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/The command in the .htaccess file was: Redirect 301 /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibratorWhat has happened here? Why does the 301 create entirely new URL:s in the SERP?Tz0TULT.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Is a 301 to a 301 ok?
I have a site that has a lot of url differences. Due to coding we sometimes have to 301 to a page that is 301'd to another. Is there any danger in doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Are links to on-page content crawled / have any effect on page rank?
Lets say I have a really long article that begins with links to <a name="something">anchors on the same page.</a> <a name="something"></a> <a name="something">E.g.,</a> Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc, allowing the user to scroll down to different content. There are also other links on this page that link to other pages. A few questions: Googlebot arrives on the page. Does it crawl links that point to anchors on the same page? When link juice is divided among all the links on the page, do these links count and page rank is then lost? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0